AFA Summer 2020

Summer 76 www.afamag.com | w ww.incollect.com Buffalo Bill’s Wild West traveling vaudeville show fueled a fascination with the exoticism and vibrancy of indigenous American tribes. More than anyone or anything else, William Frederick Cody, better known as Buffalo Bill, can be credited with shaping this myth of western life. The Bloomsbury painter Dorothy Brett, who accompanied Frieda and D. H. Lawrence to Taos in 1924, recalled an 1883 performance in London. “I fell in love with one of Buffalo Bill’s Indians. He rode widely around the arena . . . This heroic figure I have never forgotten.”  2 Dorothy Brett’s streamlined Art Deco Desert Indian silhouettes a white horse. Her blood-red mountain sunset is a stage set for the horse and the rider, who wears a white blanket, pants, and the typical Taos male chongo hairstyle. The painting was originally owned by a friend of art patron Mabel Dodge Luhan, who also lived in Taos, and the sitter is very likely Mabel’s Taos Pueblo husband, Tony Luhan, posing on a favorite horse. Dorothy Brett (American, born England, 1883–1977), Desert Indian, 1932–1937. Oil on canvas, 40 x 40 inches.