AFA Summer 2020

Summer 78 www.afamag.com | w ww.incollect.com Black was one of many artists who sought better health and longer life in the seven- thousand-foot-high desert climate in New Mexico. Taos is located on the edge of the Great Plains, and Taos Pueblo horsemen regularly joined tribes from the plains for buffalo hunts. More than any other pueblo, Taos members were people of the horse. Black’s The Gathering is an impressionist frieze of the pueblo’s cowboys and imparts the energy and liveliness of a culture he admired. Black became known for his depiction of glittering morning light, and here he spotlights the horses, especially the centrally placed white horse in profile. For Pueblo peoples, the physical landscape and the spiritual landscape correspond. As William de Buys put it in Enchantment and Exploitation: The Life and Hard Times of a New Mexico Mountain Range (1985), “Again and again . . . the old buildings seem to silhouette the mountains and mesas, but nowhere is the influence of the landscape more strongly felt than at Taos, where each of the two great pueblo buildings is a mountain, like the mountains behind.” A master of the watercolor medium, Schille’s modern, bold compositions are full of movement and light, countered by a Fauve use of color, which she had experienced firsthand in Paris. This work conveys the resonance between the great structure illuminated by golden light and the pueblo’s blue and sacred mountain. Alice Schille (American, 1869–1955), Pueblo, Taos, N. Mex., ca. 1919–1920. Watercolor on paper, 17¼ x 20¼ inches. LaVerne Nelson Black (American, 1887–1938), The Gathering, ca. 1920. Oil on canvas on board, 16 x 24 inches.