Friday, January 23, 2015

Gladys Caldwell Fisher: Sculptor and Animalier

I'm continually surprised at the numbers of female artists I discover whose names are virtually unknown beyond their local fame. That is my motivation-their work is beautiful, professional, and deserves to be re-visited so....


Gladys Caldwell Fisher
American Indian Orpheus and the Animals
ca 1934
Stone Relief
Denver City and County Building
Denver, Colorado

Born in Loveland, Colorado, Gladys Caldwell Fisher's family moved to Denver in 1917 when she was eleven years old. Gladys had an interest in sculpture from the time she was a child. While she attended Manual and East High Schools from 1921-1925, she joined the Beaux Arts Atelier, Denver at the suggestion of local, professional artists. After her third year at the atelier, she received a scholarship from the Denver Allied Arts in 1926, allowing her to study sculpture for a year at the American School of Architecture in New York under Alexander Archipenko. Afterward, she spent a summer in sculpture and ceramic classes in Woodstock, New York. She used a second Denver Allied Arts scholarship to study in Paris with Antoine Bourdelle at the Econle de las Grande Chaumiere and also learned under sculptors Jose de Creeft, George Hilbert, and Aristide Maillol.

After she returned to the United States in 1929, Fisher did freelance work in New York and in 1932, returned to Denver. Four years later she married architect Alan Berney Fisher. While raising a family, she continued to pursue her career and she taught art at Denver University and the Denver Art Museum.

Gladys Caldwell Fisher
Model of Boulder Dam
ca 1935
Cast aluminum
19.5 w x 14 d x 7 h inches
Gladys' love of animals was evident throughout her life and she spent quite a bit of time observing them in their natural habitat. Two of her Rocky Mountain sheep sculptures installed in 1936 at the main Denver post office, weighed ten tons each and were carved from limestone. The sculptures were the result of winning a federal competition to produce sculptures for the Denver Post Office. To begin her work, Gladys spent time in Yellowstone observing sheep in their natural habitat.

Gladys Caldwell Fisher
          Rocky Mountain Sheep" and White Ram
ca 1936
      Indiana limestone
        Byron White U.S. Courthouse
Fisher modeled a pair of grizzly bear cubs for the Yellowstone Park post office at Mammoth Hot Springs, a federal commission she completed in 1941. Her depiction of the cubs was somewhat controversial because of her abstracted style which was influenced by her study with Alexander Archipenko. Other subjects of her work included bobcats, fawns and burros.

Gladys Caldwell Fisher
Young Grizzly Bears
ca 1941
Stone
Yellowstone National Park Post Office
Fisher exhibited widely including the Paris Salon, Society of Independent Artists, the Denver Art Museum, Colorado Fine Arts Center, and the Syracuse, New York Museum of Fine Arts. Her work can also be found at the Special Collections Library, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, Denver Art Museum, the Denver Public Library and at the City and County Building in Denver.
Gladys Caldwell Fisher
Sandy and Johnny
ca n.d.
Charcoal
11 1/8 x 10 1/8 inches
Gladys Caldwell Fisher died on April 18, 1952 in Denver, Colorado.

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Sources
An Encyclopedia of Women Artists of the American West, Phil Kovinick and Marian Yoshiki-Kovinick, 1998, pp 93-94
Public Art Archive, Gladys Caldwell Fisher, http://www.publicartarchive.org/work/american-indian-orpheus-and-animals, retrieved January 23, 2015
Peter Hassrick, "Drawn to Yellowstone"
New Deal Art Registry, http://www.newdealartregistry.org/artist/FishergladysCaldwell/, retrieved January 23, 2015
Best of the West Auctions, Gladys Caldwell Fisher, Colorado Springs, CO, retrieved January 23, 2015

Thursday, January 8, 2015

Mabel Dodge Luhan: Patron of the Arts, Writer, and Muse of Taos

Mabel Dodge Luhan
1879 – 1962
ca. 1934
Carl van Vechten, Photographer
 
Most of my blog entries have been about specific female artists with a bit of history tossed in to allow for a greater understanding of the particular challenges faced by women, as they strove to create lives of purpose.

Mabel Dodge Luhan was less a visual artist but a writer whose account of her own complex life experiences, including her eventual self-healing in New Mexico, ran to four volumes. She was a force, a unique woman of profound contradictions; mercurial, domineering, generous, and endearing.

Luhan was born Mabel Ganson to society couple Charles Ganson and Sarah Cook. The Gansons lived in a Victorian mansion on Delaware Avenue in Buffalo, New York. Buffalo mirrored the prosperity and power of the growing United States during the Gilded Age. The Gansons, who spent lavishly on their daughter, neglected her emotional needs. Her father had a violent and unpredictable temper and her mother, while decisive and strong, was not warm. Mabel grew up in a family and in a society that placed value on appearances and a lack of purpose... she was raised to charm and groomed to marry. Luhan, however, was a Victorian woman who rejected the constraints and expectations of what a woman was supposed to be. She became a symbol of the "New Woman:" self-determining, emancipated, and publicly opinionated about art, society and politics.

Her first of four marriages at the age of 21 occurred in 1900 when she wed Karl Evans, son of a steamship owner. Mabel and Karl had one son, John. When Karl died in a hunting accident two-and-half years later, he left her a widow at the age of 23. Mabel was sent by her family to Paris because she was having an affair with a prominent Buffalo physician however, just later that year she met and married wealthy architect Edwin Dodge. It was a marriage of convenience for Mabel as she needed financial support and a father figure for her son.

Photo of Mabel and her son John in the Gran Salone,
Villa Curonia, Florence, Italy
The Dodges settled in Florence, Italy at the Villa Curonia in Arcetri, a region in the hills to the south of the city center. Between 1905 and 1912, Mabel entertained local artists, expats and visitors such as Gertrude Stein and her brother Leo, Alice B. Toklas, and French author and Nobel Prize winner AndrĂ© Gide. Bored with her life in Florence by 1912 and greatly influenced by Gertrude and Leo Stein's philosophy that the individual could overcome the ill effects of both heredity and environment and create herself anew, Mabel returned to New York.
Mabel Dodge's friend, Bertram D. Wolfe, founder of the American Communist Party and biographer, later recalled: "Wealthy, gracious, open-hearted, beautiful, intellectually curious, and quite without a sense of discrimination, she was Bohemia's most successful lion-hunter." Her apartment in New York City became a salon, a place where intellectuals and artists such John Reed, Lincoln Steffens, Margaret Sanger, Louise Bryant, Emma Goldman, Frances Perkins, Carl Van Vechten and Amy Lowell would meet.

Thornton Wilder Soiree, Mabel Dodge’s Greenwich Village salon
n.d.
Mabel Dodge Luhan Papers
In his book, Autobiography (1931), Lincoln Steffens claimed: "... Mabel Dodge managed her evenings, and no one felt that they were managed. She sat quietly in a great armchair and rarely said a word; her guests did the talking, and with such a variety of guests, her success was amazing."

Dodge was involved with one of the most important exhibitions of the Twentieth Century, the Armory Show of European Modern Art in 1913, and she published in pamphlet from a piece by Gertrude Stein, "Portrait of Mabel Dodge at the Villa Curonia" which Dodge distributed at the exhibition. She contributed to The Masses, the leading left-wing literary and political journal of her day; wrote a syndicated newspaper column popularizing Freudian psychology; and supported a host of organizations, among them the Women's Peace Party, the Heterodoxy Club, the Women's Birth Control League, and the Twilight Sleep Association. She also published articles in leading modernist literary and art magazines such as The Dial, and Stieglitz' photographic magazine, Camera Work.

In 1916, Mabel and her third husband, artist and sculptor Maurice Sterne, moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, but found it too confining so they relocated to Taos. The 600-year-old Pueblo culture provided a model of permanence and stability; a total integration of personality achieved through the organic connection of work, play, community, and environment. She soon fell in love with Tony Lujan, a Pueblo Native American. She quickly divorced Sterne and wed Lujan, her fourth and final husband. Mabel viewed their alliance as a bridge between Anglo and Native American cultures but changed the spelling of her last name (Lujan to Luhan) to allow for an easier pronunciation.
Tony Lujan of Taos Pueblo, New Mexico
 ca. 1930
 Ansel Adams
In the 1920s, Luhan wrote her four-volume memoirs: Intimate Memories (1933), Background, European Experiences (1935), Movers and Shakers (1936), and Edge of Taos Desert (1937). She wrote a number of articles on behalf of the integrity of Native American culture, health, and the protection of tribal lands. She remained, as one reporter described her in the early 1920s, "the most peculiar common denominator that society, literature, art, and radical revolutionaries ever found in New York and Europe." In attempting to alter the direction of American civilization, she captured the imaginations of her generation's most talented writers, artists, and thinkers, and profoundly influenced their understanding of modern America.
Mabel Dodge Luhan House
 also known as Big House and St. Teresa House
 Taos, New Mexico
Declared a National Historic Landmark in 1991 
Luhan also wrote Winter in Taos (1935) and Taos and Its Artists (1947), a leading overview of the painters and sculptors from the art colony founders through the modernists of the 1940s. Up through the early 1950s, Mabel continued to produce the occasional newspaper and magazine article, many of which were dedicated to the history and culture of Taos.

Mabel Dodge Luhan, Frieda Lawrence,
and Brett at Kiowa Ranch
  ca. 1938
Mabel Dodge Luhan Papers
Mabel Dodge Lujan died in Taos, New Mexico, on April 18th, 1962.

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Sources
Taos.org, Look and Book,  Mabel Dodge Luhan, http://taos.org/women/profiles-legends?/item/78/Mabel-Dodge-Luhan, retrieved January 7, 2015.
The Muse of Taos, Stirring Still, New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/1997/01/16/garden/the-muse-of-taos-stirring-still.html, retrieved January 8, 2015
Women Artists of the American West, Susan R. Ressler, ed., McFarland and Publishers, Inc. Philadelphia, p. 85-86.
Spartacus Educational, Mabel Dodge, http://spartacus-educational.com/USAdodge.htm, retrieved January 8, 2014.
Mabel Dodge Luhan, Encyclopedia.com, http://www.encyclopedia.com/topic/Mabel_Dodge_Luhan.aspx, retrieved January 8, 2015.
New Mexico History.org, Mabel Dodge Luhan, http://newmexicohistory.org/people/mabel-dodge-luhan, retrieved January 8, 2015.