Couse House Taos

What a day.

Those who doubt climate change should have been here yesterday Saturday when a chilly monsoon storm enveloped northern and central New Mexico leaving us surprised and wet and shivery if we weren't bundled up like ticks. The weather forecast was sunny-ish and warm. Day before the temperatures were in the 90s. Not so yesterday Saturday.

The trip up to Taos from our place takes about 2 ½ hours on a good day. Yesterday it was closer to three thanks to the rain that stayed with us or followed or preceded us pretty much the whole way.  Sometimes light, sometimes torrential, it rained and rained and rained. There were plenty of thunder claps and flashes of lightning, a few of which fell quite close to the road we were taking, the Low Road to Taos it's sometimes called, as opposed to the less traveled but better known High Road.

The Low Road to Taos back in the day

The lady in the first car looks thoroughly exhausted, and I bet she is. The road is a little better now and cars are a bit more comfortable, but it can still be a challenge to get up the hill to Taos along the Rio Grande -- which was flowing deep and fast and brown, full of rafters intent on running the many rapids, no matter the weather, before the end of the Fourth of July weekend.

So we went, and we went for a specific purpose, to attend the opening of an exhibition of photographs of Pueblo (primarily Taos Pueblo) Indians used as models by E. I. Couse, in the early 20th century.

It was.... interesting... There were a couple of dozen photos in what's called the Luna Chapel which E. Irving Couse had used as a studio until he built a new one onto the side of the house. Two models were featured over and over again, Ben Lujan and Jerry Mirabal.

With a few exceptions, they were posed crouching. The crouching Indian was a consistent theme of Couse's and it would show up in the works of a variety of other Taos and Western artists and probably still does, though I haven't really checked recently. The Cowboys and Indians genre is very popular in Southwest, but it's really not my thing.

The Couse House is a rambling adobe and frame house perched up on a tiny mesa top down the hill from Mabel Dodge Lujan's Los Gallos place where we've stayed a number of times over the years and where we feel surprisingly at home. Perhaps in our previous lives we were guests of Mabel or maybe it is something else.

The Couse House has been preserved by the artist's granddaughter pretty much as it was when he died in 1936, whereas Mabel's place has gone through a number of overhauls and other uses since she passed in 1962, most notoriously its phase as Dennis Hopper's Mud Palace.

Couse was an original member of the Taos Society of Artists, arriving not long after the artist "discoverers" of Taos, Ernest Blumenschein and Bert Phillips whose broken wagon wheel made them linger in Taos while it was fixed in 1898.

Couse had a long time association with Joseph Henry Sharp, whose studio is on the premises, and who, in Paris at the Academie Julien suggested to Blumenschein and Phillips, and later to E. Irving Couse, that they head West and check out Taos and New Mexico for a breath of fresh air and the endless inspiration of the people (especially the Indians), the land and the sky. And so they did. Sharp had been in the area earlier -- I think 1893 -- but he hadn't settled there, nor would he, so far as I can tell, for many years after the initiation of the artist colony which became the Taos Society and its successors. In fact, though Sharp had a house and studio adjacent to Couse's place, he may never have actually "settled" in Taos at all. He may have been more like Blumy, who had a house and studio of his own in Taos and spent summers there, but did not "settle" until 1919, long after his first visit, and even then, he was on the road a great deal of the time he lived in Taos.

Much art would be -- and is today -- made in Taos, but then and now, it has to be sold somewhere else. Taos is today a small town (abt. 5000 population) and back then, it was tiny. It could be and sometimes still is a challenge to get to and get out of. The market for Art was elsewhere, and to a large extent, it still is. One may create there (as I have done on occasion), but if one is serious about selling (as I am not) one must locate other places for outlets -- even though now there are lots of galleries in Taos.

The "crouching Indian" theme was what drew us to Taos over the weekend.  Sure enough, we weren't disappointed. There were dozens of photos taken by Couse of his Indian models crouching by the fire, crouching in the grass, crouching along the trail, crouching, crouching, crouching, and in his studio, there were more prints and paintings of crouching Indians examining pots, wearing bizarre and un-Pueblo-ish costumes, and the last painting Couse was working on, still on its easel, barely sketched in oil, shows yet another crouching Indian. It was his thing.

I took few pictures while we were there and this is not the painting he was working on when he died. It is an example, however, of his crouching Indian genre.

Ms. Ché wrote and read a Crouching Indian poem during one of her sojourns in Taos, and she's going back for a writer's conference on the upcoming weekend. I might go over to the Blumenschein house just to compare...

Meanwhile the new It-Boy in Western art, Mark Maggiori, sold one one of his cowboy paintings at the Scottsdale auction for almost $100,000 with fees. Before last year, he was barely a blip on the artscene. How quickly they rise!