Walter Ufer's Journey

Walter Ufer (1876-1936),  Indian Corn-Taos, Oil on Canvas, 40 by 50 in., Private Collection

Walter Ufer, Callers, ca. 1926, Oil on Canvas, 50 1/2 x 50 1/2 in, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.

Walter Ufer, Bob Abbott and Assistant, 1934, Oil on Canvas, 50 1/4 x 50 1/2 in, The Speed Art Museum, Louisville, Kentucky

Walter Ufer, Where the Desert Meets the Mountain, Oil on Canvas, 36 ½ by 40 ¼ in., American Museum of Western Art - the Anschutz Collection - Denver 

On August 2, 1936, Walter Ufer died at the age of 60 in the Santa Fe hospital where he had been transported three days earlier by motor car from Taos some 70 miles away for treatment of a ruptured appendix. 

The tragic and premature death of this outstanding figurative painter must have greatly shocked the storied and tight-knit Taos art colony of the early 20^th Century.  Ufer was a terrific draughtsman and fantastic colorist, who is said to have been influenced by John Singer Sargent’s treatment of hands, faces and garments.

In my opinion, Ufer could draw and paint faster and better than any of the other members of the Taos Society of Artists, although he had stiff competition from E. Irving Couse, Victor Higgins and Ernest L. Blumenschein.  And as good as they all were, none of the 11 other full members of the Society could quite match the brilliant sunlight effect he captured on canvas, a remarkable gift that is bestowed on very few painters -- Sorolla, Zorn, Frank Benson and Aldro T. Hibbard are in the company as well. 

“Walter Ufer has two large canvases that are miracles of painting, in one of which the desert sunlight almost gives off warmth from the canvas,” wrote the reviewer of the 30^th Annual American Art Exhibit at the Chicago Art Institute in the December 1917 issue of Fine Arts Journal.

Ufer also painted some of the most amazing and entertaining self-portraits I’ve ever seen.

Self-Portrait, Paint and Indians, 1923, Oil on Canvas, American Museum of Western Art–Anschutz Collection, Denver

An exhibition titled "Walter Ufer; Rise, Fall, Resurrection" was on display from February 7 to May 11 of this year at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City.  It featured 60 works by Ufer and his peers.  I would have loved to see that exhibit, but Oklahoma City is a long bus ride from my fashionable neighborhood on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.

Ufer was trained as an academic realist in Germany and worked as an illustrator and portrait painter in Chicago before settling in Taos in 1917 for the rest of his life.  Like all the European-trained artists who colonized Taos, he was immediately attracted to the high desert landscape.  But Ufer was primarily a bravura figure painter, and he focused on creating dazzling paintings of contemporary Pueblo Indians posed outdoors, in the clear light of the New Mexican day.  This focus earned him a fair amount of national recognition during his lifetime. 

While some of his Taos colleagues held firm to depicting a somewhat romantic notion of Indians from the Old West, Ufer painted Indians of the New West.  "I paint the Indian as he is. In the garden digging--in the field working--riding amongst the sage--meeting his woman in the desert--angling for trout--in meditation,” he told the author of a 1928 gallery exhibition catalog.  His words echo the advice given 10 years earlier by a wealthy patron, Chicago Mayor Carter H. Harrison, Jr., who used similar language to suggest that Ufer paint “the Indians as they are today.”  Harrison had encouraged Ufer and several other Chicago artists to migrate to the Southwest, and he subsidized their travel expenses.

Ufer was a devoted socialist and supporter of individual freedoms.  One critic thought the painter must have been “struck by the irony of the Indian's lot in this artistic paradise, and he used the language of paint to argue more eloquently than he could have done with words.”   Ufer believed the Taos Indians had lost their “race pride” and wanted only to be Americans.  “Our civilization has terrific power,” he said. “We don't feel it, but that man out there in the mountains feels it, and he cannot cope with such pressure."

Coping wasn’t so easy for the charismatic and enigmatic Ufer either.  He is remembered as a chronic alcoholic, a depressive, and a heavy gambler, who occasionally got bailed out by friends who were never paid back.  But he is also recalled as a generous man with a strong social conscience.  During the 1919 flu pandemic, he worked day and night tending to the sick alongside the town’s only doctor.  Ufer was outspoken about his socialist beliefs, joined protest groups and picket lines of striking workers, and reportedly was a close friend and drinking buddy of Leon Trotsky, the Socialist leader.

Ufer is said to have been warm and personable and had many friends, but he apparently tried the patience of a lot of people, often saying harsh things about his patrons and colleagues behind their backs. Harrison was moved to write Ufer, “Up to the present time you have received $327 of my money, but from your conversations about town, one would suppose you had been very harshly treated.”  Ufer called his good friend Blumenschein, who founded the Taos art colony with Bert Geer Phillips in 1898, a “bald-headed S.O.B.” at a meeting of the Taos artists that Blumenschein did not attend.  And “Blumy” wasn’t even bald, although his hair was thinning. 

Ufer fibbed all his life about being born in Louisville, Kentucky, when he was actually raised there by immigrant parents from the age of one, having been born in Huckeswagen, Germany on July 22, 1876. Maybe it was because it was not wise to claim German heritage during World War I.  And in 1921 and 1926, Ufer won the prestigious Altman Prize at the National Academy of Design in New York City, a prize that is awarded only to American-born artists.

One writer summarized Ufer's career in the following manner:  “When suffering, he was moody and unproductive, and his entire body of work is the product of his better days, as drinking and gambling occupied him during his dark spells.”  It always strikes me that painters in the old days had a lot more fun and personality, as well as raw talent, than today’s realist painters, who are primarily obsessed with creating marketing ploys to sell their computer-enhanced photographic images.

Despite his dysfunctional personal life, Ufer sold many paintings at high prices during the 1920s and achieved national recognition for his art.  His paintings were acquired by several museums and he was made a member of the National Academy of Design.  Once he had a bit of a setback when he adopted an agent’s idea to create a number of paintings featuring the same Indian figure on a white horse against a background of the iconic Taos Mountain.  That series of paintings was a marketing disaster.  But Ufer was generally successful until the Stock Market crash of 1929, which caused his art and investment income to evaporate.  Fortunately, Walter Henry Klauer, a wealthy businessman from Dubuque, Iowa provided some critical financial support to allow Ufer to continue painting.

Ufer’s father was a master engraver of gunstocks and a political radical himself.  Both parents strongly supported their child’s early interest in art.  After an apprenticeship in the printing plant of a Louisville commercial lithographer, Ufer traveled to Dresden, Germany to study at the Royal Applied Art Schools and the Royal Academy.  Following his study abroad, Ufer moved back to Louisville and then to Chicago, where he eventually attracted the notice of Harrison and his friend and partner, Oscar Mayer, the meat-packing tycoon.  The two men sponsored Ufer’s first painting trip to Taos -- in 1914.

Ufer met his future wife, Mary Monrad Frederikson (1869-1947), in Chicago at the J. Francis Smith Academy, described as a division of the Academy Julian in Paris, where the Danish born Mary had previously studied.  John Francis Smith (1868-1941), a Chicago native, was a painter and illustrator who had studied in Paris with Boulanger and Lefebvre and taught in Chicago from 1905 to 1914 before moving to California.  

Mary Ufer, who was seven years older than Walter, encouraged her husband to leave illustration and take up portrait painting, which led to his being noticed by Harrison.  After the couple settled in Taos, Mary continued to paint, but “Walter’s alcoholism, increasingly poor health, debts and the low demand for his paintings put a strain on their marriage,” according to one online biographical account. “To help with finances, Mary delivered lantern-slide lectures on artists both at the Art Institute of Chicago and on a traveling lecture circuit.”

After Ufer’s untimely death, the family was left destitute, but Blumenschein helped raise money to ease the burden on Mary, who was a pretty good artist with an interesting life story as well.  But this blog post is getting out of hand, so if you want to know what happened to Mary, the story is here: http://mabeldodgeluhan.blogspot.com/2012/04/mabel-dodge-luhan-and-early-women.html   

When Ufer fell ill, the other Taos artists raised several hundred dollars to pay his medical expenses and to buy gas for the Taos painter Martin Hennings’ Ford, which was used to transport him to St. Vincent Hospital in Santa Fe in a futile attempt to save his life.   

I think I read somewhere that Blumenschein went along on that ill-fated journey.  Blumenschein had been particularly close to Ufer, despite their often spirited rivalry, as recounted in Ernest L. Blumenschein: The Life of an American Artist, by Robert W. Larson and Carole B. Larson.  The two pals had shared many confidences on art and other matters in conversation and in correspondence.   

So it was “Blumy,” that “bald-headed S.O.B.,” who conducted Ufer’s memorial service at the end of the road.  Wasn’t that a time.

Walter Ufer, Coming from the Spring, 1927, Oil on Canvas, 24 by 30 in., Private Collection

Walter Ufer, Builders in the Desert, Oil on Canvas on Aluminum, 50 ¼ by 50 ¼ in., Private Collection

Walter Ufer, Summer in Taos

Walter Ufer, Their Audience, 1917, Oil on Canvas, 40 by 50 in., Snite Museum of Art, Notre Dame