From Greenwich Village to Taos: Primitivism and Place at Mabel Dodge Luhan’s (review)

In From Greenwich Village to Taos, Flannery Burke argues the importance of New Mexico to twentieth-century modernism. Focusing on the interactions between Mabel Dodge and other fixtures of the modernist canon, Burke gives a history of cultural encounters in Taos that parallels broader artistic and political changes. A recognition of this history, she argues, refutes the modernists’ romantic belief that New Mexico is a “world apart” from modernity (2).

A unifying theme in all of these cultural encounters is primitivism. Burke challenges the modernists’ appropriations of “primitive” culture, beginning even with her decision to drop “Luhan” from Mabel Dodge’s name in order to differentiate between Mabel and her Pueblo husband, Tony Lujan. But well before Mabel Dodge adapted Tony’s surname, the roots of Dodge’s primitivism were established through her journey to Taos. Having identified primitivism as the modernist antidote to civilization’s malaise, Burke quickly complicates primitivism, adding nuance to the idea by showing where and how Dodge’s circle repeatedly divided over their romance for premodern authenticity. Moreover, Burke does an excellent job of showing how these divisions frequently had material consequences that affected modernist patrons and the patronized peoples who shared their New Mexican communities.

Burke gives us these insights in chapters that follow the thread of primitivism through the journeys of Dodge’s circle in and beyond Taos. Each of her guests manifested some contradiction endemic to primitivism. John Collier, for example, celebrated Indian authenticity, but as that stance formed the basis for his politics, he found that it could not endure the diverse racial reality of northern New Mexico. Carl Van Vechten and Mabel Dodge competed over which of their patronized groups gave the best representation of natural humanity, identifying ironies in each other’s lives while remaining blind to the inconsistencies of their own. Mary Austin tried to preserve Santa Fe’s primitive quaintness by distinguishing creative patronage from consumptive tourism in a way that Burke easily deconstructs. D. H. Lawrence, out of all Dodge’s companions, most easily identified her hypocrisy, but even his observations concealed a dark side revealed in his racism toward Taos’s non-white inhabitants.

Burke is particularly good at pausing in moments where divisions among the modernists create room for non-whites to represent themselves. Tony Lujan, for example, is shown to accept Dodge’s affections and participate in her patronage of Taos, but he retains his agency in both of those arrangements, despite gossip to the contrary. Nina-Otero Warren capitalized on the modernists’ primitivism to advance her own political agenda. Likewise, the book highlights how the interests of the Pueblos often diverged from those of their Anglo benefactors, especially during the debates over land-claim legislation such as the Lenroot Bill. In each of these examples, Burke shows that non-whites negotiated the terms and meaning of modernist patronage for themselves as much as possible.

In her epilogue, Burke outlines how Dodge’s vision of New Mexico became popularized through Georgia O’Keeffe. Highlighting how this modernist primitivism is still with us, she makes a good case for the pertinence of her analysis to current problems in New Mexico. Burke writes in clear and direct prose that is well-paced and engaging. Drawing on a variety of sources and methods, her contribution will likely attract the attention of scholars across the humanities who are interested in the issues of race and place in the American West.