Art in New Mexico, 1900–1945: Paths to Taos and Santa Fe by Charles C. Eldredge, Julie Schimmel, and William T. Truettner (review)

Reviews 85 Art in New Mexico, 1900-1945: Paths to Taos and Santa Fe. By Charles C. Eldredge, Julie Schimmel, and William T. Truettner. (New York: Abbeville Press, 1986. 227 pages, $45.00.) The physical format is coffee-table art book; the authors, who have written individual essay-chapters, are staff members of the Smithsonian. Art in New Mexico, 1900-1945: Paths to Taos and Santa Fe speaks from the meta-authority of form (over half of the 200 illustrations are in representative color tones) ; and of content (the essay-chapters draw from impressive crossdisciplinary sources of archaeology, literature, and popular culture). The first and last essay headings—“Beyond the Picturesque” to “The Faraway Nearby” —intimate the metaphorical range of the study because above all, this book is about the most elemental of the western American consciousness—space. Dur­ ing this time and in the places of Taos and Santa Fe, something original occurred that since 1945 has not been duplicated with the same intensity and purity of purpose. The relationship of the New Mexico space to all that occurred within, or as a part of it from without, is the study’s inviting argument. During these forty-five years, New Mexico represented a united cultural effort of scholars and artists who struggled on paper and on canvas to maintain the unity of the subject-object question: the Pueblo Indians and myth, the Hispanics and Catholicism, religion and sentiment, the unity of modern man with primeval space, the fragmentation of space with modernism. This study, published for a 1986-87 touring exhibition by the same name, is itself “Beyond the Picturesque” by bringing into perspective, if not view, “The Faraway Nearby” of a land where artists and scholars, before World War II, meted cultural understanding with the clarity of vision of a land whose dignity was found in its geometry, in its awesome expanse of space, and in its diverse people. These people, in New Mexico, had a meeting of minds under the auspices of earth and sky. The many voices of this study’s authority speak clearly and poetically, merging scholarship and art into one informative rhetorical medium. PAMELA R. HOWELL Midland College River Runners of the Grand Canyon. By David Lavender. (Tucson: Grand Canyon Natural History Association and University of Arizona Press, 1986. 147 pages, $27.50.) The next best thing to being in the Grand Canyon is to read David Lavender’s finely researched book on the men and women who floated, rowed, bashed, capsized, white-knuckled and caroomed their way from Cataract Canyon to Diamond Creek. ...