ARTS & CULTURE
ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF LIGHT
2015 marks the centennial founding of the Taos Society of Artists
BY YVONNE PESQUERA
Courtesy Couse Foundation
The newly formed Taos Society of Artists on the porch at the home of Eanger Irving Couse in 1915. From left, Bert G. Phillips, W.H. “Buck” Dunton, Joseph H. Sharp, O.E. Berninghaus, Couse and Ernest L. Blumenschein.
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or the longest time, Taos was a remote mountain outpost, home to Taos Pueblo and a hardy bunch of Hispano settlers. The only other adventurous folks who gravitated here included Army scouts like Kit Carson and fur trappers like Frenchman Ceran St. Vrain. Most of the businesses on Taos Plaza sold firearms, pelt blankets, leather ware, and miner’s tools. Art was always part of the traditions of the residents of the Taos Valley, but beginning in the early part of the 20th Century, there was a shift
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from an economy based on mining, hunting and agriculture to something that also included the art galleries, boutiques, museums, and artist studios that dot the region today. In the summer of 1915, six artists joined together to form the Taos Society of Artists: Oscar Edmund Berninghaus, Ernest Leonard Blumenschein, Eanger Irving Couse, William Herbert Dunton, Bert Geer Phillips, and Joseph Henry Sharp. The Society organized its paintings to travel to
the buyers in major cities such as Boston, Chicago, New York, and San Francisco. By deliberately combining their individual efforts for the common good, they were the founding fathers of the Taos arts colony that is a big part of our reputation to the outside world. But how did these artists even find Taos in the first place? At the turn of the last century, it was a harrowing one- to two-day journey through the canyon from Santa Fe –– and that was in the good weather.