Present Company: Portraits from the Taos and Santa Fe Studios, 1902 to 1983

About this event

A new exhibit featuring 30 portraits and one bronze if people plus five sheets by Linda Lynch, the present company of the title, who turns back to the landscape.

The self-portraits open the exhibition, Jozef Bakos sitting for himself in 1934 with his hat and cane, a man who has decided how he wants to be remembered, and Howard Cook drawing himself in Paris in 1929. William Penhallow Henderson drew his about 1902, fourteen years before he settled in Santa Fe, and Patrick Henry Bruce painted his in Paris in 1910, in the city where Cook would draw himself nineteen years later. Then come the painters by one another, Theodore Van Soelen's Joseph Henry Sharp of about 1910 and Bakos's friend Ward Lockwood in 1932, the painter across the road being the easiest model in these studios, and a bronze head of Nicolai Fechin's wife Alexandra, cast from his model.

The earliest work in the exhibition is Maynard Dixon's pencil drawing of a Navajo policeman at Ganado, of 1902, and the latest is Fritz Scholder's Portrait with Thunder Bolts of 1983, eighty years of portraits in which the style changes with the decade. Between them are Paul Burlin's Indian Mother of about 1915, one of the first modernist pictures painted in Santa Fe, Ernest Blumenschein's Mauricio of Taos Pueblo of 1919, Fechin's Peasant Woman and Child, and Willard Nash's Emily in a Red Cloche, the twenties in a single hat.

The present company of the title is Linda Lynch, the one living artist in the exhibition, who works in New Mexico. The painters turned from the landscape to paint each other, and she turns back to it with five sheets in pastel and graphite, a bluff, a bed of sediment, three pronghorn, so that what the painters came here for keeps company with the portraits.

"We know these painters by their landscapes," said Laura Widmar, the gallery's director. "They knew each other by their faces. The portraits came out of the same studios in the same years, and this is the first time the gallery has put them in one exhibition."

The Owings Gallery has dealt in nineteenth- and twentieth-century American art for more than forty years at two locations in Santa Fe, and Counterparts, painters of the Southwest a century apart hung in pairs, opens the same evening at The Owings Gallery on Palace, 100 East Palace Avenue. Contact: Laura Widmar, Director, 505-982-6244, lwidmar@owingsgallery.com. Photographs of the works are available on request.