Andrew Dasburg (1887-1979)

Born in 1887, Andrew Dasburg is a pioneer among American modernist painters.  After study at the Art Students League, he went to Paris in 1909 where he visited the studio of Matisse, met Leo and Gertrude Stein and, most importantly, saw the paintings of Cezanne at Vollard’s gallery.  Upon returning to New York, he exhibited four works in the Armory Show of 1913.  Dasburg first came to New Mexico in 1916 to visit his friend, Maurice Stern.  The structured mountains and valleys of Taos, so reminiscent of Cezannes’ Mont Sainte-Victoire, provided Dasburg with the motif which was to be dominant in his work for more than fifty years.   The Taos series represents a still further extension of the long procession of brilliant landscape drawings that caused Alfred Frankenstein to write in 1966 that Dasburgs drawings reveal him as the greatest draftsman of landscape since Van Gogh.