He was born in the year of the nation’s Centennial in Louisville, Kentucky, and in 1893 sailed to Germany, eventually spending three years in Dresden as a student at the Royal Academy and as a member of art circles there. In 1900, he moved to Chicago and worked as a graphic designer, and began to attract critical acclaim for his work. In 1911, he was able to afford two years’ study in Europe; returning to Chicago, he exhibited his paintings to great praise and was awarded a travel opportunity to New Mexico as a guest of the Santa Fe Railroad.

Taos captured Ufer’s imagination, as it had so many artists, and by 1917 he was an active member of the Taos Society of Artist. He then divided his time between Chicago, New York and Taos, and by 1920 his paintings of Taos Indians had achieved great notoriety.Ufer saw the New Mexico Indian as an example of a people who had been vanquished by civilization. “The Indian has lost his race pride,” Ufer commented at one point. “He wants only to be American. Our civilization has terrific power. We don’t feel it, but that man out there in the mountains feels it, and he cannot cope with such pressure.”

Accordingly, Ufer depicted the Indian with an unblinking eye for detail, often without the romanticized trappings of lost grandeur. His bold, confident use of thickly applied paint, which he had learned abroad, was intensified by the vibrant color and sharp contrasting light of Taos. Ufer was very fond of the work of John Singer Sargent, and his work shows this influence in the portrayal of the hands, faces, and garments of the figures.

Ufer, however, in his best work, went beyond the surface of things to expose the undercurrents of human feeling. Unlike so many of his Taos counterparts, he seems to have been struck by the irony of the Indian’s lot in this artistic paradise, and he used the language of paint to argue more eloquently than he could have done with words.

Resources: The American West: Legendary Artists of the Frontier, Dr. Rick Stewart, Hawthorne Publishing Company, 1986