Alfred G. Morang
Born Maine, 1901
Died New Mexico, 1958

Writer and painter, Alfred Morang was a colorful figure in the Santa Fe art scene, known for his unique painting style, radio art show, tavern murals, and raucous parties. Influenced by the astrologer, Dane Rudhyar, the artist participated in the abstract ventures of the Transcendentalist Painters Group, along with his wife Dorothy. His repertoire of subjects went from the mystical to the profane, including the town, its environs, and local call girls. He is known for his use of palette knife and his thick layering of impasto, which is the formal counterpart to his prose style.

Born in Ellsworth, Maine, he began by painting alongside artists who summered near his home. Moving to Boston, he studied music, painting, and literature, earning his masters degree in Fine Arts at Fremond University. In the 1920s, he settled with his wife Dorothy Clarke in Portland, Maine, where he gave music lessons, painted, and work on illustrations for books and magazines. He would also become friends with the controversial author, Erskine Caldwell, who ran a bookstore in Maine with his wife, and his letters to Morang are a major resource.

n 1937, Morang and his wife moved to Santa Fe for its dry climate, upon the painter contracting tuberculosis. In her memoirs, Betty E. Bauer, co-founder of the "Santa Fean," describes a Chaplinesque figure always wearing a hat and heavy black overcoat that reached almost to his ankles. The Morangs always gave parties in a house that flowed with wine and was filled with cats. In one memorable incident, a guest was surprised upon petting a very stiff cat on the windowsill. Running to Morang, the artists remarked, "Oh, yes, poor Otto he died a couple of weeks ago."

Morang gained a recognizable presence for his art column, "Ferris Wheel," in the Santa Fe New Mexican and for his radio program "The World of Art with Alfred Morang" on KTCR. He also taught at the Arsuna School of Fine Art. Living on Canyon Road, he often painted murals of the local bars in exchange for libations, and visitors to Santa Fe still enjoy his work on the walls of El Farol Restaurant and Cantina.

Attracted to the esoteric, Morang aligned himself with the Transcendentalist Painters Group (1938-41), co-founded by Emil Bisttram and Raymond Jonson. Espousing universal meaning in abstract forms, Bisttram advanced the knowledge of Kandinsky's work, but other artists and thinkers were part of the mystical mix. Morang became acquainted with Dane Rudhyar, who would come to Santa Fe in the summers to paint, and the artist published a volume about the astrologer. In addition to his abstract works, Morang's contribution to this movement was the book, "Transcendental Painting."

In his approach to painting, Morang favored a thick application of pigments often with the colors having a sensual gloss. This style finds a parallel in his prose, such as found in his short fiction, "Tangled with Darkness": "Her theme tangled with darkness, and the words that lifted to sheer dazeblur of vague memory fell inwards and mingled with lipred and labels that told of sloegin's impotent slumber." His affinity for dense layers of paint application found a co-equivalent subject in his figural works of prostitutes, a theme advocated by the 19th-century writer Baudelaire for the "painter of modern life."

In his work, Morang combines his literary sensibility with his extreme physicality in use of materials. Writing in his Adventure in Drawing (1948), he simply states, "Drawing is the art of surrounding an idea with a line in order to communicate that idea to the observer." In Morang's case, his line was agitated and nervous, a linear correspondent to his dense impasto surfaces.

Morang died in a fire in his home/studio in 1958.

Exhibited: Museum of Non-Objective Painting, 1944, 1945; Philadelphia Print Club, 1944; University of New Mexico (solo); White Memorial Gallery, Santa Fe (solo); Boston Art Club (solo); Museum of the New Mexico (solo); New Mexico State Fair (prizes 1941, 1943, 1944); New Mexico Allied Gallery, 1950, 1951.

Works Held: Museum of New Mexico, Santa Fe; Eastern New Mexico College; Canyon Texas Museum.

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