Andrew Dasburg
Born France, 1887
Died New Mexico, 1979
Andrew Dasburg was born in Paris, but emigrated to New York City in 1892 with his mother. A childhood sickness left him lame, and his artistic propensities were first recognized by a teacher at the crippled children's school. She enrolled him in the Art Students League in 1902. There he studied under Kenyon Cox, Frank Vincent Dumond, and Birge Harrison. Later, he began taking night classes from Robert Henri at the New York School of Art.
Dasburg spent 1908-1910 in Paris, where he was introduced to the great impressionist painters Matisse and Cézanne. Inspired by the work of the European modernists, Dasburg returned to the United States, where he moved to Woodstock, New York. In Woodstock, he and his wife, Grace Mott Johnson, lived with Morgan Russell. Russell was the leading artist of the American Synchromist movement.
In 1918, Dasburg first visited Taos, New Mexico and was taken in by the spaciousness and simplicity. Dasburg decided to live half the time in New York and return to the Southwest to continue painting. The decade of the twenties was the first in which Dasburg's art focused on Taos and Santa Fe, rather than Woodstock and New York City. By 1927, Dasburg was diagnosed with Addison's disease, which brought his painting to a standstill until the early 1950's. After a long recovery, Dasburg slowly began painting and printmaking again. In 1975, at the age of 88, Dasburg began a series of lithographs that were so successful, he continued them until his death in 1979.
Media: Oil; watercolor; pastel; pencil; ink; charcoal; woodcut; lithography.
Education: Art Students League, New York, with Kenyon Cox; Woodstock with Birge
Harrison; New York School of Arts with Robert Henri.
Public Collections: (partial list) Art Museum, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque; Barnes Foundation, Merion Station, PA; Cincinnati Art Museum, Ohio; Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, CO; Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, Texas; Denver Art Museum, CO; Fort Worth Art Museum, Texas; Harwood Foundation, Taos; Hirshorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institute, Washington, DC; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City; Museum of New Mexico, Santa Fe; Roswell Museum and Art Center, New Mexico; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; Santa Barbara Museum of Art, CA; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City.
Selected Bibliography: Coke, Van Deren, Andrew Dasburg. University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque,1979. Nestor, Sarah and Robertson, Edna, Artists of the Canyons and Caminos: Santa Fe, The Early Years. Peregrine Smith, Inc., 1976.
Udall, Sharyn Rohlfsen, Modernist Painting in New Mexico 1913-1935. University of
New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 1984.
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