Callers by Walter Ufer

No bows and arrows, no hunting buffalo on horseback. Walter Ufer saw first-hand that Native Americans in the 1920s weren’t the romanticized caricatures from the old Wild West shows.

In today’s episode we’re looking at “Callers” and find out how a city boy from Chicago ended up in Taos, NM and broke all the rules when it came to depicting his friends and neighbors as real people trying to balance the modern world with tradition.

If you want to zoom in and pan around you can find it here

SHOW NOTES (TRANSCRIPT BELOW)
“A Long Look” themes are “Easy” by Ron Gelinas https://youtu.be/2QGe6skVzSs and “At the Cafe with You” by Onion All Stars https://pixabay.com/users/onion_all_stars-33331904/

Episode Music
“Free Guitar Riding Blues” and “Follow the Little Creek” by Loco Lobo. Courtesy of Free Music Archive
https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Lobo_Loco/completly-free/free-guitar-riding-blues-f-014

https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Lobo_Loco/verona/follow-the-little-creek-faster-id-1386

“Clusticus the Mistaken” by Doctor Turtle. Courtesy of the artist
https://doctorturtle.bandcamp.com/album/free-turtle-archive-everything-cc-by-by-turtle

Artwork information
https://americanart.si.edu/artwork/callers-24394

Artist info
https://americanart.si.edu/artist/walter-ufer-4912

https://www.historynet.com/walter-ufer/?f

https://cometatomic.com/walter-ufer-a-remarkable-journey-through-art-and-activism/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Ufer

https://www.illinoisart.org/essays/walter-ufer#_ftn23

Ufer letter
https://libmma.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p15324coll1/id/1930

Taos Artists Society
“The Taos Society of Artists : Masters & Masterworks” by Amy Scott (Internet Archive)
https://archive.org/details/taossocietyofart0000scot

TRANSCRIPT
Hello and welcome to A Long Look! I’m your host, Karen Jackson

Did you know most people spend only a few seconds looking at works of art? But what happens if you slow down and take a long look? Join me while I take you thru what I see and discover while looking at art for minutes instead of seconds. Then I’ll share the history, mystery, or controversy behind it!

Welcome back! This year, I’ll be doing something different, instead of featuring just one or two museums, I’ll be taking you all over town including to some of DC’s hidden gems. There may even be a road trip! 

Ready? Then let’s head to the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

MUSIC

Today I’m looking at “Callers” by Walter Ufer [OO-fer]. If you want to follow along, you can find it at alonglookpodcast.com slash callers. 

So what do you first notice? 

The guarded look of a young woman facing us and two men on horseback outside her front gate. They’re all Native Americans with medium brown skin and black hair. She stands to our right, wearing a knee-length cobalt blue tunic over loose white pants and shoes. A charcoal-grey shawl drapes over her head and shoulders. Her left hand, on our right, grips the top of the gate she’s pushed open and it’s almost as tall as she is. It’s part of a tall seafoam-green picket fence running from left to right across the middle of the canvas. 

The two riders sit side-by-side on reddish-brown horses with their backs to us and fill most of the left and center of the scene. The man on the left wears a coral-red shirt and his companion wears a lilac shirt and olive-green pants. Both have wide white sashes tied around their hips. Their hair is parted in the back and pulled forward, suggesting braids. They kind of loom over the young woman and the man in red leans way forward as if talking to her. 

She appears to be not thrilled or maybe just unsure. She’s ducked her head a little and her small mouth is pursed, almost downturned as she looks up at him with dark eyes.

The fence divides the riders and us from grass-green leafy shrubs and a tall sturdy tree. There’s a glimpse of rust brown and blue rooftops through its thick arms that spread across the top of the canvas. And after a minute, I noticed there were a few little pink flowers peeking over the fence too!

Strong sunlight from the upper right breaks into dappled shadows as it filters through the tree’s emerald green leaves onto the riders, horses and dirt road. 

Ufer did a fantastic job creating that dappled effect. He used long swipes of dark violet and darker tones of red, brown, and yellow to create shadows on the guys’ shirts and pants. Bright white patches highlight their shoulders. Darker and lighter tones of red ripple across the horses coats and coffee-brown shadows spread out under them and the young woman onto the tan roadside. These broad swirling strokes make me think there are branches overhead, maybe swaying in a breeze. 

This is a huge painting, about 4 ft square, although it really looks bigger than that. Had to step back about halfway into the room to take it all in!

So what’s happening with this young woman and her visitors?

MUSIC

According the museum’s site, these men may be visiting her as part of a courtship ritual. And This kind of scene of everyday Native American life is what Walter Ufer loved to depict.

Bio
Walter Ufer was born in Germany in 1876 and raised in Louisville, KY. He started his career working as a lithographer and after a few years went to study art in Germany. This was typical for a lot of German-American artists from the Midwest. He eventually settled in Chicago when he got back and got a job as lithographer and art teacher. 

He married one of his students, Mary Monrad Fredericksen and after several years of exhibiting, his work caught the eye of Chicago mayor, Carter Harrison. Not only was he a collector, he became a patron and advisor. 

Harrison had traveled frequently to New Mexico and was convinced it would make a great subject for Walter. He showed up at his studio one day with brochures filled with beautiful descriptions about the Southwest and the next day, Walter was on a train out of town. 

He ended up in Taos, New Mexico, where he fell in love with the dramatic landscape, colors, and light. He became fascinated by the Native Americans he met and wanted to show their real, everyday lives. 

Harrison encouraged him, suggested he take a more modern approach to painting the local Pueblo Indians. He said, “It seems to me that abundant artistic material could be found in the painting the Indians as they are today” He thought the whole Wild West caricature of them hunting with bows and arrows wearing old fashioned costumes had been done to death. 

So Ufer broke with this tradition, combining the realistic portrait style he’d learned in Germany with the intense colors and rugged, arid, landscapes around him to depict his neighbors harvesting corn, fishing, or building their adobe houses by hand.

There were still men on horseback, except now they’re driving cattle or just heading home through the snow. Women are shown carrying water and working in their gardens but also as the creatives, making intricate jewelry and baskets. Ufer recognized that his neighbors were tired of being treated as some kind of exotic curiosity, “ like a dingleberry on a tree,” as he said. 

He also insisted on paying his models the standard modeling rate, apparently another break from tradition. 

MUSIC 

Mary as Business Genius
It turns out his wife Mary had a good head for business. She came up with a brilliant idea of a subscription program where members would make monthly payments and at the end of the year, get their pick of Walter’s work. 

She took the idea to Harrison, suggesting he and his brother should form a syndicate to paid for Walter to live and work in NM in exchange for a set number of paintings. Which they did and fun fact, the hot-dog maven Oscar Meyer became a member! 

That’s how Walter ended up in Taos in 1914.

MUSIC 

Taos Artists Society
For Walter, Taos was a haven from the noise and chaos of Chicago, it’s where he found his creative footing. He wasn’t the first. He joined the Taos Society of Artists, a group created by three painters in the late 1800s. 

Bert Phillips, Ernest Blumenschein and Joseph Henry Sharp all met while studying art in Paris. Back in America, they headed to Taos and began spreading the word to other artists. Pretty soon, they had an artists colony and exhibitions of their work introduced the eastern cities of the US to this spectacular area. Some critics thought they had made up the color and dramatic terrain. They’d never seen anything like it. The artists basically replied, how would you know? You’ve never been here! As the popularity of their work soared, it attracted tourists. It might be how Carter Harrison discovered the area. 

Late in his career Walter wrote a letter for an exhibition brochure explaining his devotion to New Mexico. He believed an American national art would come from the Southwest more than the East Coast. He said, “Gradually, and with the Indian here I believe we can give much to American Art in the future.” 

OUTRO:

I hope you’ll try out a long look on your next museum visit! Just take a little time and let the art reveal itself.

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Thanks for joining me!