Choice Review
The subject of this study is the work of 20 or so American artists who lived and painted in Taos, New Mexico, from the mid-1940s to the early '60s. These artists worked as individuals rather than as a school, but they shared an interest in nonobjective imagery and perhaps in conveying the feeling of space and light of the Southwest. A couple of the artists discussed are well-known modernists--Andrew Dasburg and Agnes Martin, for example--but most are known primarily in their regional context, such as Oli Sihvonen and Clay Spohn. The work of these artists is reproduced in 48 color plates, and photographs picturing the artists themselves are included among the black-and-white illustrations in the text. This study can be seen as taking up where S.R. Udall's Modernist Painting in New Mexico, 1913-1935 (CH, Dec'84) left off, but it is even more narrowly focused and so is recommended only to those college libraries with specialized collections in American and modern art.
Library Journal Review
As defined by Witt, the Taos Moderns were mature artists who came to this special part of New Mexico for its natural beauty in the 1940s and 1950s. Though coming directly after the successful Taos Society of Artists, they had no formal organization. According to Witt, the Moderns focused ``on motif and the manner in which an artwork is developed.'' They held deep, nearly mystical respect for the Native American culture and were drawn to the quality of light, the distant gorges, and the color and sky of Taos. The book's many photographs, which place the Taos Moderns in the social and geographical context of northern New Mexico, include 40 color plates that prove the variety of work produced there. A valuable contribution to the merger of artists, place, and time that made the Taos Moderns, this is recommended for most libraries.-- David Bryant, Belleville P.L., N.J. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.