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Lot 106
Walter Ufer(American, 1876-1936)House on a hill 30 1/2 x 30 1/2in overall: 35 1/2 x 35 1/2in
28 April 2015, 18:00 PDT
Los AngelesSold
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Walter Ufer (American, 1876-1936)
House on a hill
signed 'W Ufer' (lower right) and titled and signed indistinctly (on the stretcher)
oil on canvas
30 1/2 x 30 1/2in
overall: 35 1/2 x 35 1/2in
signed 'W Ufer' (lower right) and titled and signed indistinctly (on the stretcher)
oil on canvas
30 1/2 x 30 1/2in
overall: 35 1/2 x 35 1/2in
Footnotes
Provenance
With Grand Central Art Galleries, New York, New York
Collection of Dr. E. O. Holland on behalf of the Museum of Art, Washington State University, acquired from the above 1946
Property Sold to Benefit the Museum of Art, Washington State University
Walter Ufer's permanent move to Taos in 1917 transformed his work. Like many European trained artists who flocked to Taos, Ufer abandoned studio methods in favor of direct sunlight in the expansive untamed land of the American Southwest. His New Mexico repertoire consisted of genre scenes of Native Americans engaged in daily activities. He also mastered the essence, anatomy, and dynamism of horses, favoring representations of riders on horseback crossing brilliant landscapes.
House on a Hill showcases Ufer's emblematic use of broad, painterly brushstrokes, saturated natural light, and a vivid high-keyed palette. He uses a bold application of paint with varied impasto throughout the canvas. This complex surface helps translate the two horses into motion and emphasizes the pause of the rider. Ufer crops the foreground with a picket fence to distinguish the space between the viewer and the landscape. Reiterating color and shape, the artist allows the eye to meander the golden and yellow dirt trail, eventually resting on the deep and vibrant blues of the mountain range while briefly pausing on the adobe cottage. Intense green pastures bordering the trail complement the burnt oranges and rusty reds of the horse, rider's clothing and the desert flowers. The crisp light of the New Mexico landscape throws shallow shadows into stark relief along the edge of the road and to the right of the figure on horseback, his shadow dramatically interrupted by the fence line. House on a Hill rests on repeated simple geometric shapes, reminiscent of post-impressionist compositions. Triangles compose the sky-blue fence gate in the foreground, the adobe cottage in the mid-ground, and the cerulean mountain peak in the background. These echoing forms flatten the image, allowing the shapes and color palette to dominate the canvas plane.
Ufer provides in this work a beautiful example of advice that he had given his students, "Treat things as a whole. The horse becomes a part of the mesa and takes on the colors of the mesa." The rider and the landscape are one entity, acknowledging the Native American's reduction to a part of the landscape, as if merely another landmark on a sightseeing tour. (Broder, p. 228). In fact, Ufer himself became so well-known by 1920 that he attempted to deter uninvited visitors with a sign on his studio reading "DANGER DYNAMITE."
P. J. Broder, Taos: A Painter's Dream, New York Graphic Society, Boston, 1980.
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