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Pueblo Indian Watercolors: Brief History of the Pueblo Indians
Pueblo is a Spanish term meaning town or village. When Spanish explorer Francisco Vasquez de Coronado ventured into the Pueblo Indian region (now Arizona and New Mexico) in 1540, he called the American Indians who lived in permanent towns Pueblo Indians to differentiate them from their nomadic neighbors, the Apache and Navajo. These groups today live in the same towns they have occupied for centuries, even predating the arrival of the Spanish. The map shows the location of these pueblos.
For more than a thousand years, Pueblos in the Southwest of what is now the United States have painted decorative and symbolic patterns and designs. Until recently these painted motifs were used primarily as religious symbols on walls in ceremonial rooms called kivas or to decorate the highly refined pottery developed in the region. Within both of these traditions, artists painted against a monochromatic or unpainted background, filling in the forms with solid colors without shading. They mixed paints using mineral or plant pigments and applied them with a yucca leaf brush.
In 1598, by command of Philip II of Spain, Juan de Onate established the first permanent European settlement, and first political capital in the region near the Tewa-speaking pueblo of San Juan. Although the Spanish and later Mexican settlers and priests actively tried to replace the native religions of the Pueblos with European Christianity, many ancient Pueblo religious beliefs exist to this day.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, "Anglo" (a term used in the Southwest to indicate people who are neither Indian or Hispanic) anthropologists, artists, and enthusiasts discovered the rich cultural traditions of the Pueblos and predicted that these cultures would soon be lost to the advancing European-based civilization. Anthropologists hoped to preserve a record of these traditions before they disappeared. They recorded the language, documented in photographs the communities and people, and collected objects made by Pueblo Indians. Anthropologists Jesse Walter Fewkes of the Bureau of American Ethnology and Edgar L. Hewett of the School of American Research and Museum of New Mexico both commissioned Pueblo artists to paint images documenting their traditional ceremonies and activities.
By 1915 artists of San Ildefonso Pueblo, one of many pueblos along the Rio Grande in northern New Mexico, had developed a style of painting in watercolor on paper that focused on figures and geometric designs. Avanyu by Julian Martinez is an example of this style. These artists were encouraged and influenced not only by anthropologists such as Fewkes and Hewett, but also by art teachers such as Dorothy Dunn of the Federal Santa Fe Indian School and non-Indian artists such as John Sloan of New York.
By the early 1930s this new style, which eventually came to be considered a traditional form of Native American painting, was adopted by artists in neighboring pueblos in the Rio Grande valley. The movement, typified by bold color, balanced compositions, and figures painted without shading, perspective, or foreground and background, has continued to influence succeeding generations of Native painters. The first subjects of these paintings included ceremonial dances, activities of daily life, and adaptations of traditional pottery designs and decorative motifs.
Before the arrival of Europeans, Pueblo peoples did not use paper and did not sell paintings. Although there are elements of the Pueblo Indian watercolor paintings that can be traced back to Pueblo culture before contact with Europeans, twentieth-century Pueblo paintings are the result of influences of both ancient local tradition, and Anglo aesthetic ideas and art marketing practices.
Patrons of Pueblo Art
Patrons who requested and bought paintings were essential in the development of the Pueblo Indian painting movement. Alice Corbin Henderson, a Chicago poet, began collecting watercolors by Pueblo Indians in 1917, soon after she and her husband, artist William Penhallow Henderson, moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico. Fascinated by the local cultures, the couple became strong advocates for the paintings of Pueblo artists. Beginning with the work of Crescencio Martinez and his nephew Awa Tsireh, both from San Ildefonso Pueblo, Henderson built her collection, supported artists through sales of watercolors to friends and acquaintances during her travels, and sponsored an exhibition of the Pueblo watercolors in 1920 at the Chicago Arts Club.
That same year in New York City, John Sloan and writer Mary Austin arranged exhibitions of Pueblo paintings at the Society of Independent Artists and the American Museum of Natural History. The paintings discussed here were collected by Alice Corbin Henderson and were given to the National Museum of American Art (now the Smithsonian American Art Museum) by her daughter, Alice Henderson Rossin.
All of the ceremonies and traditional ways of life depicted in these paintings continue today in the pueblos of the Southwest of the United States. Despite the fears of anthropologists and artists such as photographer Edward Curtis, who called American Indians the "vanishing race," the Pueblo Indians have maintained their culture and continue to pass their traditions from one generation to the next.
Pictured above:
Top: Thomas Vigil, Buffalo Dance—Six Dancers, Two Drummers,
Bottom: Julian Martinez, Avanyu, about 1923, watercolor, ink, and pencil on paper, 15 5/16 x 16 3/8 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Corbin-Henderson Collection, Gift of Alice H. Rossin