Juan Duran, the New Mexican man who posed for this portrait, brings the brilliant light and vivid colors of his native desert landscape into the artist’s studio with him. In works like this one Kenneth Adams, who had left New York to join the artists’ colony in Taos, adapted the bold colors and geometrically faceted forms of European modernism to painting New Mexican landscapes and people. In Adams’s daring rendition, Duran’s hair and mustache are shown as green rather than the gray they probably really were. The bright colors of Duran’s clothing are reflected in the skin of his broad, strong hands and blunt face. Even as this powerful man sits smoking with his hands resting on his knees, the lively hues and vigorous brushwork of the painting suggest the energy he will bring to his work when he finishes his cigarette.

1934: A New Deal for Artists exhibition label