Walter Ufer 1876 - 1936

Born in Louisville, Kentucky to German immigrant parents, Walter Ufer's artistic endeavors began shortly after grade school when he accepted an apprenticeship at a local lithography firm. Demonstrating great skill and talent at seventeen, Ufer traveled to Dresden, Germany where he studied and painted until earning enough money to enroll at the Royal Academy in 1895. Ufer returned to the United States a few years after, eventually settling in Chicago in 1900, where his work earned him recognition from prominent patrons, including Mayor Carter Harrison, who provided funds to sponsor the artist's first trip to Taos in 1914. Once settled in Taos, Ufer witnessed the unsettling effect that modern industrialization had on the traditions and religion of the Taos Indians. A social critic and a great supporter of individual rights, Ufer saw the negative impact these changes had on the Pueblo Indian's way of life and sympathized with the Southwest's indigenous people.  "Ufer seldom painted the dances and religious rituals of the Pueblo people. Unlike most of the artists who devoted their lives to recording those aspects of daily and ceremonial life which had continued through the centuries, he focused his efforts upon painting the Taos Indians as a people suffering the pains of cultural transition...Rejecting the Indian as a mystical or exotic subject in favor of the Indian as a participant in the daily life of Taos Village...He was a passionate man and his New Mexico paintings are inspired, artistic statements of the contrast between the beauty, power, and rhythm of the natural world and the stoic despair of the Indians rendered immobile by the destruction of the world they understood and to which they belonged" (Patricia Janis Broder, Taos: A Painter's Dream, pp. 215, 218).

In the present painting, Ufer depicts Pueblo Indians departing a mid-day mass.  Dressed in traditional woolen shawls, known as rebozos, the subjects have adapted to following the strict order of the Catholic Church by covering their shoulders and heads during services.  Spanish missionaries first arrived in New Mexico at the beginning of the 17^th century to convert Indians to Catholicism and obtain political control of the territories.  The Taos Indians adopted certain Spanish tenets of Christianity, but preserved elements of their own identity by continuing to dress in native tunics and moccasins.  The multitude of rich pigments represented in the splendid rebozos creates a sharp juxtaposition against the sand colored stucco walls of the adobe chapel.  Ufer accentuated the folds and creases created by the draped shawls with the use of heavy impasto which animates the surface of the canvas.  Ufer's pointillist technique in the rendering of the pale blue sky presents a sense of texture interwoven across the composition not found in the flatness of the chapel façade and distant mountains.  One of the most striking elements of the painting is the intensity of light that suffuses the composition.  The high noon-day sun casts shallow purple shadows against the warm sun burnt earthen path.  However, nowhere in the composition is the treatment of light more pronounced than around the doorway of the church illuminating an Indian woman dressed in white, signifying the cultural crossroads Taos Indians faced in the early decades of the 20^th century.