Bound for Taos

Gustave Baumann's small print Bound for Taos presents a panoramic American Southwest vista in which a lone car travels along a mesa on a dirt road leading towards a majestic, bluish-purple mountain range. The carefully executed color woodcut captures the landscape's spaciousness and the striking qualities of light on a gloriously cloudless day. Swathes of bright yellow and green vegetation fill the foreground on either side of the road, overgrowing its rutted borders. The image is otherwise dominated by rich, harmonizing blue-green, blue, and lavender punctuated by the black of the vehicle and the scattered trees hugging the crest of the rise it travels. The dense color of the top half of the image contrasts with the foreground, where the uneven ground blanketed with scrubby plants gives way to sandy soil indicated by the unprinted surface of the rough oatmeal paper Baumann favored for his prints. The composition is unified within the artist's typical device: an irregular dark band surrounded by another border of dots in the same muted tan used in the foreground of the image.

Baumann was already a successful color printmaker when he first visited Taos in 1918, lured west by reports that it was an artistic paradise. The artist found his true vocation in portraying the landscape and nature of the American Southwest. Its distinctive topography, color, and light attracted numerous contemporaries, including Joseph Henry Sharp, as seen in his Taos Canyon (TF 1999.134), and Walter Ufer, as in his Builders of the Desert (TF 1992.174). Baumann soon settled in the lively art center of Santa Fe, but prints such as Bound for Taos and Aspen-Red River (1996.12) indicate numerous trips between the two settlements, seventy miles apart. This image conveys the spectacular landscape and a sense of the adventure involved in traveling to the then-remote pueblo village.

Ville et campagne: les artistes américains, 1870–1920 (The City and the Country: American Perspectives, 1870–1920), Musée d'Art Américain Giverny, France (organizer). Venue: Musée d'Art Américain Giverny, France, April 1–July 15, 1999. [exh. cat.]

Manifest Destiny, Manifest Responsibility: Environmentalism and the Art of the American Landscape. Terra Foundation for American Art, Chicago, Illinois and Loyola University Museum of Art, Chicago, Illinois (organizers). Venue: Loyola University Museum of Art, May 17–August 10, 2008. [exh. cat.]

Krause, Martin F., Madeline Carol Yurtseven and David Acton. Gustave Baumann: Nearer to Art. (exh. cat., Museum of New Mexico). Santa Fe, New Mexico: Museum of New Mexico Press, 1993. No. 89, p. 115.

Brownlee, Peter John. Manifest Destiny / Manifest Responsibility: Environmentalism and the Art of the American Landscape. (exh. cat., Loyola University Museum of Art, Chicago, Illinois). Chicago, Illinois: Terra Foundation for American Art and Loyola University Museum of Art, 2008. Text p. 34 (checklist).