Casa Luhan, Taos

In 1923, German-born artist Arnold Rönnebeck visited the United States. During his early career in Europe, he had met a number of the American avant-garde, including Marsden Hartley and Charles Demuth, as well as patron Mabel Dodge. He joined the cadre of modern artists circulating around Alfred Stieglitz and, in the summer of 1925, visited Mabel Dodge Luhan's home in Taos, New Mexico. Rönnebeck depicted Luhan's home, Los Gallos, with tight lines and a geometric approach to form sympathetic to the modernist style known as precisionism and its celebration of the built environment. As such, his representation of Los Gallos resembles skyscrapers or ziggurats rather than the more organic character of the adobe structures. Rönnebeck also acknowledged the bohemian atmosphere of Los Gallos in the inclusion of a nude woman bathing in front of an open window, an indication that modesty and Victorian morality had no home at Casa Luhan.