New Mexico Landscape
Artist
Cady Wells
(American, 1904 - 1954)
Date1938
Mediumoil on canvas
DimensionsImage: 18 × 25 3/8 in. (45.7 × 64.5 cm)
Frame: 22 11/16 × 29 15/16 × 1 3/4 in. (57.6 × 76 × 4.4 cm)
Frame: 22 11/16 × 29 15/16 × 1 3/4 in. (57.6 × 76 × 4.4 cm)
ClassificationsPainting
Credit LineGift of the Cady Wells Estate, 1982
Object number1982.16.38
DescriptionNew Mexico landscape, bare tree in foreground with adobe houses in the background.eMuseum Notes
Of all
the Modernist painters working in New Mexico, few have captured the darkness of
the region like Cady Wells. Wells was particularly interested in depicting the
Western landscape, like many painters who came to New Mexico. But where most
artists excelled in capturing the bright sunshine for which New Mexico is
famous, Wells employed a mute palette of blacks, browns, and greys to capture a
darker vision of the region. Wells struggled with depression most of his life
and his work tended to become darker and more abstract later in his life, and
particularly after his service in World War II.
Born to a traditional, well-to-do New England family, Cady Wells settled in northern New Mexico in 1932. Wells’s somber approach to depicting the land is rooted in an ongoing struggle with depression and struggle to find acceptance as a gay man in early twentieth-century America. While many painters celebrated the bright light and open spaces of the New Mexican landscape in their canvases, Wells took the novel approach of depicting the West as dark and foreboding. The bare tree in the foreground evokes the barrenness of the desert, while the adobes in the background melt into the gloomy landscape around them.
On View
On viewTerms
- trees
- landscapes (representations)
- adobe
- dwellings
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