VERSO
Label, The Redfern Gallery, Laguna Beach, California

Legendary Western art historian Peter H. Hassrick noted Payne’s enduring connection to the American Southwest, “In a biographical sketch written after Payne’s death by his widow and fellow artist, Elsie Palmer Payne, it is suggested that of all the locations that beckoned him as a muse, the American Southwest was perhaps the most compelling. The Paynes were still in Chicago when they embarked on their first extended summer trip to Arizona and New Mexico: ‘In 1916, the Santa Fe Railroad, just opening that country to tourists, sent him ... to paint the Indian Pueblos and Mesas and mountains of New Mexico and the Canyon de Chelley [sic], Monument Valley and Grand Canyon of Arizona.’ Elsie went on to say that ‘he returned to that glorious country nearly every year that he was in America the rest of his life. It was the last place he painted before his final illness.’”

“Payne’s prolonged visit to New Mexico and Arizona in 1916 appears to have produced a rather limited body of work and seems to have been a singular event in his early career. Despite Elsie’s earlier quoted contention that ‘he returned to that glorious country nearly every year that he was in America the rest of his life,’ there is no evidence either in his subsequent art production or in itineraries of his travels to substantiate that claim. After 1917 he stopped exhibiting works related to the area, which would imply that he had ceased visiting the Navajo and had refrained from painting them and their homeland as well. Given Payne’s belief that fresh observation resulted in the most compelling studio production, he was no doubt loath to return to southwestern themes without renewed visitation.

“Payne’s known exhibition records until 1931 contain no southwestern paintings.… It was not until 1927 and a commission to provide eight murals for the new Hotel St. Paul in Los Angeles that Payne drew once again on his Southwest experience.

“By the time Payne revisited the Southwest, his style had changed substantially. Since he rarely dated his works, it is difficult to distinguish stylistically his paintings of the 1930s from those of the early 1940s. Yet compared with his works of 1916, these new oils were far bolder in execution, more adventuresome in composition, and more expansive in palette. Moreover, in 1930 he entered Navajo land from the north, coming from Ogden, Utah, through Monument Valley, so even the topography was different from what he had seen in 1916.

“Subsequent exhibitions in 1931, in New York at the National Academy of Design and in Chicago at the city’s mecca for businessmen, the Midland Club, reveal a substantial production of major southwestern works following his initial return to the region, not just one or two pictures. The Midland Club display contained thirty-four canvases, approximately one-third of which had been inspired by Payne’s Southwest travels. About half of those were landscapes; the rest were scenes of Navajo riders. They contributed to what was regarded as a ‘stunning show.’

“Over the next fifteen years, the Southwest consistently engaged Payne’s imagination. When he motored through Monument Valley over those years, he persistently reapplied his early mantra about the seminal importance of ‘bigness’ of mountain mass and the ‘beauty’ of clouds. Now energized with the force of his expressionist brushwork and a heightened palette, he embraced the atmospheric clarity of the subject.

“In these late southwestern paintings, Payne manifested an artist’s true affection for his subject. As the forms and light disclosed nature’s rhythms and made their way to the surface of his canvases, he incorporated their cadence and meter into his vision of what art should mean. Most art forms – dance, poetry, and music, for example – must be governed by rhythm, he wrote. So too must painting. And when nature’s countenance and the artist’s disposition were in harmony, great art could result. Just as some creative talents could orchestrate euphonious chords for the ear, Payne used his virtuosity to work visual miracles meant to expose what he called the ‘spiritual flow which encircles animate and inanimate nature – the rhythm of life and the universe.’”

PROVENANCE
Norman and Betty Moss, Eureka, California, ca. 1950
John and Callie Wilson, California, by bequest
Private collection, by descent
Christie’s, New York, New York, 2012
The Redfern Gallery, Laguna Beach, California, 2013
Private collection, Windsor, Colorado

• Edgar Payne’s Past Results

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