CIRCLE OF ARTISTS IN TAOS, Eve M. Kahn New York Times, August 1, 2014 The only property owned by the British novelist D. H. Lawrence, which he called Kiowa Ranch, near Taos, N.M., reopened to the public in early July after years of being a shuttered health hazard. Traces of hantavirus had been found in mouse droppings at the 160-acre site. The property’s owner, the University of New Mexico, had stopped letting the public visit the scattered cabins and a 1930s memorial chapel. A dozen 1940s guest huts, originally used by Los Alamos scientists and infested by mice, remain off limits. “They were a blight,” Stan Riveles, president of the D. H. Lawrence Ranch Alliance, said. Lawrence spent summers on the ranch in the 1920s, and his German-born wife, a baroness whose maiden name was Emma Maria Frieda Johanna von Richthofen, stayed on for three decades after his death in 1930, at 44. Frieda Lawrence had his cremated remains transferred there from a medieval cemetery in southern France, and she is believed to have incorporated the ashes into the chapel’s concrete. Sunflowers are painted on the chapel walls, and she is buried just outside the front door. The cabins have weathered furniture. But no one is quite sure which pieces date to Lawrence’s era, when he helped build and repair the ranch buildings as tuberculosis ruined his health. “There’s an old wooden chair that he may have made,” William Haller, president of the Friends of D. H. Lawrence, said. Researchers are looking for artifacts that were long at the site but are now missing, he said, including a typewriter, a suitcase and clothing believed to have belonged to the author, his wife and their companion Dorothy Brett, a British painter. Longtime caretakers left behind boxes of unsorted papers. “There’s documentary material there that needs to be archived,” Mr. Riveles said. “We don’t know what’s there.” The Taos area has numerous preserved homes and collections that belonged to members of the Lawrence circle, which included the oil heiress Millicent Rogers, the writer Mabel Dodge Luhan (D. H. Lawrence painted geometric patterns on her bathroom windows) and the artists Nicolai Fechin, Eanger Irving Couse, Joseph H. Sharp and Ernest L. Blumenschein. The Hotel La Fonda on the town plaza displays nine 1920s erotic paintings by Lawrence. Scholars have been comparing numerous memoirs of life at Kiowa Ranch. Luhan and Brett wrote versions of the story that portray Frieda Lawrence as a moody villainess. In Frieda Lawrence’s telling, however, “she didn’t want to make herself look unhappy, because she thought it was humiliating not to keep up appearances,” said Katherine Toy Miller, a writer in Taos. In 2016, the Harwood Museum of Art in Taos will present an exhibition about Luhan and her celebrated friends, including Gertrude Stein, Georgia O’Keeffe, Ansel Adams, Marsden Hartley and Willa Cather. A handful of objects that Luhan owned during her friendship with the Lawrences have been found, including a steamer trunk, Persian and Mughal paintings of hunting scenes and Navajo turquoise jewelry. Much of the contents of Luhan’s house, however, belonged to a subsequent owner of the property, the actor Dennis Hopper, who kept it in storage. Lois Palken Rudnick, a curator of the Luhan show, said, “We don’t have a clue as to what happened to that furniture.”
Posted on: Sun, 03 Aug 2014 23:05:37 +0000
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