Synopses & Reviews
Cady Wells (1904-1954) was one of the most innovative modern artists working in the Southwest during the years of 1932-54, and a leading member of the Taos and Santa Fe art colonies when they were flourishing. Wells' contemporary Georgia O'Keeffe regarded him as one of the two most important artists of his era (claiming herself as the other). In the twenty-year span between 1933 and 1953, Wells was given twenty-one solo exhibitions and included in seventy group shows. His work was highly sought and regarded alongside artists such as Jackson Pollack, Adolph Gottlieb, Morris Graves and Mark Tobey. A 1948 New York Times review noted that Wells' work registers an abstract impression of landscapes and ritualistic objects with the delicacy of a seismograph. Following his untimely death at the age of fifty, Raymond Jonson called Wells the finest American watercolorist, and that includes the great Marin. Given the intense interest by scholars today in reexamining American modernism, it is timely to revisit Cady Wells and his work through a full-scale retrospective. From his earliest landscape paintings that show the influences of Andrew Dasburg (his only formal art teacher), John Marin, and his adaptations of Chinese and Japanese landscape aesthetics, Wells moved into a series of strikingly original semi-abstract styles which spoke to New Mexico's past in terms of the global present, the most powerful of which were influenced by his experiences serving in Europe during World War II and his living next to Los Alamos. Insightful biographical essays by leading scholars explore aspects of the artist's New England upbringing, his inspirational friendship with dance choreographer Martha Graham and his important collection of Hispano religious folk art, which had significant influence on his art. Plans are underway for a major museum exhibition and traveling exhibition of Cady Wells to open at the University of New Mexico Art Museum in 2011.