Mabel Dodge Luhan
Encyclopedia
Taos art colony
The Taos art colony is an art colony founded in Taos, New Mexico by artists attracted by the rich culture of the Taos Pueblo and beautiful landscape. Hispanic craftsmanship of furniture, tin work and more played a role in creating a multicultural tradition of art work in the area.In 1898 a visit...
.
Early life
Mabel Ganson was the heiress of a wealthy banker from Buffalo, New YorkBuffalo, New York
Buffalo is the second most populous city in the state of New York, after New York City. Located in Western New York on the eastern shores of Lake Erie and at the head of the Niagara River across from Fort Erie, Ontario, Buffalo is the seat of Erie County and the principal city of the...
. Her first marriage, at the age of 21, was to Karl Evans, the son of a steamship owner in 1900. They had one son, and Karl died in a hunting accident two-and-half years later leaving her a widow at the age of 23. In the Spring of 1904, an oval portrait of her in mourning dress was painted by the Swiss-born American artist Adolfo Müller-Ury
Adolfo Müller-Ury
Adolfo Muller-Ury was a Swiss-born American portrait painter and impressionistic painter of roses and still life.-Heritage and early life in Switzerland:...
for her paternal grandmother Nancy Ganson of Delaware Avenue in Buffalo. Later that year she married Edwin Dodge
Edwin Dodge
- Personal background :Dodge was born into a wealthy family of Newburyport, Massachusetts, the son of the manufacturer Elisha Perkins Dodge. He trained as an architect at MIT, graduating in 1897. In 1902, he graduated from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris....
, a wealthy architect.
She was actively bisexual during her early life and frankly details her passionate physical encounters with young women in her autobiography Intimate Memories (1933).
Florence
Mabel and Edwin lived in FlorenceFlorence
Florence is the capital city of the Italian region of Tuscany and of the province of Florence. It is the most populous city in Tuscany, with approximately 370,000 inhabitants, expanding to over 1.5 million in the metropolitan area....
from 1905 to 1912. At her palatial Medici
Medici
The House of Medici or Famiglia de' Medici was a political dynasty, banking family and later royal house that first began to gather prominence under Cosimo de' Medici in the Republic of Florence during the late 14th century. The family originated in the Mugello region of the Tuscan countryside,...
villa — the Villa Curonia — in Arcetri
Arcetri
Arcetri is a region of Florence, Italy, in the hills to the south of the city centre.-Landmarks:A number of historic buildings are situated there, including the house of the famous scientist Galileo Galilei ,...
, not far from Florence
Florence
Florence is the capital city of the Italian region of Tuscany and of the province of Florence. It is the most populous city in Tuscany, with approximately 370,000 inhabitants, expanding to over 1.5 million in the metropolitan area....
she entertained local artists, as well as Gertrude Stein
Gertrude Stein
Gertrude Stein was an American writer, poet and art collector who spent most of her life in France.-Early life:...
, her brother Leo
Leo Stein
Leo Stein was an American art collector and critic. He was born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, the older brother of Gertrude Stein. He became an influential promoter of 20th-century paintings. Beginning in 1892, he studied at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for two years. The...
, Alice B. Toklas
Alice B. Toklas
Alice B. Toklas was an American-born member of the Parisian avant-garde of the early 20th century.-Early life, relationship with Gertrude Stein:...
, and other visitors from Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
, including André Gide
André Gide
André Paul Guillaume Gide was a French author and winner of the Nobel Prize in literature in 1947. Gide's career ranged from its beginnings in the symbolist movement, to the advent of anticolonialism between the two World Wars.Known for his fiction as well as his autobiographical works, Gide...
. A troubled liaison with her chauffeur led to two suicide attempts: the first was by eating figs with shards of glass; the second with laudanum
Laudanum
Laudanum , also known as Tincture of Opium, is an alcoholic herbal preparation containing approximately 10% powdered opium by weight ....
.
New York and Provincetown
In mid-1912, Mabel and Edwin (who by this time were becoming estranged) returned to America, and she began to set herself up as a patron of the arts, holding a weekly 'salonSalon (gathering)
A salon is a gathering of people under the roof of an inspiring host, held partly to amuse one another and partly to refine taste and increase their knowledge of the participants through conversation. These gatherings often consciously followed Horace's definition of the aims of poetry, "either to...
' in her new apartment at 23 Fifth Avenue in Greenwich Village. Often in attendance were such luminaries as Carl Van Vechten
Carl van Vechten
Carl Van Vechten was an American writer and photographer who was a patron of the Harlem Renaissance and the literary executor of Gertrude Stein.-Biography:...
, Margaret Sanger
Margaret Sanger
Margaret Higgins Sanger was an American sex educator, nurse, and birth control activist. Sanger coined the term birth control, opened the first birth control clinic in the United States, and established Planned Parenthood...
, Emma Goldman
Emma Goldman
Emma Goldman was an anarchist known for her political activism, writing and speeches. She played a pivotal role in the development of anarchist political philosophy in North America and Europe in the first half of the twentieth century....
, Charles Demuth
Charles Demuth
Charles Demuth was an American watercolorist who turned to oils late in his career, developing a style of painting known as Precisionism....
, "Big Bill" Haywood
Bill Haywood
William Dudley Haywood , better known as "Big Bill" Haywood, was a founding member and leader of the Industrial Workers of the World , and a member of the Executive Committee of the Socialist Party of America...
, Max Eastman
Max Eastman
Max Forrester Eastman was an American writer on literature, philosophy and society, a poet, and a prominent political activist. For many years, Eastman was a supporter of socialism, a leading patron of the Harlem Renaissance and an activist for a number of liberal and radical causes...
, Lincoln Steffens
Lincoln Steffens
-Biography:Steffens was born April 6, 1866, in San Francisco. He grew up in a wealthy family and attended a military academy. He studied in France and Germany after graduating from the University of California....
, Hutchins Hapgood
Hutchins Hapgood
Hutchins Hapgood was an U.S. journalist, author, individualist anarchist/philosophical anarchist....
, Neith Boyce
Neith Boyce
Neith Boyce Hapgood was a U.S. novelist and playwright.She married Hutchins Hapgood on June 22, 1899...
, and John Reed. Van Vechten took Dodge as the model for the character "Edith Dale" in his novel Peter Whiffle. Anthropologist Raymond Harrington
Mark Raymond Harrington
Mark Raymond Harrington was curator of archaeology at the Southwest Museum 1928-1964 and discoverer of ancient Pueblo structures near Overton, Nevada and Little Lake, California.-Early life:...
introduced Dodge and her friends to peyote
Peyote
Lophophora williamsii , better known by its common name Peyote , is a small, spineless cactus with psychoactive alkaloids, particularly mescaline.It is native to southwestern Texas and Mexico...
in an impromptu "ceremony" there.
She was involved in mounting the Armory Show
Armory Show
Many exhibitions have been held in the vast spaces of U.S. National Guard armories, but the Armory Show refers to the 1913 International Exhibition of Modern Art that was organized by the Association of American Painters and Sculptors...
of new European Modern Art in 1913, and she published in pamphlet form a piece by Gertrude Stein, "Portrait of Mabel Dodge at the Villa Curonia", which Mabel distributed at the exhibition. This brought her to public attention.
She sailed to Europe at the end of June 1913. Her new acquaintance John Reed
John Silas Reed
John Silas "Jack" Reed was an American journalist, poet, and communist activist, best remembered for his first-hand account of the Bolshevik Revolution, Ten Days that Shook the World...
('Jack') — worn out from having recently organized the Paterson Pageant — travelled with her. They became lovers after arriving in Paris, where they socialized with Stein and Pablo Picasso
Pablo Picasso
Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso known as Pablo Ruiz Picasso was a Spanish expatriate painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer, one of the greatest and most influential artists of the...
. They moved down to the Villa Curonia, where the guests this time included Arthur Rubinstein
Arthur Rubinstein
Arthur Rubinstein KBE was a Polish-American pianist. He received international acclaim for his performances of the music of a variety of composers...
. At first this was a very happy time for the couple, but then tension grew between the two as Jack grew uncomfortable with the affluent isolation and Mabel saw his interests in the world of people and achievements as a rejection of her. They returned to New York in late September 1913. In October 1913 Jack was sent to report on the Mexican Revolution by The Masses magazine. Mabel followed him to Presidio, a border town, but left after a few days. In 1915, she returned to Provincetown with painter Maurice Sterne
Maurice Sterne
Maurice Sterne was an American sculptor and painter remembered today for his association with philanthropist Mabel Dodge Luhan, to whom he was married from 1916 to 1923. He began his career as a draftsman and painter, and critics noted the similarity of his work, in its volume and weight, to...
.
Over 1914-16 a deep and continuing relationship developed between the intelligentsia of Greenwich Village
Greenwich Village
Greenwich Village, , , , .in New York often simply called "the Village", is a largely residential neighborhood on the west side of Lower Manhattan in New York City. A large majority of the district is home to upper middle class families...
and Provincetown. Jack Reed contributed to the start of the Provincetown Players
Provincetown Players
The Provincetown Players was an amateur group of writers and artists who, at the early part of the 20th Century, wanted to see a change in American theatre and created a company committed to producing new plays by exclusively American playwrights...
, and Mabel had a rivalry with Mary Heaton Vorse
Mary Heaton Vorse
Mary Heaton Vorse or Mary Heaton Vorse O'Brien was an American journalist, labor activist, and novelist. Vorse was outspoken and active in peace and social justice causes, such as women's suffrage, civil rights, pacifism , socialism, child labor, infant mortality, labor disputes, and affordable...
.
Mabel became a nationally syndicated columnist for the Hearst organization
Hearst Corporation
The Hearst Corporation is an American media conglomerate based in the Hearst Tower, Manhattan in New York City, New York, United States. Founded by William Randolph Hearst as an owner of newspapers, the company's holdings now include a wide variety of media...
.
She moved to Finney Farm, a large Croton
Croton
-In plants:* Croton , a plant genus of the family Euphorbiaceae* Crotoneae, a tribe of the subfamily Crotonoideae* Codiaeum variegatum, a plant commonly called a "Croton"...
estate. Sterne, who was to become Mabel's third husband, was staying in a cottage behind the main house. Mabel offered Jack the third floor of the house as a writing studio; he moved in for a short period but the situation was untenable. Later that year, 1916, Mabel married Maurice.
Santa Barbara
Around this period of time Mabel Dodge Sterne spent a great deal of time living in Santa Barbara, California where her friend Lincoln Steffens had relatives who were living at the time. Lincoln Steffens sister Lottie was married to local rancher John J. Hollister.Taos
In 1919 Mabel Dodge Sterne, her husband Maurice, and Elsie Clews ParsonsElsie Clews Parsons
Elsie Worthington Clews Parsons was an American anthropologist, sociologist, folklorist, and feminist who studied Native American tribes—such as the Tewa and Hopi—in Arizona, New Mexico, and Mexico. She helped found The New School...
moved to Taos, New Mexico and started a literary colony there. On the advice of Tony Luhan, a Native American
Indigenous peoples of the Americas
The indigenous peoples of the Americas are the pre-Columbian inhabitants of North and South America, their descendants and other ethnic groups who are identified with those peoples. Indigenous peoples are known in Canada as Aboriginal peoples, and in the United States as Native Americans...
whom she would marry in 1923, she bought a 12 acres (48,562.3 m²) property. Tony set up a teepee in front of the small house and drummed there each night until Mabel came to him. Maurice bought a shotgun with the intention of chasing Tony off the property, but he was unable to use it, and simply took to insulting Mabel. Mabel sent Maurice away, and supported him with monthly payments until their divorce four years later.
D. H. Lawrence
D. H. Lawrence
David Herbert Richards Lawrence was an English novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, literary critic and painter who published as D. H. Lawrence. His collected works represent an extended reflection upon the dehumanising effects of modernity and industrialisation...
, the English author, accepted an invitation from her to stay in Taos and he arrived, with Frieda
Frieda von Richthofen
Frieda Freiin von Richthofen , a distant relative of the "Red Baron" Manfred von Richthofen, who is best known for her marriage to the British novelist D. H. Lawrence.-Life:...
his wife, in early September 1922. He had a fraught relationship with his hostess and wrote about this in his fiction. Mabel later published a memoir about his visit entitled, Lorenzo in Taos (1932).
Mabel and Tony hosted a number of influential artists and poets including Marsden Hartley
Marsden Hartley
Marsden Hartley was an American Modernist painter, poet, and essayist.-Early life and education:Hartley was born in Lewiston, Maine, where his English parents had settled. He was the youngest of nine children. His mother died when he was eight, and his father remarried four years later to Martha...
, Arnold Ronnebeck
Arnold Ronnebeck
Arnold Rönnebeck was a German-born American modernist artist and museum administrator. He was a vital member of both the European and American avant-garde movements of the early twentieth century before settling in Denver, Colorado...
, Louise Emerson Ronnebeck
Louise Emerson Ronnebeck
Louise Emerson Ronnebeck was an American painter best known for her murals executed for the Works Progress Administration . Born in Philadelphia she married artist Arnold Ronnebeck in 1926 and they settled in Denver, Colorado...
, Ansel Adams
Ansel Adams
Ansel Easton Adams was an American photographer and environmentalist, best known for his black-and-white photographs of the American West, especially in Yosemite National Park....
, Willa Cather
Willa Cather
Willa Seibert Cather was an American author who achieved recognition for her novels of frontier life on the Great Plains, in works such as O Pioneers!, My Ántonia, and The Song of the Lark. In 1923 she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours , a novel set during World War I...
, Robinson Jeffers
Robinson Jeffers
John Robinson Jeffers was an American poet, known for his work about the central California coast. Most of Jeffers' poetry was written in classic narrative and epic form, but today he is also known for his short verse, and considered an icon of the environmental movement.-Life:Jeffers was born in...
and his wife Una, Florence McClung
Florence McClung
Florence McClung , painter, printmaker, and art teacher, daughter of Charles W. and Minerva White, was born at St. Louis, Missouri, on July 12, 1894. She moved to Dallas in 1899 and lived there until her death...
, Georgia O'Keeffe
Georgia O'Keeffe
Georgia Totto O'Keeffe was an American artist.Born near Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, O'Keeffe first came to the attention of the New York art community in 1916, several decades before women had gained access to art training in America’s colleges and universities, and before any of its women artists...
, Mary Hunter Austin
Mary Hunter Austin
Mary Hunter Austin was an American writer. One of the early nature writers of the American Southwest, her classic The Land of Little Rain describes the fauna, flora and people – as well as evoking the mysticism and spirituality – of the region between the High Sierra and the Mojave Desert of...
, Frank Waters
Frank Waters
Frank Waters was an American writer. He is known for his novels and historical works about the American Southwest...
, and others.
Mabel Dodge Luhan died at her home in Taos in 1962 and was buried in Kit Carson
Kit Carson
Christopher Houston "Kit" Carson was an American frontiersman and Indian fighter. Carson left home in rural present-day Missouri at age 16 and became a Mountain man and trapper in the West. Carson explored the west to California, and north through the Rocky Mountains. He lived among and married...
Cemetery. The Mabel Dodge Luhan House
Mabel Dodge Luhan House
Mabel Dodge Luhan House, also known as Big House and St. Teresa House is a house in Taos, New Mexico. It was a home of artist Mabel Dodge Luhan and was a haven for artists and writers....
has been designated a national historic landmark and is a historic inn and conference center. Natalie Goldberg
Natalie Goldberg
Natalie Goldberg is an American author. She is best known for a series of books which explore writing as Zen practice. Goldberg lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.-Books:*Chicken and in Love , ISBN 978-0930100049...
frequently teaches at Mabel Dodge Luhan House, where Dennis Hopper
Dennis Hopper
Dennis Lee Hopper was an American actor, filmmaker and artist. As a young man, Hopper became interested in acting and eventually became a student of the Actors' Studio. He made his first television appearance in 1954 and appeared in two films featuring James Dean, Rebel Without a Cause and Giant...
wrote the script for Easy Rider
Easy Rider
Easy Rider is a 1969 American road movie written by Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, and Terry Southern, produced by Fonda and directed by Hopper. It tells the story of two bikers who travel through the American Southwest and South with the aim of achieving freedom...
.
Archives
The Mabel Dodge Luhan Papers Collection—a collection of letters, manuscripts, photographs and personal papers documenting the life and works of Mabel Dodge Luhan—is housed at the Beinecke Library at Yale UniversityYale University
Yale University is a private, Ivy League university located in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States...
. A portion of these is available online.
Further reading
- Rudnick, Lois Palken (1987): Mabel Dodge Luhan: New Woman, New Worlds Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. ISBN 978-0826309952
- Rudnick, Lois Palken (1996). Utopian vistas : the Mabel Dodge Luhan House and the American counterculture Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.