Artist’s Taos

A Richer Dust, Amy Boaz, 2008

Taos Pueblo 1936 taospueblo1936.jpg

A novel of the international artist’s colony which arose in Taos New Mexico in the 1920s. The author acknowledges drawing freely from the lives and works of Leon Trotsky, G.I. Gurdjieff (Armenian mystic and spiritual teacher), Vera Brittain (British writer and pacifist). William Bradford (19th Century Romantic landscape painter), D.H. and Frieda Lawrence, Dorothy Brett (Aristocratic Brit, Abstract Painter, a member of the Bloomsbury group, and Taos colony member), and Mabel Dodge Luhan (wealthy founding matron of the Taos colony).

Mabel Dodge Luhan mabel_dodge_luhan.jpg mabel.jpg

The main character Doll, is the aristocratic daughter of a Viscount regular at the courts of Victoria and Edward, who disappoints her family to become a spinster painter in London. She is hard of hearing and carries an ear trumpet. Her trust fund assures she will never have to worry about money. She meets famous writer, philosopher Abe and his German wife Vera after WWI and Abe convinces Doll to move with them to the newly established artist’s community in Taos New Mexico. Doll pays for the move and supports the couple in Taos.

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Jane is the wealthy patron who lives with her Indian husband in a a two story great house in Taos. It is she who publicizes Taos with its native American artisans as a new haven for intellectuals and artists. Jane promotes exchange between the artists and native artisans. Abe thinks the dry dessert air of New Mexico will help cure his (probable) TB. He doesn’t reckon with the primitive drafty cabins they will inhabit. Vera stirs things up with the Indians by teaching feminist ideas to the women of the area and the women all start a sex strike for societal change.

The novel moves between the late Victorian and WWI war and revolutionary years in England where intellectuals are giving up on the dying old world of Europe, 1924 in London when the move to Taos originates, to Taos in 1924 and shortly thereafter, and then jumps forward to 1963 when we see Doll, the only remaining artist from the original group still living in Taos, falling in love for the first time (with a much younger childlike man).

D.H. Lawrence Tomb tomb.jpg