Esther Bruton’s Native American screens
 |
| Rabbit Hunt by Esther Bruton Courtesy of Annex Galleries, Santa Rosa, CA |
In December 1929, the Bruton sisters had their first group exhibit at the Galerie Beaux Arts in San Francisco. Esther contributed two screens, each with three panels, depicting Native American scenes inspired by her recent travels in New Mexico. These are large works, each measuring five feet tall and nearly five feet across when fully extended. Rabbit Hunt shows Native Americans on horseback, chasing a rabbit with their dogs, and Indian Corn Dance depicts Pueblo people participating in a ceremonial dance. Both screens, which use complementary background colors of silver and gold, are full of movement and detail. They are mural-like in their ability to fully capture the drama and emotion of an event in a well-developed scene. One art critic couldn’t say enough about Esther’s achievement with these works: “it is in two decorative screens that we see the artist in one of those revealing flashes of genius which comes now and again, at something near her full power… Both screens are so complete, so perfect, that it would be difficult to award a decision or superior merit between them.”1 The art critic from the San Francisco Examiner concurred, saying that the screens “are originally conceived and faultlessly made... they use the American Indian themes with subtle beauty.”2 These large works were perhaps a first step towards Esther’s eventual mastery of mural painting. Esther was praised as having a “broad mental range” and “an extraordinarily elastic mind.”3
Rabbit Dance was displayed in 2013 in the exhibit California’s Designing Women at the Museum of California Design. Indian Corn Dance is in the collection of the Wolfsonian, a museum in Miami Beach, but Rabbit Hunt is currently available for sale at Annex Galleries. You can see Indian Corn Dance in the background of the iconic Imogen Cunningham photo of the Bruton sisters.
1The Argonaut, 7 Dec. 1929.
2San Francisco Examiner, 1 Dec. 1929, p. 10E.
3The Argonaut, 7 Dec. 1929.
"Rabbit Hunt" has recently been on display with other Bruton work at the Pasadena Museum of History's "California Women Artists Emerge, 1860-1960". For more on the Brutons (and other Carmel denizens) in Taos in 1929 see my "Edward Weston and Mabel Dodge Luhan Remember D. H. Lawrence and Selected Carmel-Taos Connections" at:
ReplyDeletehttps://socalarchhistory.blogspot.com/2011/12/edward-weston-and-mabel-dodge-luhan.html.
Thanks for the information. Margaret Bruton’s “Taos Woman” was also recently on display at the Pasadena Museum of History: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.coloradoboulevard.net/lost-california-women-artists/amp/
ReplyDelete