The company she kept
Mabel Dodge Luhan and Company: American Moderns and the West at the Harwood Museum of Art in Taos
Gertrude and Leo Stein
“The days are wonderful and the nights are wonderful,” begins Gertrude Stein’s 1911 book Portrait of Mabel Dodge at the Villa Curonia, the only nonvisual work available at the groundbreaking 1913 Armory Show in New York, after Stein distributed 300 copies at the event. Luhan had met Gertrude and Leo Stein for the first time two years before, during one of their Saturday night “at homes” at 27 rue de Fleurus, and Luhan’s salons were often compared to those of the Steins’ in Paris, as many guests flowed back and forth between the two. Gertrude Stein and Luhan formed a mutual admiration society: As a response to Stein’s Portrait of Mabel Dodge, Luhan published the first major article on Stein’s writing, “Speculations, or PostImpressionism in Prose,” in 1913, declaring, “Gertrude Stein is doing with words what Picasso is doing with paint.” Luhan diverged from Stein’s salonniére style, making her orchestrated gatherings a lifelong pursuit in Florence, New York, and Taos (Stein stopped her regular salons before World War I began), and incorporating a more eclectic range of guests than Stein’s modern-art circles. — Molly Boyle
Rebecca Salsbury Strand James
Rebecca Salsbury Strand James might have had an amorous relationship with Georgia O’Keeffe, or the two might have just been good friends, but it’s because of her comely pal “Beck” that O’Keeffe first came to New Mexico to stay with Mabel Dodge Luhan. Beck was married to Paul Strand, protégé of Alfred Stieglitz, when they first visited Luhan in 1926. She and O’Keeffe came to Taos in 1929 to get away from their men for the summer and paint in peace, though Beck was busier helping Luhan when she was sick than painting in those years. She later found her true artistic medium in developing and perfecting a technique that heightened the luminosity of oil paint as seen through glass. Beck divorced Strand in Mexico in 1933, and then came back to Taos, married William James, and stayed for the rest of her life. — Jennifer Levin
Miguel Covarrubias
Mexican artist and author Miguel Covarrubias and his soon-to-be wife, dancer and choreographer Rosa Rolando, visited Mabel Dodge Luhan in Taos in 1929. A humorous drawing made during his visit shows a tourist at Taos Pueblo, wearing a squash-blossom necklace and a concha belt, with a Navajo blanket furled beneath her arm, proving that some regional fashion trends have a long shelf life. In Taos, Covarrubias met Georgia O’Keeffe, making her the subject of one of his caricatures. He depicted her as “Our Lady of the Lily,” her head balanced at the top of the elongated stalk of her neck, mirroring the long-stemmed flower she held in her hand, her demeanor seemingly dour. The drawing appeared that year in The New Yorker. In June of 1929, photographer Alfred Stieglitz wrote to O’Keeffe from his home in Lake George: “The New
Yorker has sent me back the three small prints of you I let them have. Covarrubias has made a drawing of you. The article is to appear July 6. — I fear to see it.” — Michael Abatemarco