From Taos and Beyond
The works of world traveler and artist Hans Paap are featured at an upcoming exhibition at Nedra Matteucci Galleries
Nancy Paap set out to rediscover her father, painter Hans Paap (1894-1966).“I saw him for the last time when I was 4½ years old, and it was not until
I was 20 that I heard his name spoken again.”the results of her research appear in the book Hans Paap: Portraits and Landscapes and an exhibition, Fromtaos and Beyond:the Art and Odyssey of Hans Paap at Nedra Matteucci Galleries in Santa Fe, New Mexico, through December 7.
She discovered her father was a respected painter in Taos and beyond, yet remained relatively unknown. “The lack of acclaim seems attributable to the fact that he never settled in one place long enough to become established and recognized.” Long before her parents married in Germany during World War II, her father lived in Argentina where he was married. His wife died during childbirth, leaving a son who was brought up by her family. Having discovered so much about her father’s life, she hopes someday to connect with the relatives of her half-brother.
Hans Paap was, indeed, peripatetic. He was born in Munich and had been an art director in the film industry in Germany, a professor of fine arts in Buenos Aires,argentina, and an illustrator in Los Angeles before arriving in Taos. In one period of his life he alternated between living in Hawaii and Taos. He was 30 years older than
Nancy’s mother, Ilse Nitschmann, who “described him as loving, generous and good hearted—except when he drank.” It was his drinking that precipitated Ilse leaving in the middle of the night with her three children and driving to Los Angeles. She later divorced Paap and remarried. Hans Paap’s name was never mentioned again.the new family was also peripatetic but Nancy eventually settled in Santa
Fe in 1968 when she was 20. She learned weaving at St. John’s College
and is now a renowned weaver.
She recognized the quality of her father’s paintings and began to learn of his association with the painters of the Taos Society of Artists, ranking him their equal and learning that the Taos artists often sought him out for advice.
He had arrived in Taos in 1929.
She also learned about his earlier life and career and the ephemeral appreciation for his art that occurred wherever he traveled. A 1923 review in a newspaper in Rio de Janeiro noted,“we slowly study the painter’s work and with satisfaction we find its incontestable value and its prominent unconventionality. The majority of the paintings offer a characteristic aspect, which stands out from the ordinary.they are not akin to the balancing act of some
artists; tendencies so in vogue in the great centers of art.the painter interprets the scene in a particular and highly personalized way, and his paintings provoke in our mind a strange impression of being, rarely felt before by the works of other painters who have visited us…in Hans Paap’s paintings there is a pronounced sensitivity that reveals the presence of an emotional soul.”
Paap’s paintings show a heightened sense of color—more somber in his paintings of the people of the Taos Pueblo and lighter in his scenes from the tropics. He was attracted to light and form and was influenced by cubism and fauvism throughout his career—as Bess Murphy notes in her book essay. His paintings Descanso de las Barcas and Hawaiian Landscape illustrate both.