Picturing Passion: Artists Interpret the Penitente Brotherhood

Santa Fe, NM

Gene Kloss (1903-1996) and her husband Phillips Kloss (1902-1995) traveled between Berkeley, California, and Taos, New Mexico, for 20 years before settling in Taos in 1945. They lugged her etching press back and forth until it found its permanent home in Taos. Among the many aspects of the culture of northern New Mexico that fascinated them were the ceremonies of Hermanos de la Fraternidad Piadosa de Nuestro Padre Jesús Nazareno (Brothers of the Pious Fraternity of Our Father Jesus of Nazareth) or, the Penitente Brotherhood. They lived near one of the group’s meeting houses or moradas but were careful to observe their activities only from afar.

The Brotherhood has been dedicated to doing good works in the community since its founding in the 1790s. Their private rituals, however, have invited sensational stories about their content.

Kloss recalled having witnessed a nighttime processional. “We were awakened by this weird minor song accompanied by a little fife.

It was a windy night. The trees were blowing. There was a moon going in and out of dark clouds and a group came up the road with a torch. Their voices grew louder and then they went into the moradas.” In the same 1964 oral history interview with the Archives of American Art, the Smithsonian Institution, she recalled that on a Good Friday “we saw the fires near us, and they sent one of their number down by our little house with a ratchet—the devil chaser that went clackety-clack around—to admonish us to stay put.”

Her etchings, Penitente Good Friday, 1936, and Penitente Fires, 1939, are in the exhibition, Picturing Passion: Artists Interpret the Penitente Brotherhood, at the New Mexico Museum of Art through August 16.

Before the Klosses began visiting Taos, William Penhallow Henderson (1877-1943) painted Holy Week in New Mexico, 1919. He and his wife, Alice Corbin (1881-1949), had moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 1916. Henderson illustrated her book Brothers of

Light: The Penitentes of the Southwest in 1937. Holy Week depicts a Penitente procession in which one brother carries a carving of Jesus on the cross with his bloody wounds shown prominently. Following close behind are other members who are bleeding from scourging their backs to atone for their sins.

Christian Waguespack, the museum’s curator of 20th-century art, explains the exhibition “is not about the Penitente Brotherhood. It is about artists—most from outside the state— and how they have interpreted this uniquely New Mexican phenomenon in their work. As with any interpretation, the imagery these individuals produced was skewed by their own perceptions and backgrounds. Because of this, it is important to note that this is an exhibition about artists’ responses to and interpretations of their own experiences and ideas about the Penitente Brotherhood, not an exhibition about the Brotherhood itself. Picturing Passion explores how regional artists have been inspired by moradas, Penitente

processions, traditions and material culture as source material for their work, scant and superficial as it may have been.”

Ernest L. Blumenschein (1874-1960), Penitente Procession (Study for Sangre de Cristo Mountains), ca. 1925, ink, watercolor, Chinese white on paper mounted on paper, 9⅞ x 6⅞”. New Mexico Museum of Art. Gift of Helen Greene Blumenschein, 1985 (1985.507.4) © The E. L. Blumenschein estate. Photo by Blair Clark.

Russell Cheney (1881-1945), New Mexico (Penitente), 1929, oil on canvas, 39½ x 39½”. New Mexico Museum of Art. Gift of Russell Cheney, 1942 (1181.23P). Photo by Cameron Gay.

Gene Kloss (1903-1996), Penitente Good Friday, 1936, drypoint etching, 14¾ x 17”. On long term loan to the New Mexico Museum of Art from the Fine Arts Program, Public Buildings Service, U.S. General Services Administration (646.23G). Photo by Cameron Gay.

William Penhallow Henderson (1877-1943), Holy Week in New Mexico, 1919, oil on panel, 31½ x 39½”. New Mexico Museum of Art. Gift of Mrs. Edgar L. Rossin, 1952 (83.23P). Photo by Blair Clark.