Description:

Oscar Edmund Berninghaus (American/New Mexico, 1874-1952), "American Indian on Horseback, Taos", oil on board, signed and inscribed "Taos" lower right, "Noonan-Kocian Co., St. Louis" sticker en verso, 10 in. x 12 in., framed with artist plaque. Provenance: Noonan-Kocian Art Company, St. Louis, MO; Descended in the Gieselman family, St. Louis, MO and New Orleans, LA. Note: Oscar E. Berninghaus began his career in his native St. Louis as a commercial lithographer. In 1899, as a reward for his hard work taking night classes at Washington University and the St. Louis School of Fine Arts, he was given a month's paid vacation and provided with free passage to the West by the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad. While visiting Taos, Berninghaus met the artist Bert Phillips, who became a lifelong friend, and was inspired to join the new Taos artist's colony. Berninghaus established a seasonal rhythm based on his family's needs, spending winters in St. Louis pursuing a successful career as a commercial artist and summers in Taos painting the Native Americans, their horses and the landscape. In 1915, he became a founding member of the Taos Society of Artists, one of the most important formal groups of American artists ever established. Along with Berninghaus, Bert Phillips, Ernest Blumenschein, Buck Dunton, Eager Irving Couse, and Joseph Henry Sharp all joined this group. Their aim was to market their artwork in traveling exhibitions, as there were no galleries in Taos to sell their work at the time. The traveling shows were a great success and galleries in many American cities drew significant crowds to the work of these artists, whose combination of technical, academic skill and a sympathetic approach to the exotic people and landscapes of New Mexico were of great interest to the urban populace of the day. The light and landscape of Taos captivated Berninghaus and even when wintering in St. Louis, the sights and scenes of the region were his primary subject matter. This ability to paint what he could not see in front of him, as he did when painting Taos natives from his studio, was both an intellectual exercise and a hard-earned talent developed on sketching trips. Berninghaus believed that art was an emotional exercise, not a representational one. “The painter must first see his picture as paint-as color-as form-and not as a landscape or a figure. He must see with his inner eye, then paint with feeling, not with seeing.” The two paintings offered here are fine examples of Berninghaus’ Taos paintings and show his short, impressionist brushwork. One depicts a Pueblo Indian on horseback contemplating the mountainous desert landscape. The other shows a group of horses outside an adobe on a Taos street.

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September 24, 2016 10:00 AM CDT
New Orleans, LA, US

Neal Auction Company

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