Foursome

by Carolyn Burke

  Becoming a westerner heightened Beck’s sense of herself as a Salsbury. She kept in touch with Ethel Salsbury, Milton’s widow, who was raising their son, Nate Salsbury III, in New York. Starting in 1937, when Nate was twelve, he spent summers with “Auntie.” She was “a tremendous character,” he recalled. “She lived through the whole development of the Taos artists’ colony, the drinking, the fighting, the competitions. People looked up to her. I loved her dearly; Bill adored her.” Nate was, in a way, the child the couple would never have.

  At a time when eccentricity flourished, “Becky linked two Taos worlds, that of the artist and that of the roistering frontier,” the local bookseller thought. Toward the end of 1938, Beck retreated to her studio to prepare a solo show for the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, a multicultural space opened in 1936 to house indigenous art, though recently mounting shows of the French moderns. Displayed in the center’s blend of Native American and classical design, Beck’s paintings stood out; judging by the checklist for a show of Taos artists that same year, they probably included flower paintings and still lifes, such as her juxtaposition of a macaw’s feather and a camellia—perhaps suggested by O’Keeffe’s similar choice of subject matter.

  Beck and Georgia saw each other infrequently but sent notes and cards, especially at Christmastime; Beck included gifts of the sort that Georgia appreciated. Once the road from Taos was improved, they visited more often. It was important to Beck to think that she was maintaining the shared values of their life together. When Paul sent her a copy of his portfolio of Mexican photographs in 1940 (many taken when they had toured Mexico together), she reflected, “I am glad I have worked—in the sense of keeping faith with what you encouraged me to start so long ago.”

  In her own way, Beck was turning to a situated sense of art—cultural forms embodied in the experiences of daily life. By 1940, she was taking an active part in celebrations like the annual fiestas in the plaza, where Indians, Hispanics, shopkeepers, artists, and villa dwellers like Mabel all showed up in costume. There were parades, a string orchestra, dancers of all kinds, stagecoach rides, penny pitching, and the coronation of a queen. One year, Beck oversaw the local artists’ attempts to devise costumes for their float; she and several friends would commemorate the fiesta in a set of murals à clef. By the 1950s, she was a regular in the annual stagecoach ride through town.

  Soon after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the Jameses enrolled in the war effort. Bill volunteered with the U.S. Army Air Corps and was stationed in Maryland, where Beck joined him—too brief a visit, in her opinion, although they had time for a reunion with Paul, Virginia, and the Baasches. When Bill went to Albuquerque to teach chemical warfare, she began work as director of the Taos Red Cross Knitting Group. Like a sewing circle whose members gossip and socialize, the group was an alternative to her studio. On Bill’s return to Taos, she threw herself into his latest plans, his cattle ranch and the New Mexico Angus-Aberdeen Cattlemen’s Association.

  Their friends included the poet Spud Johnson, who came to Taos to work for Mabel while publishing his gadfly review, Laughing Horse, and running a bookstall near the plaza. Beck was closest to the painter Cady Wells, who was often her guest. Their circle filled out when they were joined by Tom and Dorothy Benrimo, an artist couple from New York, and Kay and Richard Dicus. Having studied at the Art Students League, Dicus adapted to life in Taos by turning his hacienda, La Finca, into a bohemian B and B. Once Dick began raising cattle, he and Bill found that they had much in common, including the care of ailing cows.

  From New York, Georgia sent occasional news of old friends, like Paul. Native Land, his 1942 movie on the trade unions’ struggles against the corporations, was beautifully photographed but “cruel,” in her opinion. Georgia had been uncomfortable with him when he came to lunch: “I was glad to see him but when he left I felt it had not been pleasant.” He was still dreaming of a world “where the ideals of the Soviet Republic prevail.” To some extent, Rebecca shared Georgia’s assessment. “I feel you get too preachy,” she told Paul in reply to his insistence on socialism as a bulwark against fascism. While Bill was a staunch Republican, he had offered his services to Truman following Roosevelt’s death. “So you see, we are not blindly partisan.”

  In the same letter, she wrote, “I…have philosophically made up my mind that for the moment I cannot paint much.” Still, over the next years, she produced a number of reverse paintings on glass, whose titles suggest her preoccupations. The garden at Casa Feliz inspired some intensely felt floral studies, White Roses at Twilight and Hollyhocks and Polar Ice Gladiolas; in both of these, the glass surface holds the viewer at a distance while the refinement of the facture draws one to the flowers themselves. Another series evokes the elements in poetic juxtapositions. Earth and Water pairs a dying tree with a huge white shell; Fire and Air sets a blackbird soaring in the night sky against the dark mountains.

  Two landscapes from this time, Walking Woman and Mourning Woman in Campo Santo, use their flattened perspectives to depict female figures traversing the landscape in quest of the solace figured in the distance. Commenting on this series, Beck compared her terrain to that of Constable, who said of his sites, “These scenes made me a painter and I am grateful.” Rebecca continued: “Paraphrasing this for myself I say, ‘A walking woman, a waiting woman, a watching woman, a mourning woman, a devout woman, adobe, cedar posts, old dry wood, the fields of alfalfa, the churches—I love these things. They have made me paint, and I am grateful.’ ” In this spirit, she turned her subjects’ limitations to her advantage.

  Beck also completed a sequence on the seasons—Summer in Taos, Autumn in Taos, Winter in Taos, and two versions of the intriguingly titled Despair in Taos. Winter in Taos, which foregrounds a branch of thorns and a bear’s tooth against a backdrop of mountains, may have been her reply to Mabel’s memoir of the same title. While Mabel’s book related a day in her life with Tony, Rebecca’s painting envisioned a world larger than the self. (She completed this enigmatic scene in 1948, more than a decade after the publication of Mabel’s Winter in Taos [1935].)

  While some Taos artists went on enjoying Mabel’s patronage, others kept their distance. For her own reasons, among them a desire to set the record straight, Rebecca overcame her hostility when Mabel began writing a book entitled Taos and Its Artists, which was to include her. To help Mabel with this project, she verified the details of her fellow artists’ careers, corresponded with the publisher, and advised him on her own entry, to be illustrated with one of Paul’s portraits of her. (When published, it was credited to Bill James.)

  Beck may have found some satisfaction in reading Mabel’s account of her career. It began, “The paintings on glass by Rebecca James…are perhaps the most exquisite productions of any Taos artist”; they touched one “through…their inconspicuous delicacy.” Mabel continued: “Trying to analyze this knockout influence of theirs, I have wondered whether the artist actually transfers an unconscious high vibration of her own directly to the surface before her.” As for the resemblance of her floral portraits to Georgia’s, they painted in distinctly different manners. Georgia’s flowers demanded one’s attention; Beck’s were modest. (When praising friends who were currently in favor, Mabel could not resist slighting those no longer on her list.)

  In Mabel’s view, Taos had already replaced New York as “the best-known and most significant art center of America.” The growing prestige of New Mexico’s artists, enhanced by the increasing number of exhibitions and books like Mabel’s, brought Beck’s work to the attention of those who understood the linkages between southwestern tradition and art steeped in its values. Even allowing for a certain amount of self-promotion, Mabel’s conclusion echoed the sentiments of its subjects: “Taos is going forward….The genius loci is still exerting its age-long influence.”

  Although equally entranced by the landscape, Beck did not admire Mabel’s rapturous self-expression, nor d
id their rapprochement extend to her taking part in Mabel’s salons. Beck socialized instead with people who took an interest in the town. At that time, she was writing a counternarrative to celebrate Taoseños who had contributed to its character “but not with brush or pen.” She began with eight biographies of “oldtimers,” including Gerson Gusdorf, a German immigrant who had learned English, Spanish, and Tiwa after coming to Taos in 1884; Gusdorf had founded a dry-goods store and the Don Fernando Hotel, where artists who lacked indoor plumbing rented rooms to luxuriate in its bathtubs, until it burned down in 1933. Beck’s evocation of the hotel reads like a lament for the years when she and Bill were deciding how to be together: “Paintings by Taos artists covered the walls, draped over the balconies were brilliant Mexican and Indian blankets….A mighty pine log blazed in the fireplace around which Taoseños gathered to thaw out.”

  Beck would add ten more biographies of Taos notables and publish them under the title Allow Me to Present 18 Ladies and Gentlemen and Taos, N.M. 1885–1939. She saw herself as an impresario, like her father. Featured among the “gentlemen” was her husband, described as a Denver aristocrat turned rancher, councilman, and bank director. Like Bill, these hardy western types—including the Gusdorfs, Doughbelly Price, and Mike Cunico—stayed in Taos “because they felt something different, enchanting, ‘foreign’ and free was going on as in no other place they had known before.”

  In 1948, Beck and three friends collaborated on a set of murals to celebrate the fiesta. Working with her in her garage, the Benrimos and Barbara Latham, a book illustrator, devised a lighthearted re-creation of the event. They painted dancers and canoodlers on the rooftops, a rollicking stagecoach in the plaza, and a variety of locals—Pueblo dwellers, cowpokes, ladies in suits, children, and artists—along with caricatures of notables like Mabel, Frieda Lawrence, the art collector Millicent Rogers, and, for good measure, themselves. Beck, in her black riding hat, shirt, and trousers is shown from behind, while Bill, looking like a western squire, surveys the scene.

  The murals paid tribute to their friendships but also to the plaza itself—the camera shop, the art gallery, the Emporium, and Ilfeld’s Hardware, the successor to Gusdorf’s dry-goods store. Max and Bertha Ilfeld, a well-educated couple from the Boston area, had settled in Taos at about the same time as Beck, and they became good friends. Max, a civil engineer, played poker with Bill; he and Bertha, an open-minded woman who had studied at Radcliffe, supported local culture. At Beck’s urging, they backed the Artists Association’s plan to ensure that new buildings echoed vernacular styles to keep Taos “authentic.”

  Bertha often took Florence, her daughter, to Casa Feliz. The house was “dark and cool with lots of art on the walls…informal, comfortable,” Florence recalled. Once the war broke out, Beck’s nephew Nate stopped coming, but in 1940 Florence met a young teenager who was staying with the Jameses, introduced to her as Vera, Bill’s adopted daughter. Beck confided to Paul, “I have to smile when I think of my bringing up a kid at my advanced years!” (She was nearly fifty.) Noting Beck’s strained relations with Vera, Florence wondered whether she was Bill’s daughter from his first marriage. After Vera went to boarding school, she became “wild,” and at eighteen, she died in a car crash. “There was always some mystery about her,” Florence mused. We know only that Vera’s ashes were interred in the Jameses’ plot in Denver, at a slight distance from the rest of the family.

  Beck said little to friends about her own family, except to regale them with her father’s exploits. The Ilfelds, who were Jewish, had no idea that she had been brought up in her mother’s faith. Although there were several Jewish families in town, Florence observed, “one didn’t talk about being Jewish. We celebrated Christmas and Easter, not the High Holy Days. The Gusdorf sisters held seders in their restaurant on the plaza, but I had no idea that this was part of Jewish tradition.” Beck never mentioned a religious affiliation. Like many Anglos who settled in the Southwest, she came under the spell of its rich blend of Indian spirituality and Hispanic religious fervor, the sources that infused the region’s hybrid culture and, increasingly, her art.

  Beck would describe her discovery of the colcha stitch, a form of embroidery practiced by Hispanic women, as an epiphany. For some time, she had been taking Spanish lessons from her neighbor Jesusita Perrault—a former state senator and labor organizer who still danced at the fiestas. After one lesson, Jesusita showed Beck her embroidery of floral patterns. Beck later described her reaction:

  This, I thought with excitement, this is for me….I was on my way. On my way to where? To what? As in any high adventure, the end, or the where, was shrouded….The embroideries give the answer. The “what” that has gone into them is respect for tradition, the awareness and love of things and places about me that I could not see any other where. The embroideries express the ambiente in which I live.

  Her reflections likened stitchery to meditation: “It has taken time to find out where I was going because I was not going. I was staying in the room where I now sit and letting the things I have loved…say with a clear voice, ‘Please make me.’ ”

  Beck’s discovery of this type of needlework was all the more surprising because the colcha stitch had nearly died out. After decades of use in domestic embroideries and ecclesiastical textiles, colcha survived only in the practice of Jesusita Perrault and a few others in the northern part of the state. During this time, when Beck was learning this exacting technique (colcha uses long, overlapping stitches anchored from the back by cross-stitches), she was also learning to tame her impatience. Colcha embroidery demands great concentration, yet it became, for Beck, “the most free-wheeling stitch I know.”

  By the 1950s, Beck was holding colcha sessions at Casa Feliz, where she taught Bertha Ilfeld the art. These “colcha clubs” satisfied her desire for an art form imbued with a sense of place. As for the debate about whether such crafts counted as art in the same way that painting did, this no longer mattered: “Both the painter and the hand-stitcher start with equally simple, ordinary tools—and for both the responsibility is the same—to create something that lives.” It pleased her that colcha could be humorous, as in the coat of arms she stitched for Bill depicting the animals on his ranch—a bull, a stallion, and a pig set in a trefoil (the threefold shape familiar from Christian symbolism).

  Increasingly, Beck adapted Spanish Colonial imagery to her own ends. These motifs became her visual vocabulary, a blend of geometric forms and flowers, hallowed landscapes, and religious icons like the Sacred Heart, the Lamb of God, and the Holy Child of Atoche—images that were familiar to the people she lived among. Her 1950 Agnus Dei centers its lamb on an oval field below a golden crown and above a sacred heart, with angels in the corners. Similarly, The Queen of Heaven surrounds the figure robed in the Virgin’s traditional blue with angels, lambs, wreaths, and garlands (the Queen is placed against a cross, part of which is replaced by her own person).

  In Beck’s effort to renew the practice of colcha, she had the help of two women who shared her love of this distinctive art: Nellie Dunton, whose 1935 Spanish Colonial Ornament was published under the auspices of the Federal Art Project, and Elizabeth Boyd (known as “E.”), whose studies of the region’s art became Beck’s source books. E. Boyd would, in turn, pay her respects to Rebecca: “Mrs. James demonstrates the range of imaginative composition, color and texture which can be achieved with stitches. It may be noted that the intangibles of patience, skill and faultless taste are her ingredients for picture-making.”

  While immersed in efforts to revive this tradition, Beck also completed some of her most accomplished reverse paintings on glass. Georgia wrote to propose that they travel together to New York. She hoped to show Beck’s oils in the last exhibition at the Place. Beck agreed but warned that she might cancel. “New York seems forbidding after 15 years away—and I with hay sticking out of my ears!” After declining Georgia’s invitation at the last minute, she t
old Paul, “The end of an era has come. In spite of all the heartache I owe Stieglitz and you much and my only way to prove it is to keep on working.”

  In 1951, Beck and Bill drove to California to present her oils at welcoming venues. That year, she had a show at San Francisco’s Palace of the Legion of Honor; it traveled to the Santa Barbara Museum, where Donald Bear was then the director. Her paintings were admired in both venues, and some sold. The San Francisco Chronicle remarked on the “hushed” settings beneath their glossy surfaces—“bleak mountains, snowy foregrounds, and…adobe churches dwarfing a few shrouded figures” portrayed naïvely yet “with infinite pathos, sympathy and love.” El Crepusculo, a Taos paper, declared, “The Painter on Glass Comes into Her Own.”

  By the 1950s, Beck’s mastery of both reverse oil painting and colcha had given her the confidence to practice these arts unapologetically. Having overcome her sense of internal division, she had come to see herself as Bill and their friends saw her. Paradoxically, in this flamboyant village she found the serenity she had previously sought in vain, the spiritual poise behind her turn to depictions of women praying, burial grounds (camposantos), and homemade miniatures inspired by the figures in her collection of folk art. In these years, she honed her gift “for seeing and leaving alone.”

  To Frieda Lawrence, who spent a day with “Rebequita” as she prepared for an exhibition in Santa Fe in the summer of 1952, her embroideries were a mirror of herself. After explaining how she devised motifs inspired by traditional themes, Beck demonstrated the meticulous work required to prepare the threads used for her creations. A few days later, she told Frieda that their conversation had made her think about her materials: “a stiff little piece of steel and a thin thread. Certainly all small tools, but what an enormous expression they can make if the eye is true, the hands diligent, the mind disciplined, the spirit aware.”