Andrew Michael Dasburg was an early American modernist long associated with New Mexico. He studied in New York at the Art Students League with Kenyon Cox (1856-1919), Frank V. DuMond (1865-1951), and Birge Harrison (1854-1929). While in Paris from 1909 to 1910 he met Gertrude and Leo Stein, Henri Matisse (18691954), and Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) and was introduced to the work of Paul Cézanne (1839-1906). Upon his return to the United States he became a prominent member of the modernist Rock City group of the Woodstock art colony.

Dasburg participated in the Armory Show in 1913. As the result of his friendships with MORGAN RUSSELL and Konrad Cramer (1888-1965) and his exposure to avantgarde ideas about abstraction and color, he created his first abstract paintings in 1913. He showed these in 1913 and 1915 at the progressive exhibits at the MacDowell Club and in the important Forum Exhibition of Modern American Painters in 1916. Dasburg’s flirtation with pure abstraction was short lived, and by 1916 he had returned to more recognizable imagery. He remained, however, an important modernist, with his love of Cézanne and cubism determining the course of his art for the remainder of his life.

During the early teens Dasburg became an intimate of Mabel Dodge Luhan’s circle and at her invitation first visited Taos in the winter of 1918. From 1920 until the early 1930s, when he moved permanently to the Southwest, Dasburg spent every winter in New Mexico and the remainder of the year in Woodstock or New York City. Until his art began to receive official recognition Dasburg supported himself by selling Indian and Spanish artifacts and occasionally teaching. In 1937 he was stricken with Addison’s disease and stopped working until 1943, when he began to make works on paper. During the mid-1970s, in association with Tamarind Institute, he produced a series of lithographs.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Archiv. Am. Art, Andrew Dasburg Papers § Index 20th Cent. Artists 3 (May 1936): 289-90; 3 (August-September 1936): II; reprint, pp. 587-88, 596 § Van Deren Coke, Andrew Dasburg (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1979), with chronology, lists of paintings and drawings in public collections § Clinton Adams, "The Prints of Andrew Dasburg: A Complete Catalogue," Tamarind Papers 4 (Winter 1980-81): 18-25 § Sheldon Reich, Andrew Dasburg: His Lift and Art (Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, and London: Bucknell University Press and Associated University Presses, 1989), with chronology, bibliography.