Enriching their stories: Former Albuquerque Museum director James Moore continues pursuit of art history

James C. “Jim” Moore retired from his job as director of the Albuquerque Museum of Art and History in 2005.

But step into his handsome South Valley house, and you realize immediately that art history is as much a part of his life now as it was during the 26 years he was at the museum.

Enriching their stories: Former Albuquerque Museum director James Moore continues pursuit of art history

Paintings, prints, baskets, rugs, pottery and pieces of period furniture decorate the adobe home with the imposing vigas.

Books, some of them written by colleagues in the discipline of understanding the world through art, fill shelves near the residence’s entrance.

Moore, who turned 83 this month, has a story to go with just about every picture, pot and whiskey cabinet he passes as he leads a guest through the house.

On this day, however, the main topic is “Vecinos Y Amigos: Bert Geer Phillips and His Neighbors.”

That’s the title of an exhibit up through February at the Couse-Sharp Historic Site (CSHS) in Taos.

Moore is guest curator of the exhibit, which attempts to identify the people who served as artist Phillips’ models for the handful of his paintings in which the Hispanic community is depicted.

“One of the goals is to put a face on these people,” Moore said. “They are part of the system.”

Go West, young artist

Bert Geer Phillips, a native of New York state, is said to have been excited during his childhood years by accounts of the exploits of frontiersman Kit Carson and by James Fenimore Cooper’s “Leatherstocking Tales” of American Indian adventures.

He studied art in New York City and Paris, but in 1898 he set out on his own western adventure with fellow artist Ernest Blumenschein. They settled in Taos, a circumstance considered to be the seed that led to the flowering of Taos Society of Artists (TSA) in 1915. The six founding members, known as the Taos Six, were Phillips, Blumenschein, E. Irving Couse, Joseph Henry Sharp, Oscar E. Berninghaus and W. Herbert Dunton.

“Phillips is unusual among the Taos Society of Artists,” Moore said. “He lived (in Taos) the longest, he became the person most connected with (Taos) Pueblo and he had the least academic training.”

In the gallery guide he wrote for the “Vecinos Y Amigos” exhibit, Moore notes that during their first summer in Taos, Phillips and Blumenschein were visited by Manuel Mondragon and other residents of Taos Pueblo. Phillips and Mondragon became friends, and Mondragon was Phillip’s first model. That was fortunate.

“Unless you have independent means, artists need to sell paintings,” Moore said. “You have to know what’s popular. What the people wanted from the Taos artists were Indians.”

Moore said Phillips did not paint Hispanic subjects often because there was not a market for that work.

Those few he did paint are explored in the Taos show.

“Our exhibition seeks to expand our knowledge of the context of those few paintings of Bert’s in which people in the Hispanic community modeled, to identify them, and to enrich the artist’s stories with theirs,” said Davison Koenig, CSHS executive director.

Imaginative tableaux

Phillips did not get off to as good a start with the Hispanic community of Taos as he did with the people of Taos Pueblo. He displayed a bigoted attitude toward his Hispanic neighbors and actually touched off a riot when he refused to remove his hat during a procession celebrating the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe.

His feelings changed as he studied Spanish and became more acquainted with the Hispanic culture.

Phillips’ paintings with Hispanic themes in the CSHS exhibit include “Our Washerwoman’s Family” (1917); “His Favorite Santo” or “The Santero” (1917); and “Lady, Please Buy One Chicken”(Moore puts the date at 1937). Facsimiles of “Three Musicians of the Baile” (1918) and “Spanish Girl of Taos” (circa 1947) are also on display.

“We’ve got some of the best work he has done,” Moore said.

With the exception of two of the subjects in “Three Musicians of the Baile,” all the models for these works have been identified. One model, Tomás Barela, is in three of the paintings. He is the patriarch in “Our Washerwoman’s Family,” the santero in the painting of that title and the fiddler in “Three Musicians of the Baile.” Moore said Phillips’ laundress was Barela’s adopted daughter.

The boy depicted in “Lady, Please Buy One Chicken” has been identified as Elias Casias, who, according to Moore’s gallery guide, lived on a truck farm in Talpa, about five miles south of Taos.

Moore said two of Casias’ children, a son and a daughter, attended the exhibit’s opening reception on Oct. 11.

“Research into the models’ families and recognition of who they were allows us a new understanding of Bert’s working method and greater insight into how paintings were conceived to fit the existing market — and appeal to the stereotypes held by potential buyers,” Moore said.

With the exception of “Spanish Girl of Taos,” none of the paintings in the CSHS exhibit is a portrait.

“They are imaginative tableaux in which people served as actors in stories that Phillips felt would have success in broadening his reputation on the exhibition circuit,” Moore said.

“Without the people, there’s nothing to paint except landscapes.”

Sounds like fate

Moore was director at the Albuquerque Museum from 1979 to 2005. He said that since retiring, he has kept active corresponding with colleagues, doing research and publishing papers when he felt he had something to add to the field.

He was born in Topeka, Kansas, in 1941, but moved to Albuquerque in 1950. He graduated from Highland High School in 1959 and received a bachelor’s in art history from the University of New Mexico in 1966. He earned a master’s and a doctorate in art history from Indiana University.

Moore was coordinator of the art history program at the Toledo (Ohio) Museum of Art and an adjunct associate professor at the University of Toledo when he was hired for the Albuquerque Museum job.

Perhaps the most amazing part of Moore’s personal story is that he graduated from college and discovered a passion for art and its history.

“When I was in high school I worked at Piggly Wiggly, stocking shelves and sacking groceries, and at Hiland Bowl, setting pins,” Moore said. “My grades suffered. My counselor told me not to even bother applying for college.”

But he did anyway.

“I was in the Sputnik (satellite launched by the Soviet Union) generation,” Moore said. “All the guys were being channeled into the sciences. I enrolled at UNM and got signed up for all the engineering prerequisites.”

While exploring the campus, however, he found himself in the crafts annex building and met sculpture professor Keith Monroe. While they were talking, Monroe discovered that Moore had signed up for engineering courses even though he did not know what he wanted to do in life.

“He said, ‘Well, if you don’t know what you want to do, why don’t you get into the art department?’ “ Moore said. “He redid my schedule.”

The rest is history. Art history.