CADY WELLS

(b. 1904 Southbridge, MA. d. 1954 Santa Fe, NM)

EDUCATION

1925 Harvard University

1932-33 Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University

SOLO EXHIBITIONS

1937 Stendahl Galleries, Los Angeles, CA

1938 Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, MA

1939 Wadsworth, Atheneum, Hartford, CT

William Rockhill Nelson Gallery, Kansas City, MO

Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO

1940 Philadelphia Art Alliance, Philadelphia, PA

1944 Durlacher Bros. Gallery, New York, NY

1947 Durlacher Bros. Gallery, New York, NY

University of New Mexico Art Gallery, Albuquerque, NM

1948 Santa Barbara Museum of Art, CA

Fine arts Gallery of San Diego, San Diego, CA

California Palace of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco, CA

Durlacher Bros. Gallery, New York, NY

Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, Colorado Springs, CO

1949 William Rockhill Nelson Gallery, Kansas City, MO

Margaret Brown Gallery, Boston, MA

1951 Durlacher Bros. Gallery, New York, NY

1953 Durlacher Bros. Gallery, New York, NY

Vassar College Art Gallery, Poughkeepsie, NY

EXHIBITIONS (PARTIAL LIST):

1933 Museum of New Mexico, Santa Fe, NM

Fine Arts Gallery of San Diego, CA

Denver Art Museum

1936 Fine Arts Gallery of San Diego, CA

1937 Museum of New Mexico, Santa Fe

1940 Springfield Art League, MA

1943 Museum of Modern Art, New York City

1944 Institute of Modern Art, Boston, MA

1946 Art Institute of Chicago

1947 Art Institute of Chicago

Museum of Art, Dallas, Texas

Philadelphia Art Alliance

1948 Taylor Museum of the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center

1949 Whitney Museum, New York City

Brooklyn Museum, New York

Denver Art Museum

1953 Whitney Museum, New York City

1967 Amon Carter Museum of Western Art

SELECTED PUBLIC COLLECTIONS:

Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, MA; The Art Institute of Chicago, IL; Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Worcester, MA; California Palace of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco; Fine Arts Gallery of San Diego; Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, MA;

Museum of New Mexico, Santa Fe; Newark Museum of Art, NJ; Phoenix Art Museum, AZ; Roswell Museum and Art Center, NM; Santa Barbara Museum of Art, CA; Taylor Museum of the Colorado Springs Fine Art Center, CO; University Art Museum, The University of New Mexico.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY:

Cady Wells, A Retrospective Exhibition”, Exhibition catalogue, 1967, University of New

Mexico Art Museum, Albuquerque.

Coke, Van Darren, Taos and Santa Fe, The Artist’s Environment, 1882-1942, 1963

The University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque.

Udall, Sharyn Rohlfsen, Modernist Painting in New Mexico”, 1913-1935, 1984

The University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque.

Cady Wells was born in 1904 in Southbridge, Massachusetts. He was afforded all the cultural and educational advantages that a child of a wealthy first-generation New England family could receive. As a young man he had years of classical training in music, literature and the arts. He also spent time in boarding school in Arizona, and this exposure ultimately formed his love of the desert landscape and the basis of his aesthetic and spiritual vision.

In 1931 Wells settled in New Mexico and soon thereafter sought out Andrew Dasburg as a teacher. Dasburg introduced him to the fluid medium of watercolor, which clearly suited Wells’ style and vision. From 1932-1933, Wells enrolled in courses at the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard. In 1935 he went to Japan specifically to study Japanese brush techniques. Throughout these years, however, Wells lived and worked primarily on his ranch in Jacona, NM. The Pojoaque Valley, including nearby Black Mesa, became the primary subjects of his paintings. Here, he not only depicted the mysterious landscape, but was able to express his emotional power through these naturalistic forms in his very unique artistic voice. Cady could sum up weeks of looking at the surrounding landscape in a few energetic strokes, or a melee of memories in a mass of amoeba-like, curved forms. As his friend Merle Armitage wrote, “Cady was the only painter who ever really got under the skin of the southwest…. Cady really understood its color, its gigantic scale, its infinite and fascinating detail, and its dramatic past…”

In 1933, Wells had his first show alongside Agnes Pelton and Raymond Jonson at the Museum of New Mexico (now the New Mexico Museum of Art) in Santa Fe, which marked the beginning of his career as an artist. Wells went on to achieve recognition as an artist both regionally and nationally. He was given twenty-one solo exhibitions, was included in seventy group shows and was often noted in media and books on the subject of twentieth-century American art. Georgia O’Keeffe wrote in a forward for an exhibition catalog in 1944, “I am glad you are showing Cady’s paintings at the same time that Stieglitz is showing mine because I think we are the two best painters working in our part of the country. I think we both love that country more than most people love any place.” (Durlacher Galleries, New York City, 1944).

There is a great variety in Cady Wells’ paintings. His exploratory nature never allowed him to overwork any particular style; rather, it constantly forced him to consider new subject matter and to tax the possibilities and resilience of his water-based medium. “The creative process in painting,” Wells wrote, “is based on my needs and wishes to share with others what I cannot share in any other form.” Dasburg’s influence is evident in Wells’ early works, where emphasis is on structure, pattern and calligraphic line. This is the dominant characteristic of Wells’ first major phase of work, dating from 1932-1935. In early paintings, broad, vigorous strokes meet and cross at diagonals on a bare background, but in slightly later works they are underlain with modulating washes, which begin to build form.

The artist translates New Mexico’s geography into undulating hills and clouds and transparent tendrils of foliage. A strong interest in texture begins to emerge in Wells’ work during 1939 and 1940. This is evidenced in several free, somewhat abstract landscapes.

Cady’s career was interrupted in 1941 when he entered the army. He did not paint again until his return to New Mexico from the European battleground in 1945. Wells’ last group of works, painted from the latter part of 1952 through 1954 show an increased control of form where colors are applied to simulate the luminosity of stained glass. This final phase of Wells’ development was interrupted before arriving at full fruition by the artist’s death in November 1954. He died of a heart attack at the age of forty-nine.

The sudden death of Cady Wells moved some in the art community to speculate that had Wells lived out his career, he might have ended up as the pre-eminent modernist painter of the region. His body of work uniquely conveyed the synthesis of European modernism and American subject and spirit. Wells held the quality of the region, its great distances and the magic of its physical and spiritual color, in the cadence of his delicate line and brush.