New Mexico

Not on view
After studying art in Chicago, Paris, and Munich, Higgins settled in Taos, New Mexico, in 1914. The region’s strong light and alluring landscape served as powerful antidotes to his traditional training, and his watercolors from the 1930s often inventively blend realism and abstraction. In this luminous painting, Higgins portrays an expanse of landscape near Taos as a patchwork of interlocking angular shapes. Broad washes around three edges of the composition suggest an encroaching storm and inflect this otherwise sunny scene with an ominous mood. Like many artists living and working in New Mexico, Higgins collected Southwestern art.

Artwork Details

Object Information
  • Title: New Mexico
  • Artist: Victor Higgins (American, 1884–1949)
  • Medium: Watercolor on paper
  • Dimensions: 15 in. × 18 15/16 in. (38.1 × 48.1 cm)
  • Classification: Drawings
  • Credit Line: Gift of Edwin J. Gamble, 1952
  • Object Number: 52.205.2
  • Curatorial Department: Modern and Contemporary Art

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