Artists and Authors associated with Lake Chapala, Mexico
Tony Burton
Tony Burton's books include “Lake Chapala: A Postcard History” (2022), “Foreign Footprints in Ajijic” (2022), “If Walls Could Talk: Chapala’s historic buildings and their former occupants” (2020), (available in translation as “Si Las Paredes Hablaran"), "Mexican Kaleidoscope” (2016), and “Lake Chapala Through the Ages” (2008).
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Alice Jean Small (1918-2009) lived for at least four years at Lake Chapala, from 1962 to 1966. During her lifetime, she is reputed to have sold more than 6000 works, making her a likely candidate for the title of “most prolific painter ever to have lived at Lake Chapala”.
Small was born in Sandpoint, Idaho, on 11 December 1918. Her passing, on 8 November 2009 in Monterey, California, was commemorated by an art exhibition and celebration of her life.
Small began painting from an early age and attended the Derby School of Art before completing a Master of Fine Arts degree at the University of Washington. She also studied at Cranbrook Academy of Arts (Michigan), Chicago School of Design, University of California at Berkeley, the University of Havana and the University of Tokyo.
In the 1950s, Small spent two years serving with the U.S. Army as Regional Arts and Crafts Director in the Far Eastern Theater. She was a renowned art teacher, and taught painting and design in several U.S. public schools, the University of Washington, West Virginia University and the University of Tampa.
It is unclear precisely what drew Small to relocate in 1962 to Lake Chapala, where she took a house mid-way between Ajijic and Jocotepec: Casa Alicia, Piedra Barrenada. Her stay in Mexico was marred by a personal tragedy. Her young son Edward died at the age of six in 1966 in a hospital in Guadalajara following a brief illness. (Another son, Laird, outlived her).
Known not only for paintings, but also for prints and illustrations, Small exhibited her work in numerous galleries around the world from New York (the Riverside Gallery) to Japan and Mexico (Monterrey, Saltillo, Hermosillo). She held more than 500 one-woman shows and won first prize awards for oils (Florida Art Fair); watercolors and lithographs (Wisonsin Art Fair). An inveterate traveler, and honorary president of the National Association of Women Painters, Small was known as the “traveler with a sketch book.”
Her work in Mexico was sponsored by the U.S. Information Service (USIS). Her exhibitions in Mexico were well received. For example, the Mexico City Times said that, “Diplomatic with an easel, this famed artist paints to span nations with the Bridge of Beauty.” One of her exhibitions in Mexico, in 1963, comprised fifty-five paintings illustrating an imaginary trip around the world; it was first shown at the University of Sonora in Hermosillo.
The following year, fifty of her “Around the World” paintings were on display for both HRH Prince Phillip, the Duke of Edinburgh, and former US president Dwight D. Eisenhower, when they visited Guadalajara within a few days of each other. It is presumed that this display was the exhibit which opened at the Casa de la Cultura in Guadalajara on 29 October 1964, but it is probable that some of Small’s paintings were also on display at the Hotel Montecarlo in Chapala.
[HRH Prince Phillip, the Duke of Edinburgh, visited the Hotel Montecarlo with his entourage for lunch on 28 October 1964, while three days later, President Adolfo López Mateos hosted a banquet there in honor of the members of the People to People executive. The People to People (“De Pueblo a Pueblo”) initiative was begun by Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1956 to strengthen non-governmental connections. Eisenhower himself was at the meetings in Guadalajara but did not attend the Montecarlo function, where his son John D. Eisenhower, stood in for him. Walt Disney was another of the many noteworthy dignitaries at this event.]
Small held another exhibit in Guadalajara in June 1965, at the Instituto Mexicano-Norteamericano de Jalisco, at the opening of which she referred to Mexico as “her second home”.
Possibly partly as a result of her time in Mexico, Small developed a passionate interest in the circus and would spend the next forty years bringing circus characters and scenes to life on her canvasses. Fifty of her clown paintings are on permanent display at the Adaptive Physical Education building, Monterey Peninsula College, California. Her portfolio of clown and circus stories, paintings and poems are in the Special Collections in various libraries of the University of California, as well as at Tufts University and Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey Clown College in Venice, Florida.
She was reportedly a very friendly woman, full of kindness and good humor, and fond of donning colorful clothes and hats.
Small published at least three books showcasing her work: Clowns (1988), Painted poems (1995) and Pierre and his present (1997).
Main Sources:
Monterey Peninsula Herald, California, 14 March 1966
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Dated 1981, these Georg Rauch designs for a children’s playground demonstrate the versatility of this amazing artist.
Georg Rauch: Playground designs, 1981. Click image to enlarge.
Georg’s widow, Phyllis Rauch, has kindly shared the following recollections related to Georg’s interest in playgrounds, and to these designs in particular:
“Georg designed a number of large playground pieces for a famous park in Vienna. When he arrived in the United States he was still fascinated by the topic and we visited playgrounds wherever we went – especially in New York.
When we moved to Mexico, Georg designed a very large and amazing playground for the town of El Molino, near Jocotepec. At the time there wasn’t even a church there, only a bell. The completed playground, utilizing all things that are freely available and could be replaced, was inaugurated by the then Governor of Jalisco’s first lady.
Sadly the only thing we didn’t take into consideration was upkeep, a fund for replacing tires, ropes etc., and over the years it basically disappeared. But I’m sure there are people in their late 40s and 50s who remember it well and enjoyed playing there.
Georg’s first and only stipulation was that a bathroom first be built and installed.
Sometimes when returning from Guadalajara, I think I can see it still there, among the many homes that have since been built.”
When Georg Rauch later learned that the Lakeside School for the Deaf (now the School for Special Children) in Jocotepec planned to build new play equipment, he gave the designs to Gwen Chan, the school’s director from 1985 to 1994. Some of Rauch’s designs were subsequently incorporated into the deaf school’s play equipment.
While most sources list José Rafael Rubio as having been born in 1880 and dying in 1916, the available documentary evidence suggests that he was actually born on 4 September 1879 in Zamora, Michoacán, and died in San Antonio, Texas, on 7 January 1917.
Rubio worked for a time as a journalist in Guadalajara and subsequently won a national (El Imparcial) writing competition with a short story entitled, “El hombre doble” (“The Double Man”). He also wrote, sometimes using the pen name of Pepe Pérez Pereda, for Arte y Letras. Revista Mensual Ilustrada and Churubusco, In addition, he was editor in 1898 of a publication in Zamora, El Granuja: Seminario festivo ilustrado.
Rubio married Maria Luisa Dolores Alatorre Diaz (b. 1882). The couple’s daughter, Gloria Rubio Alatorre, was born in Veracruz, and became, as Gloria Guinness (1912–1980), a contributing editor to Harper’s Bazaar (1963-1971) as well as a prominent socialite and fashion icon of the twentieth century.
During the Mexican Revolution, Rubio fought against Victoriano Huerta, before leaving for the USA with his family.
Rubio’s published short stories include “Not Guilty”, set at Lake Chapala. Written originally in Spanish, an English translation was published in the 16 December 1911 issue of Town Talk (the Pacific Weekly), a San Francisco-based publication.
“Not Guilty” is the story of a man accused of murder who claims in a prison-cell conversation with his lawyer that he was merely a witness to the crime. In the first part of the story, the man relates how he first met the love of his life:
“I used to live near Chapala,” he [the prisoner] continued, “on a farm not far from Jamay.You have been there, have you not? You know what a beautiful country it is?Well, imagine a spacious garden of orange trees, and, nestling among them, a small house, as white as an orange blossom. One cannot live in such a placeand believe that there is any wickedness in the world. Beginning in a spring near my house, a little stream of water trickles down the hillside, — water asclear and pure as that which falls from heaven to water my little paradise. Oneither side of this stream are my flower beds. I wish you could see them! Here are clustered myriads of jasmines; there, a gay little arm of violets; alittle further down, on the right hand side, a whole regiment of red and white roses; to the left, a huge fragrant battalion of lilies of the valley. Furtherdown are other flowers, of all imaginable varieties, with the limpid littlestreamlet flowing between. How beautiful they are, and what perfumes come from them!
“My little farm supplied me with all I wished to eat. I sold most of myoranges to some gringos who lived near by; with the money I earned in thissmall business, I had sufficient to live happy and contented as a king. Do not think that I always wore rags like these. My suits rivaled the finestvestidos de charro for miles around; the buttons were silver pesos. Mysombreros were trimmed with gold braid, and cost me thirty pesos each. I owned two horses sixteen hands high, and the revolver at my side was of the best American make. But I must get on with my story.
“Have you ever attended any of the fiestas at La Barca? No? Well, they arefestivals where masses and Te Deums are sung. Bull-fights and cock-fights form part of the program, and there are all sorts of gambling games, dancing,singing, wild carousing. There is music in every inn and park. The shouting ofthe vendedores and the noise of the fireworks, together with the uproar of the hilarious crowds, are almost enough to drive a sane man mad.
“Two years ago, as was my custom, I donned my finest attire, thrust in my belt a brace of forty-fours, and started, in my boat, The Dreamer, for La Barca.Besides the native rowers, I had no company except my guitar and a bottle of wine.
“It would have done your heart good to see me at that merry-making!Cock-fighters and gamblers besieged me from all sides; vendors of everythingimaginable scrambled to get near me and when I entered a restaurant or inn,man and maid servants rushed to be the first to serve me. Even the — indeed, I’m not exaggerating, — even the ladies, dressed in silks of all the colors of the rainbow, made eyes and waved their fans at me.
“I bet two hundred on a cock, and lost in five minutes. The next match was a fight if there ever was one; in four minutes I had won three hundred! Itreated a score of people to bottles of beer, and the uproar that ensued was as exciting as an attack on the gringos! I gave the man that served me a bright new peso for a tip. Suddenly I heard a voice. I turned and saw a girlsinging. She was as beautiful as a dream and her great dark eyes were looking straight at me.
But if thou drain to its bitter lees. In frantic frenzy, pleasure’s cup, —
“Those were the words that began her song. I threw my glass to the floor so violently that it crashed into a hundred pieces, and cried ‘Ole‘! Then Isnatched off my hat. placed twenty pesos in it, and tossed it to her.
“Most of the men who had followed me to the bar left as soon as they had taken their beer, for the place was full of professional gamblers, loafers and,judging by their wild looks, criminals of the worst kind. I noticed that thesinger to whom I had thrown my hat, had seated herself at the father end of the bar, where empty bottles and liquor kegs were piled in confusion. She caught my eye, and beckoned me to her side.
“‘If you are going to drink, why not drink here?’ she said, pointing to a seatnear her. I sat down beside her, and ordered more beer.
“Dios mio! How beautiful she was! I don’t think she could have been a day over seventeen years old, but she knew all the arts of making a man slave to herwill; before ten minutes had passed, I worshiped her! To look at her was tolove her. She was a brunette, and the delicate curves of her red lips reminded me of my finest, most crimson roses. Her hair, blacker than a raven’s wing, was held in place by a very thin black veil. Her eyes were the big, wondering,dreamy eyes of innocent childhood, half serious and half smiling, and the longblack eyelashes shaded and deepened them. Her mouth would tempt a saint, — and her waist! — and her arms! I had never seen such a woman even in my wildestdreams!
“I can’t say exactly how many drinks we had that night, but toward morning we decided to be married. When we went out into the street, arm and arm, themusic had ceased, and the display of fireworks was over. As she walked by my side, I felt that heaven itself had nothing further to offer me. I was madly, passionately in love with her!”
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Innovative Mexican artist Ernesto Butterlin, aka Linares, sometimes Ernesto Linares, or more simply “Lin,” had close ties with Ajijic and was active in the 1940s and 1950s. Ernesto’s parents and his two older brothers were all born in Germany and moved to Mexico in 1907, sailing first class aboard the “Fürst Bismarck” of the Hamburg-America line, from Hamburg to Veracruz. The family settled in Guadalajara, but also owned a huerta (orchard) near Ajijic. Ernesto was born in Guadalajara on 4 September 1917.
The 1930 Mexican census, conducted on 15 May of that year lists the members of the household as:
Juan Butterlin 59, engineer, born in Germany
Amalia de Butterlin 49, born in Germany, speaks German, English, French
Ernesto Butterlin 12
Ma de Los Angeles Delgadillo 40, maid
Ma Guillermina Flores 16
Ma del Refugio Flores 12
By the early 1940s, Ernesto, then in his twenties and using the name Linares for his art, was living and painting year-round in Ajijic. From about 1943 to 1945, he shared his village home with American artists Charmin Schlossman Lanier and Sylvia Fein, whose husbands were on active military service overseas. American writer Neill James first moved to Ajijic in September 1943 and in an early article about the village described Linares as a “young Mexican abstract painter who is currently showing his works in a traveling exhibition in the USA.” That brief description shows that Ernesto had already achieved some success as an artist, even at this early age.
Linares (Ernesto Butterlin): Untitled; 1949. Reproduced by permission of the owner.
A more detailed description of Ernesto and his work comes from the notebooks kept by Victor Serge, a Russian living in exile in Mexico, who visited Ajijic in December 1944 and stayed over the New Year:
“Ernesto Butterlin reminds me of Pilnyak. Often with lacquer for car bodies, he earnestly makes surrealist or abstract pictures in jumbled lines and lively tones, sometimes decorative. He wants to make money in New York, be someone, and this method worries him, and he genuinely loves art, and he’s full of inhibitions and poses. Big, blond, pince-nez, the untroubled face of a good German.”
Ernesto Butterlin: Untitled; date unknown
In about 1945, Ernesto entertained visiting American artist George Buehr (1905-1983), a professor at the Art Institute of Chicago, as his house guest.
In January 1947, Ernesto exhibited in a group show at Villa Montecarlo in Chapala, alongside fellow artists Charmin Schlossman, Muriel Lytton-Bernard and Dick Kitchin. Charlotte Wax also appears to have had paintings in that show.
Shortly afterwards, in about 1947, American artist, anthropologist and author Tobias Schneebaum arrived on the scene. Schneebaum lived and painted in Mexico, including several spells in Ajijic, from 1947 to 1950. In Ajijic, he quickly became friends with Ernesto. In Wild Man, Schneebaum writes, “A young blond painter, born in Guadalajara of German parents, also lived in Ajijic. He was twenty-seven, blue-eyed, four inches over six feet, and very handsome, and was subject to the attentions of both the men and the women who later passed through town…”
“His family owned property in Ajijic, fields of corn and beans through which he moved like a country squire. Ajijic was small, with a population of three thousand, barely a third of whom had homes in the village itself, the other two-thirds living on their farms. He knew everyone by name and was adored and respected by old and young alike. He’d changed his Germanic name to Linares to identify more closely with the country of his birth, and liked to be called Lynn. He painted during the day with bright reds and yellows in wide bands of color, freely brushed and ripped on, a technique he claimed preceded Jackson Pollock, who he insisted had seen his work. He’d had one-man shows in New York and Mexico City.” (Wild Man, 12).
Elsewhere, Schneebaum describes how Ernesto “had inherited a considerable amount of farmland on the outskirts of Ajijic, but he spent most of his time painting in a drip technique that might have preceded the work of Jackson Pollock.” (Secret Places, 7)
Schneebaum, Ernesto Butterlin and a third artist Nicolas Muzenic were all employed by Irma Jonas to teach students attending her summer painting schools in Ajijic (held 1947-1949 inclusive). According to Schneebaum, an ill-fated love triangle developed between the three artists at this time, complicated by the arrival of “haughty and radiantly beautiful” Zoe, the “fourth member of our group”, who had previously been living with Henry Miller in Big Sur, when she heard about Lin and decided to visit Ajijic:
“After my return to Ajijic from Mexico City, other foreigners came to stay, notably Nikolas (sic) Muzenic, with whom I fell in love. He had been a student of Josef Albers at Black Mountain College… Nikolas, alas, fell in love with Lynn, not with me. It was a disastrous affair that started out as if it would last forever. Nikolas remained in Ajijic for about two years…” (Secret Places, 7)].
In Wild Man, Schneebaum recalls that, “Lynn’s casual ways bewitched and irritated Nicolas, just as Nicolas’s arrogant, snobbish manner attracted and mortified Lynn. Nicolas moved into Lynn’s house and began a frenzied, volcanic affair that lasted two years.” (Wild Man, 13) Schneebaum adds that Nicolas eventually bought the property and forced Butterlin to move out, complete with his large collection of pre-Columbian art.
“Lin” (Ernesto Butterlin) in his Ajijic studio, ca 1962
In about 1948, Ernesto Butterlin, in association with one or more of his brothers, opened an art gallery in Ajijic. This is the gallery pictured in the Life Magazine article (23 December 1957) about Ajijic. The “Margo de Butterlin” or “Margaret North de Butterlin” described in that article was Otto’s lover (during his marriage to Peggy); Margo married Ernesto (who was gay) in order to acquire the Butterlin surname; she appears to have provided the financial means to help establish the gallery. In Life Magazine, she is described as “both rich and fashionable”, as well as, “US-born but Mexican by her last marriage”. The article goes on to say that “Her present husband runs the Galeria where the painters display their works and also buy drinks.”
Ernesto Butterlin: Untitled, ca 1950. Reproduced by kind permission of Katie Goodridge Ingram
Disappointingly little is known of what became of most of Ernesto Butterlin’s pioneering artworks, and whether any are held in public collections, though both Ernesto and his older brother Otto were among the 28 artists given a joint exhibition in June 1954, in Mexico City, at the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes’ Salón de la Plástica Mexicana. Other artists whose work was featured on that occasion include Roberto F. Balbuena,Michael Baxte,Leonora Carrinqton,Enrique Climent, José Feher, Elvira Gascón, Gunther Gerzso and Carlos Mérida.
In 1962, ‘Linares’ exhibited at the 1st Annual Exhibition of Paintings and Sculptures on Ajijic Beach, organized by Laura Bateman’s Rincón del Arte gallery. Other artists from Ajijic in this juried show with prizes, held in front of Posada Ajijic, included Antonio Cárdenas, Mary Cardwell, Juan Gutiérrez, Dick Keltner, Carlos López Ruíz, Betty Mans, Gail Michels, John Minor, Eugenio Olmedo, Florentino Padilla, Tink Strother, Digur Weber, Doug Weber, Rhoda Williamson, Sid Williamson, Javier Zaragoza and Paul Zars. Also exhibiting were José Ramos and Padre Santiago Ramírez (both from Jocotepec) and Javier Martínez (from Chapala), as well as Alfredo Santos and Gustavo Sendis from Guadalajara.
Ernesto Butterlin died in 1964. Schneebaum’s claim that Lin “…committed suicide. In order to fit his six-foot, four-inch body into the coffin, it was necessary to cut off his feet at the ankles.” (Secret Places, 7) is sensationalist and less than reliable. Ernesto Butterlin’s funeral and wake were held at the home in Ajijic of John Lee, an American writer who was a friend of the artist in the early 1960s. Lee has written that Ernesto, who “stayed single and was a friend of Eric, the Hildreths, the Hoppers, and me”, “died of cancer”, a version of events substantiated by others who were around at the time, including the art gallery owner Katie Goodridge Ingram.
Partial list of sources:
Colony Reporter (Guadalajara), 16 July 1964.
El Informador: 24 Jan 1947, 6; 2 June 1962, 11.
Tobias Schneebaum, Wild Man, Viking Press, 1979
Tobias Schneebaum, Secret Places: My life in New York and New Guinea, University of Wisconsin, 2000
This article was updated on 1 May 2016 to include mention of Ernesto Butterlin’s wife. As always, we would love to receive any comments, corrections or additional information.
Ernest Walter Knee was born in Montreal, Canada, on 15 May 1907 and died in Santa Fe, New Mexico on 7 October 1982.
He is most often associated with the Santa Fe art community, but also traveled widely on assignment. Knee was a talented photographer who first visited Santa Fe in 1931; he fell in love with the location, and eventually became part of the flourishing art community there.
Ernest Knee. 1941. Evening Harbor, Lake Chapala. Credit: Obscura Gallery, Santa Fe.
Knee’s friends included a wide circle of famous artists and photographers, including Edward Weston, Gustave Baumann, Ansel Adams, Georgia O’Keeffe and Laura Gilpin.
Over 100 of his powerful black and white photographs were the subject-matter for Ernest Knee in New Mexico: Photographs, 1930s-1940s, by his third son Dana Knee, published by the Museum of New Mexico Press in 2005. One of these photographs, dated 1941, depicts a lone sail boat on Lake Chapala, though it is unclear how much time he spent in Chapala. During his 1941 trip he took several other superb images of Lake Chapala.
One of these photographs is included in his Mexico: Laredo to Guadalajara (Hastings, New York, 1951). This book showcases more than 100 of his photographs, documenting a pictorial tour from Laredo to Monterrey, Linares, Villagran, Tamazunchale, Jacala, Venta de Carpio, Toluca, Morelia, Patzcuaro, Zamora, Chapala and Guadalajara.
Among Knee’s many other claims to fame is that he was, for a time, Howard Hughes’ personal photographer. He was also the first cameraman to record Angel Falls in Venezuela. His landscape and documentary photographs appeared in Life and National Geographic.
Institutions which have displayed Knee’s work include The Snite Museum of Art, University of Notre Dame; George Eastman House, Rochester New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Center For Creative Photography, Tucson; Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; California Museum of Photography, Riverside; Princeton University of Art, Princeton; The Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis; Spencer Museum of Art, Lawrence Kansas; New Orleans Museum of Art New Orleans; Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee; University of Oklahoma Museum of Art; University of New Mexico, Albuquerque; New Mexico State University, Las Cruces; Museum of New Mexico, Santa Fe; The Harwood Foundation, Taos.
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The Honorable (Selina) Maud Pauncefote (1862-1919) was the author of what is believed to be the earliest English-language travel article dedicated exclusively to the town of Chapala. Entitled “Chapala the Beautiful,” it was published in Harper’s Bazar in December 1900. The article includes what may well be the first published photographs of the village of Chapala. One, taken from the wharf by American photographer Charles Betts Waite, shows the lakeshore with the church in the background, while another, thought to be the work of Winfield Scott, shows a diligence (stage coach) in the high street, with the lake forming the backdrop. These brief extracts paint the scene as she saw it:
On the western slope of mountainous Mexico is a beautiful lake resembling in size and surroundings the Lake of Geneva. It is called the Lake of Chapala, and as it is out of the beaten track, many visitors who feel that they have seen Mexico quite thoroughly fail to see that interesting place.
To reach charming Chapala one must either take a steamer from the end of the lake, or leave the train at the station called Atiquiza, thirteen miles across the mountains. Then comes a drive over a road so full of bowlders and holes, hills and valleys, that the wonder is one has a bone unbroken in one’s body at the end of the journey….
Chapala is 400 feet lower than the city of Mexico. The lake is surrounded by mountains, which in that lovely atmosphere, so high and rarefied, take every shade of violet and pink and blue. The coloring is magnificent, and the sunsets and starlight nights are things to dream of. The Southern Cross is seen, and every star seems brighter and bigger and nearer, and the sky more filled with gems than one ever imagined.
The little village of Chapala nestles down below the mountains on the shore of the lake. There is a small foreign settlement there whose members have discovered the charm and have built villas on the borders of the lake, the air being very good for the lungs. But the native Indians are not inclined to sell their homesteads, so it is difficult to procure land on the water’s edge.”
The Hon Maud Pauncefote, ca 1893
Relatively few details of Maud Pauncefote’s life are known, despite her being the eldest of the four daughters of Sir Julian (later Lord Julian) Pauncefote, who was the British Minister in Washington (and subsequently the British Ambassador) from 1889 until his death there in 1902. Sir Julian was senior British delegate to the First Hague Conference, and was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1901.
[Aside: Sir Julian’s major claim to fame was the Hay-Pauncefote Treaty signed in November 1901, by which time Roosevelt had succeeded the slain McKinley as U.S. President. The Hay-Pauncefote Treaty mapped out the role of the U.S. in the construction and management of a Central American canal, linking the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific. The treaty led to the agreement in 1903 between the U.S. and the newly established republic of Panama that the U.S. should have exclusive canal rights across the Isthmus of Panama in exchange for Panama receiving financial reimbursement and guarantees of protection.]
Maud Pauncefote was born in Dresden on 1 June 1862, shortly after her father, a lawyer, had lost almost all his private fortune due to a bank collapse. The family sailed to Hong Kong later that year, where they remained for a decade before returning to England. Following her education in England, Maud was presented at court. In 1889, the Pauncefotes relocated to Washington D.C., where Maud, who grew to love the U.S., helped her mother, Selina, host dinners and events at the British embassy.
In 1890, Maud Pauncefote was one of the cast of high society characters at a “semi-literary entertainment” in Washington D.C., where some of those present read original poems and stories. The attendees included Mr. and Mrs. Charles Nordhoff, grandparents of the Charles Nordhoff who would visit Lake Chapala some years later and co-write Mutiny on the Bounty.
Maud visited Mexico on more than one occasion. At the end of March 1896 she was on the same train from Mexico City to the US as American ethnographer Jeremiah Curtin. Curtin recorded in his diary that fellow passengers included “Professor Lumholtz” (Norwegian anthropologist Carl Lumholtz), steamship company owner “Mr Mallory,” and an Englishman who had been a consul in China and the West Indies and who reminded him of Chapala pioneer Septimus Crowe, whom he had met six months earlier.
Maud Pauncefote returned to Mexico in March 1897, and was staying with Lionel Carden (the British consul to Mexico) and his wife at Villa Tlalocan in Chapala, when American author Chas Dudley Warner planned to visit. Warner was staying in Guadalajara and explained his intention in a letter to poet Mary Ashley Townsend, who owned the Villa Montecarlo in Chapala: “Tomorrow I go to Chapala to spend Sunday with the Cardens. Miss P—- [Pauncefote] is with them. Then I return to Mexico. [City]” It seems likely that this was when Pauncefote wrote her travel piece about Chapala.
Curiously, when her younger sister Lillian married Mr. Robert Bromley, an embassy employee, in a huge society wedding in February 1900, Maud is not mentioned in the press reports. Among those attending “this brilliant affair” were President McKinley, members of his cabinet, and the “entire diplomatic corps.”
Besides “Chapala The Beautiful,” Maud Pauncefote also wrote the non-fiction piece, “Life in Washington” (1903), an article about diplomatic life, in which she offered some timeless advice for improving trans-Atlantic understanding: “In England there is still a vague notion that Americans are almost English. If that impression were thoroughly eradicated we should comprehend the American nation much better.”
Pauncefote also wrote several short stories, including the (fiction) pieces entitled “The Silence of Two” in Munsey’s (1908) and “Their Wedding Day”, published in The Cavalier in 1909.
The Honorable Selina Maud Pauncefote died in London, England, on 3 July 1919. She never married, but was credited in her obituary in The Day, with, among other things, having been “the first of the Washington women and young girls to take up cycling.”
Acknowledgment
My sincere thanks to Michael Olivas for locating the 1897 letter from Chas Dudley Warner to Mary Ashley Townsend in the Stanton-Townsend Papers in the Howard-Tilton Library at Tulane University, New Orleans.
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Sources
Anon. 1901. “Diplomatic Life” (profile of Pauncefote.) Harper’s Bazar, v. 34 (16 March 1901), p 688-9.
Joseph Schafer (ed). 1940. Memoirs of Jeremiah Curtin. Madison: The State Historical Society of Wisconsin, p 639.
Hon. Maud Pauncefote. 1900. “Chapala the Beautiful.” Harper’s Bazar, Volume XXXIII #52, December 29, 1900. p 2231-2233.
L. G. Pine. 1972. The New Extinct Peerage 1884-1971: Containing Extinct, Abeyant, Dormant and Suspended Peerages With Genealogies and Arms. London, U.K.: Heraldry Today. p 214.
Stanton-Townsend Papers. Letter dated dated 19 March 1897 from Chas Dudley Warner in Guadalajara to Mary Ashley Townsend. Stanton-Townsend Papers, Special Collections Division of the Howard-Tilton Library at Tulane University, New Orleans, Box 2: Correspondence, 1886-1928.
The Day. “Miss Pauncefote Dead; Known Here.” (obituary) 31 July 1919, 4.
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Clement Woodward Meighan (1925-1997) was an archaeologist who undertook field research in southern California, Baja California and western Mexico. His main link to the Chapala area is that he was the lead author (with Leonard J. Foote as co-author) of the monograph, Excavations at Tizapán el Alto, Jalisco (University of California Los Angeles, 1968).
Tizapán el Alto is the largest town on the southern shore of Lake Chapala. Foote led two fieldwork seasons at the site, and among the research students and volunteers helping on the dig was painter and muralist Tom Brudenell.
Photo from cover of Onward And Upward!: Papers in Honor of Clement W. Meighan
Born in San Francisco, Meighan also lived in Phoenix, Arizona, (to recover from double pneumonia contracted before he was five years old) and in California’s San Joaquin Valley.
He first visited Mexico at age 17, when he spent several months in the country, traveling by the cheapest means he could find, which included 4th class trains. The following year, at age 18, he was drafted into the U.S. military. He was severely wounded while on active service in the second world war and spent three years in and out of military hospitals, before finally being discharged, still with a permanent limp. After the war ended, he used G.I Bill funding to study at the University of California, Berkeley, gaining undergraduate and doctoral degrees in anthropology, in 1949 and 1953 respectively.
In 1952, Meighan was appointed instructor in anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He remained at UCLA for close to forty years before retiring from that institution in 1991. His contributions to UCLA (and to archaeology) were considerable. He founded the university’s archaeological survey, chaired its anthropology department, and played key roles in several regional and national organizations.
In addition to his work in California and Mexico, Meighan also undertook archaeological fieldwork in Utah, Arizona, Belize, Costa Rica, Chile, Guam, Nubia and Syria.
Meighan made important contributions to the fields of faunal analysis, rock art studies, and obsidian hydration analysis. He was one of the first modern archaeologists to recognize the importance of scientifically excavating sites in western Mexico. Since Meighan’s early work, several archaeological sites in Western Mexico, including El Ixztepete and Guachimontones have been partially restored and opened to the public.
Among his more noteworthy students at UCLA was writer Carlos Castaneda (The Teachings of Don Juan; a Yaqui Way of Knowledge, 1969). Taking Meighan’s class “Methods in Field Archaeology”prompted Castaneda to undertake a deeper study of Shamanism.
Meighan accompanied the 1962 expedition funded by mystery writer Erle Stanley Gardner to record painted rock shelters in central Baja California. That expedition led to Gardner writing an article for Life and the book The Hidden Heart of Mexico (1962) as well as Meighan’s later academic account of the paintings in a 1966 journal article.
Meighan’s books on archaeology include: Californian Cultures and the Concept of an Archaic Stage (1959); A New Method for Seriation of Archaeological Collections (1959); Archaeology: an Introduction (1966); Prehistoric Rock Paintings in Baja California (1966); Indian Art and History. The Testimony of Prehispanic Rock Paintings in Baja California (1969); The Archaeology of Amapa, Nayarit (1976); Messages From the Past: Studies in California Rock Art (Monograph XX) (1981); Archaeology for Money (1986). Meighan was also co-author of numerous works including Sculpture of Ancient West Mexico: A Catalogue of the Proctor Stafford Collection at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (University of New Mexico Press, 1989) and Discovering Prehistoric Rock Art: A Recording Manual (1990).
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John Macarthur (“Jack”) Bateman was a painter, author and architect who was born on 9 October 1918 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and died on 15 March 1999. Bateman moved to Ajijic with his wife Laura Woodruff Bateman and three young children in 1952; the couple quickly became pillars of the local community, making exemplary contributions to the local social, cultural and artistic scene.
The Batemans were living in New York City prior to moving to Mexico. They responded to an advert in The New York Times which offered a home in Ajijic, together with five servants and a boat, for the princely sum of 150 dollars a month.
Jack Bateman studied architecture at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University), prior to be called up for military service in January 1942. He served in the U.S. Navy from 21 January 1942 to 22 September 1945 at various Naval Air Stations, including a spell in North Africa flying submarine-hunting dirigibles. After the war, he completed his studies and then set up an industrial design studio in New York to produce, among other things, molded architectural elements made of plaster.
According to a blog post by Jack’s son-in-law Tom Vanderzyl, this led to Bateman having an unexpectedly significant impact on the work of the great German-born abstract expressionist artist Hans Hofmann who was living on the floor below:
…the painter/architect John MacArthur Bateman had a studio just above Hans Hoffmann (sic). In his studio, John poured large heavy 55-gallon drums of plaster into molds for architectural elements. It seems one day a plaster mold broke and sent 55 gallons of plaster pouring across his wooden plank floor that was also the ceiling of the studio under him, and the plaster dripped through the ceiling of the studio below. At the time, Hans had all of his paintings out looking them over for his upcoming show. Hans shouted upstairs in German for it to stop and that he needed help covering his work from the dripping plaster. Bateman along with his klutz brother-in-law, who had dropped the mold in the first place, came down to help. They used blankets and canvas in an attempt to cover the paintings, but it was too late. The plaster was setting up and the damage was done. Bateman put the best spin on it by telling Hans that his paintings needed that texture made by the pressed fabric and wet plaster and that the new tactile surface was in many ways more interesting. Now, he only needed to paint over the white plaster to get a far more interesting surface. Hans Hoffmann’s show was a success, and he would pop up to borrow plaster from time to time and talk with Bateman about materials.
For the first few years in Mexico, Jack Bateman commuted back and forth to New York, spending about one week a month in the U.S. At home in Mexico, he spent time on his art and began to write. He authored five books including Loch Ness Conspiracy (New York: R. Speller & Sons, 1987), as well as a play, Caldo Michi, first performed in Ajijic in November 1998.
When the Lakeside Little Theater needed a new home in the mid-1980s, Bateman was a strong supporter of a plan to build a purpose-built facility on land donated by Ricardo O’Rourke, and acted as architect. The theater opened in 1987 and became the permanent home of Mexico’s most active English-language theater.
At various times sailor, artist, pilot, architect, writer and marketing consultant, whatever he turned his mind to, Jack Bateman made many unique contributions to the world.
For her part, Laura Bateman was a patron of the local arts scene in Ajijic, opening the village’s first purpose-built gallery, Rincón del Arte, at Hidalgo #41, Ajijic in about 1962. (For a couple of years prior to that, she had arranged shows in her own home). Rincón del Arte, which ran for many years, had monthly shows, featuring dozens and dozens of artists.For example, Whitford Carter exhibited at Rincón del Arte in both February 1967 and August 1968, while Peter Huf and his wife Eunice (Hunt) Huf held a joint exhibit there in December 1967 .
Jack and Laura Bateman’s eldest daughter, Alice M. Bateman, studied in Guadalajara, London (U.K.), New York and Italy before becoming a successful professional artist-sculptor based in Forth Worth, Texas.
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Professional photographer Jack Weatherington, born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on 12 October 1933, moved to Ajijic in 1988 and resided there, continuing to take magnificent photographs, until his death in Guadalajara on 20 Feb 2008.
Soon after relocating to Ajijic, he became fascinated with Mexican masks, “especially the hauntingly beautiful, and sometimes simply haunting centuries-old masks native to the indigenous peoples of Mexico.” (Mexconnect.com).
Jack Weatherington: Burro carrying firewood, Ajijic. Photo reproduced by kind permission of Mexconnect.com
Weatherington is quoted as saying, “I know the power of the mask. When I am preparing to photograph them, often it is as though the person who created it is there with me. Sometimes, for the briefest of moments, the veil of time lifts and I can see and feel the power of the centuries old moment of its creation. It is this power. This passion. Indeed, the majesty, I have tried to capture in my photographs.”
Jack Weatherington: Huichol mask. Photo reproduced by kind permission of Mexconnect.com
On leaving high school in the U.S., Weatherington joined the U.S. Navy, and served as a medical corpsman. After his military service, he worked as a professional photographer most of his career.
Postcard photograph, “Street Decorations” (Ajijic) by Jack Weatherington and José Hinojosa
During his twenty years in Ajijic, he was an active member of the Ajijic Society of the Arts, and his photographs, especially those of floral and woodland scenes, regularly won awards in local shows. He also took exquisite portraits of some of the Lake Chapala region’s most famous residents, including the travel writer-entrepreneur Neil James. (James bequeathed her property, including its extensive gardens, to the Lake Chapala Society).
Weatherington also held a solo show of his photographs at the Mio Cardio Gallery in the Chapalita district of Guadalajara.
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María de Jesús Magallón Pérez (1924–1957) was one of the seven poets included in De Esta Tierra Nuestra; Antología Poética (Colección Sahuayo No. I, 1972). Besides being an award-winning poet, she was a social activist and the founder of a piano school, a writing school and the “Diego José Abad” Literary Circle.
Born in Jiquilpan on 24 March, 1924, Magallón Pérez studied in Jiquilpan, Jacona and Morelia. She demonstrated poetic sensitivity as a child, and had verses published in provincial newspapers from an early age.
She subsequently entered a convent, trained as a teacher, and taught in the states of Mexico and Nuevo León. Magallón Pérez married Roberto Villaseñor Espinosa (“Ticolín”), a poet-songwriter-historian who was also an ardent promoter of cultural events in the town of Jiquilpan, and returned to Jiquilpan in 1953. She established herself as a member of the “Sahuayo literary group” and dedicated herself to writing.
Her first book was Cuadernillo poético (Sahuayo, Michoacán 1953), centered on descriptions of the landscapes of her native Michoacán. In 1955, her poem “Raíz de llanto”, dedicated to the memory of Alfonso Méndez Plancarte, won a poetry competition in San Luís Potosí. The following year, “Ciclo de Navidad” was awarded top honors in a poetry festival in Lagos de Moreno, Jalisco. That poem became the basis for a theatrical work which was also televised.
Magallón Pérez was preparing her third collection of poetry, Silbo y luna, when she died in Jiquilpan, on 19 December 1957, while giving birth, at the tragically young age of thirty-three.
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Phyllis (Porter) Rauch, born 28 October 1938, was an American artist, writer and translator who lived in Jocotepec for more than forty years. Her husband was internationally-acclaimed artist Georg Rauch (1924-2006). The couple lived in Guadalajara from 1967 to 1970, before moving to Laguna Beach, California for six years. They returned to Mexico in 1976 and established their permanent home in Jocotepec.
Phyllis Rauch. “Chayito”. Photo reproduced courtesy of the artist.
Phyllis Rauch grew up in Ohio and received her bachelor’s degree in English at Bowling Green State University and her master’s degree in library science at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. She studied German at the Goethe Institute in Rothenburg ob der Tauber and then worked at German libraries, including the Internationale Kinderbibliothek in Munich and the Amerika Gedenkbibliothek in Berlin. She met Georg Rauch in Vienna in 1965 and they were married in Ohio, September of the following year. Phyllis’ own highly-entertaining account of this love story was published on MexConnect in 2006 as “Not your usual wedding – a Valentine’s Day story.”
Phyllis Rauch: Pablito. Reproduced courtesy of the artist.
As a writer, Phyllis has written non-fiction and poetry, mainly for English-language magazines, newspapers and websites. She has also worked as a Spanish-English translator. During the 1968 Olympics in Mexico, Phyllis was a trilingual guide (English, Spanish, German) for the cultural events associated with the 1968 Olympics that were held in Guadalajara. She enjoyed very much squiring around the city the likes of the Berlin Opera and Duke Ellington’s band. Phyllis has never forgotten that after his last concert he kissed her on the cheek and said, “Shuugar.”
Phyllis Rauch. Rousseau-inspired jungle scene. Photo reproduced courtesy of the artist.
Somewhat late in life, and encouraged by her husband, Phyllis began to paint. Her charming, somewhat naif paintings of rural scenes and Mexican life have received deserved acclaim for their universal appeal.
Phyllis Rauch. Cat, kitten and maguey. Photo reproduced courtesy of the artist.
The Rauchs opened their home and studios, on a one-acre property overlooking Lake Chapala on the outskirts of Jocotepec, as the Los Dos Bed & Breakfast Villas in the 1990s. Phyllis continued to welcome visitors there, especially those with an interest in her husband’s art.
Phyllis Rauch died in September 2021. QEPD.
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Peter Everwine (born in Detroit, 14 February 1930) is an American poet who spent a sabbatical year in Mexico in 1968-1969. While living in the Lake Chapala area, Everwine (who had traveled previously in Mexico) became friends with (Don) Shaw and Tom Brudenell, both then living in Jocotepec.
Of all Everwine’s poems, the one most obviously related to Lake Chapala is “The Fish/Lago Chapala”, which was published in Keeping the night: poems (Atheneum, 1977) and reprinted several years later in From the Meadow: selected and new poems (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004). “The Fish/Lago Chapala” opens with the following stanza:
Sunrise, the tiny
almost transparent fish of Chapala
drawn in nets.
All afternoon shining and steaming
on the roadsides, scattered
or in small mounds
like fingers of broken glass.
The poem goes on to depict a child’s funeral procession, before ending with a more abstract third section.
Everwine was raised by his Italian-speaking grandmother in western Pennsylvania. He earned his BS from Northwestern University in 1952 and served in the Army from 1952 to 1954. After military service, Everwine undertook graduate studies in English at the University of Iowa, which awarded him a PhD in 1959.
After teaching English at the University of Iowa from 1959 to 1962, he taught English and creative writing at California State University, Fresno, retiring from that post in 1992. He was a senior Fulbright lecturer in American poetry at the University of Haifa, Israel, and in 2008, was a visiting writer at Reed College, Portland.
Everwine’s poetry has appeared in The Paris Review, Antaeus, The New Yorker, and American Poetry Review, and he has published seven collections of poetry, including Collecting the Animals (1972), described by one reviewer as “calmly dazzling poems”, Keeping the Night (1977), Figures Made Visible in the Sadness of Time (2003), From the Meadow: Selected and New Poems (2004) and Listening Long and Late (2013).
His work has brought him numerous awards, including Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships; the Lamont Poetry Prize in 1972; a Horizon Award in 2008; Best American Poetry 2008; and Pushcart Prize XVII.
Everwine has also published two books of translations of Nahuatl poetry: In the House of Light (Stone Wall Press, 1969) and Working the Song Fields (2009), and is responsible for translations of two works by controversial Israeli poet Natan Zach: The Static Element (1982) and The Countries We Live In: The Selected Poems of Natan Zach 1955-1979 (2011).
Everwine’s work is included in several poetry anthologies, including The geography of home: California’s poetry of place (edited by Christopher Buckley, Gary Young for Heyday Books, 1999) and How Much Earth: The Fresno Poets (edited by M. L. Williams, Christopher Buckley and David Olivera for Heyday Books, 2001).
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Lily Dulany Cushing was born in Newport, Rhode Island, on 13 January 1909 and passed away on 21 September 1969 in Fishers Island, New York. She was married three times, but throughout her artistic career appears to have signed most paintings “L.C”.
Lily Cushing, 1942. Photo by Horst P. Horst.
Her first, brief, marriage in 1929 was to George Crawford Clark Jr. After their divorce, in 1932 she married William Temple Emmet Jr. The couple had two daughters. Following their divorce, Cushing took Navy Captain Alston Boyd as her third husband, in 1953. As a result, her art is listed under various names including Lily Emmet Cushing and Lily Cushing Boyd.
Cushing, whose father Howard Gardiner Cushing (1869-1916) was a noted figure and mural painter, began painting at the age of 5, and went to Europe at age 16 to study in Paris with Alexandre Jacovleff. She also took classes in New York with American artist Walt Kuhn, then at the forefront of the modern movement.
In 1930, a few weeks after her twenty-first birthday, Cushing had her first of many solo exhibitions, at the Arden Gallery in New York. Cushing is best known for landscapes and still lifes of flowers, but subsequently took to watercolors and then oils later in her career.
Her paintings can be found in the collections of the Metropolitan museum, the Whitney, and the Museum of Modern Art, in New York City, and in many private collections.
Lily Cushing. “Guadalajara.” n.d.
In the early 1960s, she spent some time in Mexico, visiting various locations including Lake Chapala. A landscape painting of the central Mexican volcano of Popocatapetl dates from this time, as does a painting sold at auction entitled “Guadalajara” (see image).
Much more interesting for our purposes are two paintings – “Chapala Beach” and “Posada Garden with a Monkey” – listed in the 1971 and 1986 Annual Reports of the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. as being on extended loan to the Supreme Court of the United States. We have not managed to find photos of these two paintings and would welcome more information about them, including the year they were painted.
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Novelist and acclaimed creative writing instructor Smith Kirkpatrick spent several summers in Ajijic, with his wife Barbara, in the early 1960s and at one point was apparently working on a novel set in the village. The novel was never published.
Kirkpatrick was born near Paris, Arkansas, on 28 November 1922, and passed away in Gainesville, Florida, on 6 June 2008. As a child he became fascinated with natural history and determined to make his career based on writing. A former merchant seaman, he served in both World War II and Korea as a U.S. naval aviator, flying torpedo planes. He apparently survived seven crash landings before ending up in a VA hospital. Following his discharge in the mid-1950s, he studied English at the University of Florida in Gainesville, under novelist and critic Andrew Lytle, who had established the Creative Writing program there in 1948.
Kirkpatrick, known simply as “Kirk” by many of his students, became a creative writing instructor at the university in 1956, took over from Lytle as Director of the Creative Writing Program in 1961 and finally retired from teaching in 1992. In the interim, he had taught an entire generation of students, many of whom went on to become fine writers. Perhaps his most famous student was Harry Crews, author of more than twenty novels. Crews’ first novel, The Gospel Singer, was dedicated to Kirkpatrick. While his liberal teaching style was not always appreciated by the university administration, the tributes paid to him after his death by former students speak for themselves.
Among other accomplishments during his tenure, Kirkpatrick founded The Florida Writers’ Conference, an annual week-long symposium attracting participants from far afield, including not only writers, but also agents and editors.
Kirkpatrick only published one novel, The Sun’s Gold: A Novel of the Sea (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1974), which was favorably received by critics. The novel, partly autobiographical, is about a young Arkansas boy (named “No Name”) who goes to sea aboard the “Ekonk”, a particularly undistinguished merchant vessel, seeking adventure. The ship, with her cast of memorable characters, is bound for a war-torn port in Africa, carrying munitions and beer. The youth’s voyage is one of self-discovery, becoming much more complicated after he kills a man in a brawl ashore. As the Kirkus reviewer summarizes, Kirkpatrick’s point “is that a worm-ridden mankind can turn to gold in the sun”.
Kirkpatrick also wrote several published essays and short stories, including “Silence,” (The Southern Review, Winter 1968) and had plans at one stage for a book of children’s poems.
Sources:
Sources include the inaugural issue of The Christendom Review, which was dedicated to the memory of Smith Kirkpatrick.
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Poet, writer and politician Honorato Barrera Buenrostro was born in the Lakeside town of Jamay (mid-way between Ocotlán and La Barca) in 1870 and died in Ocotlán in 1952.
He left his home town for Mexico City at a young age. In Mexico City, he studied and wrote alongside Amado Nervo (1870-1919) and Luis Gonzaga Urbina (1864-1934). Coincidentally, Urbina’s own collection of poetry, Puestas de sol, includes “El poema del lago” (“The Lake Poem”), a lengthy poem inspired by a visit to Chapala. Barrera Buenrostro was also a good friend of the poet and novelist Rubén M. Campos, who had many links to Chapala.
Barrera Buenrostro subsequently returned to Ocotlán where he worked in commerce and as a telegraphist for the railway company. He later moved to Chapala, and was the Mayor (Presidente Municipal) of Chapala in 1924, during the time when Lic. José Guadalupe Zuno was the state governor (1923-1926).
Barrera Buenrostro’s work won various literary prizes, including ones awarded in Aguascalientes, Morelia and Mexico City. His best known works are a book of poems, Andamio de Marfíl (1947), and a novel, El rémington sin funda (1947).
The novel El rémington sin funda (1947) is based on the life of Rodolfo Álvarez del Castillo. Nicknamed “El Remington”, Álvarez del Castillo was a famous pistol-packing womanizer of the 1930s, who eventually fought a duel with a soldier in which both men lost their lives. Álvarez del Castillo’s life story became the basis for at least two Mexican films: ¡Se la llevó el Rémington! (1948), starring charro singer Luis Aguilar, and Aquel famoso Remington (1982), directed by Gustavo Alatriste.
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Ann (sometimes Anna) Sonia Medalie (1896-1991) was a muralist early in her career before becoming an outstanding painter of flowers and landscapes. During her six years in Mexico (1942-1948), Medalie made occasional trips back to San Francisco, but was actively painting in Ajijic on Lake Chapala for six months in 1944. American surrealist painter Sylvia Fein, who was living in Ajiijc at that time, has fond memories of Medalie, and greatly admired her artistic drive which, even then, enabled her to live from the proceeds of her artwork.
Ann Medalie: Flowers (date unknown)
Medalie, born in Latvia on 17 April 1896, was the youngest of six children of Jacob and Beila (née Gluckman) Medalie. The family was forced to move to Lithuania when she was young. In 1921, after the first world war, the family emigrated to Chicago, where she studied briefly at the Art Institute of Chicago. Medalie also worked as a furniture decorator for more than a decade, first in Chicago, and then subsequently in Los Angeles (1928-1932) and finally San Francisco.
In San Francisco, under the auspices of the Works Progress Administration, Medalie worked with sculptor Sargent Johnson (1888-1967) and was an assistant to Hilaire Hiler (1898-1966) on the colorful murals in the Maritime Museum. During San Francisco’s Golden Gate International Exposition in 1940, Medalie assisted Miguel Covarrubias on his incredible series of six murals (maps), the “Pageant of the Pacific.” According to some sources, Medalie also assisted Diego Rivera (1886-1957) on his mural Pan American Unity at “Art in Action,” and became good friends with both Rivera and his wife Frida Kahlo (1907-1954). (Note that Medalie’s name does not appear on the list of Rivera’s assistants on that mural compiled by historians at the City College of San Francisco, where the mural is now housed.)
In 1942, Medalie moved to Mexico. While her precise itinerary is unknown, she spent six months or so in Ajijic in the latter half of 1944.
In November 1944, she was one of the many distinguished guests at the opening (at the same venue) of an exhibition of paintings by Edythe (Edith) Wallach. According to the Guadalajara daily El Informador, the guests included: Mr and Mrs Jack Bennett; Nigel Stansbury Millett and his father; Miss Neill James; Sr. Pablo García Hernández, representative of Teatro Mexicano del Arte; Mr Otto Butterlin and his lovely daughter Rita; Mr Witter Bynner, famous American poet; Mr Charles Stigel; Dr and Mrs Charles Halmos; Mrs George de Huton (sic); Miss Ann Medalie; Sr. Herbert Johnson and his wife, “and many more.”
Ann Medalie: “Washing Clothes – in Ajijic”; illustration from Modern Mexico, October 1945.
Two paintings by Medalie, “Net Fishermen (at Ajijic)” and “Washing Clothes – in Ajijic” were used as illustrations for Neill James’ article “I live in Ajijic!” in the October 1945 issue of Modern Mexico.
In early 1945, she held a solo exhibition in Mexico City at the Galeria de Arte Decoración (Venustiano Carranza #30). The list of works for that exhibition shows how significant her time painting in Ajijic had been, since several of the forty oils on show had clear links to Ajijic and Lake Chapala. For example she painted the garden at Quinta Johnson, as well as the view from Quinta Johnson. The Johnsons were long-time residents of Ajijic who had built their home and magnificent sub-tropical gardens on the lakefront. The originals of the two paintings used to illustrate Neill James’ article were also included in the show, along with a surrealist “Adam and Eve” and numerous realistic flower paintings. While Medalie did paint some surrealist works, she was best known for her exquisitely detailed and keenly observed flower paintings.
In 1948, Medalie left the Americas to live in South Africa. By 1951, she had moved to Israel, which became her home and studio for the remainder of her long, productive life. She was one of the founders of the artist community in Safed in Israel.
In her career as an artist, Ann Sonia Medalie held solo exhibitions in the U.S.A, Mexico, South Africa and Israel. She died in Tel Aviv, Israel, on 30 April 1991.
Note: Some minor edits and additions were made to this post in April 2025.
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Sam Eskin (1898-1974) was an ethnomusicologist who traveled widely in the U.S. and beyond recording folk music. He was actively recording musical and cultural events for more than thirty years, from 1938 to 1969. His extraordinary audio collection includes material from the U.S., Latin America, the British Isles, the Middle East, the Caribbean, and East Asia.
Eskin visited Ajijic during the time a friend, African American artist and photographer Ernest Alexander, was running Club Alacrán (The Scorpion Club), sometime between about 1950 and 1952. The second part of Eskin’s sound recording entitled Mexican firecrackers: a prayer and a festival (Smithsonian Folkways, 2001) was recorded from the patio of the Scorpion Club and features a religious festival in Ajijic, complete with church bells and pre-dawn firecrackers.
Eskin is quoted in the cover notes (written by Emory Cook) as saying that,
I was rudely awakened at three or four in the morning. The uproar was really deafening. I reached out from my bunk and flipped the tape machine on, set level and dozed off again. Fifteen minutes later firecrackers started going off, and sleep was no more that night…. Strangely enough, El Escorpion’s patio was infested with black widow spiders.”
Cook concludes his cover notes by writing,
In Mexico one religious festival follows closely on the heels of another. one never knows at what moment all heaven will break loose with church bells, firecrackers, singing, mariachis, brass bands. The entire populace along with roosters and dogs are swept on into the contagious festival spirit.”
(Emory Cook (1913-2002) was an audio engineer and inventor. From 1952 to 1966 Cook recorded, manufactured, and distributed some of the highest quality audio recordings in the world.)
Sam Eskin was born in Washington, D.C. on 5 July 1898. He left school after the 8th grade and worked at a wide variety of jobs, including stints as a taxi driver, clerk, magazine reporter, logger, merchant seaman, cattle hand and cannery worker, before working for 15 years for UPS (United Parcel Service). Settling in Woodstock, New York, Eskin read widely on folksongs, becoming a self-taught folklorist, primarily interested in “the collection, preservation, and evaluation of American folksongs, indigenous music, dance music, primitive drumming, oral storytelling, and oral histories.”
His interest in recording folk music coincided with a time of considerable technological advancement in recording equipment and Eskin embraced new emerging technology, regularly upgrading his disc and reel-to-reel tape recorders, amplifiers, and speakers.
Eskin made friends wherever he went and was able to make recordings in an amazing variety of settings. He gave numerous lectures to audiences at universities, workshops and folk festivals, and released two commercial albums, Sea Shanties and Loggers Songs, and the four-disc set Sam Eskin Songs and Ballads.
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Painter and muralist Louis Ernest Lenshaw (1892-1988) was born in Esbjerg, Denmark, on 24 September, 1892. Lenshaw visited Chapala in the late 1940s or early 1950s while spending several months living and working in Guadalajara, though no details have yet emerged of his visit to Lakeside, or whether he painted whilst there. He does, however, have a connection to another European artist who spent some considerable time in Ajijic and whose paintings of the village were exhibited in Mexico City and elsewhere.
At age 14, Lenshaw was apprenticed to a local Danish artist. He also had considerable talent as a violinist and spent several years traveling across Europe (including Denmark, Norway and Germany), working as a decorative painter, but also playing the violin in cafes and movie houses. After a visit to Brazil he emigrated to the U.S. in 1921, landing at San Francisco. His first job was helping apply gold leaf to the sumptuous interior of the Fox Theater in Oakland.
While living in San Francisco, he took art classes at the the local Arts Students League and also spent time painting landscapes of northern California. During the 1930s Lenshaw fulfilled commissions for the Works Progress Administration (in the San Francisco County Hospital Children’s Ward and the Sunnyvale Housing Project Administration Building), and was one of the many painters who worked on murals for the Golden Gate International Exposition in 1939-1940. He also painted murals in several commercial buildings in California.
Lenshaw married Hilma in 1924; the couple had two children: Vilma and Normand. In the 1940s and 1950s Lenshaw began to become seriously interested in Spanish dancing and flamenco guitar playing. The Lenshaws moved to San Diego in 1968. In 1978, at age 85, Lenshaw remained an enthusiastic member of the San Diego Folkdance Club and the San Diego Flamenco Association. In the words of the association’s newsletter for January 1978:
Ernest Lenshaw, a legend in San Diego… is a tall, outstandingly-featured man who radiates self-confidence with his erect posture and beret perched jauntily on his head. He speaks with a Danish accent, paints, plays flamenco guitar, dances, is famous for the castanets he makes, and attends as many flamenco events as possible.”
At one time or another, he met many of the world’s greatest flamencos. Louis Ernest Lenshaw remained active as a painter, dancer and musician up to the time of his death in Covina, California, on 1 February 1988.
In an oral history interview in 1964, Lenshaw recalled details of his time as a muralist in San Francisco, and his trip to Mexico, which he remembered as being in 1952*:
a Russian girl named Anna Medalie whom I know from… I worked with her before in a furniture shop …she was a flower painter… And when I went to Mexico, I was just about a month behind her. I went to Mexico in 1952 and wherever I went, we were talking about painters and what not and people said, “Do you know Ann Medalie?” I said, “Yes.” He said, “Well, she’d just been here about a month ago or two months ago.” I was in Guadalajara and Taxco, Acapulco and I don’t know, Mexico City. I mean Sargent Johnson was also talking about her. He was acquainted with her at the same time.”
* In reality, Lenshaw must have visited Mexico much earlier than the 1952 he claimed in the interview, since Ann Medalie had definitely already moved to Israel by 1951. (See our post about the life and work of Ann Medalie).
“La Luz”, by Rosala, Jaleo (Newsletter of the Flamenco Association of San Diego) Vol 1 #6, January 1978
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One of the more interesting characters that made Ajijic a lively place to be in the early 1950s was the black American artist Ernest Alexander, known to most people simply as “Alex”. Alex was a painter and photographer who, from about 1950 to 1952, ran the Club Alacrán (Scorpion Club), a restaurant-bar in Ajijic, the hang-out of choice for the resident artists and writers of the time.
Ernest Alexander: Untitled (Shop front and doors). Image credit: Richard Norton Gallery
Relatively little is known for certain about Alex, though he is the subject of a fascinating memoir written by Sean Wilder. Wilder first met Alex in 1958, when the latter was living on handouts in the North Beach area of San Francisco. Wilder, later a practicing psychoanalyst, was only a teenager at the time but spent much of the following two years trying to comprehend Alex, while simultaneously questioning his own motives and desires. Wilder’s book, Alex, provides some telling insights into Alex’s charismatic, almost guru-like personality. In an epilogue to the book, Wilder sketches out what little biographical information he has gleaned about Alex, either from Alex himself, or from a select handful of people who knew Alex both in Ajijic and in San Francisco.
Wilder recalls the first time he met Alex in the Co-existence Bagel Shop (noted for its fine breakfasts, the Co-Existence Bagel Shop was a social center for the North Beach Beats until it closed in 1960):
Alex was the man sitting in the corner seat, a long, lean, handsome, “black”… with alert, mischievous, seductively heavy-lidded eyes, probably wearing a khaki army surplus shirt and blue jeans with frayed cuffs, and badly scuffed brown leather shoes, but no socks. No rings, either, no watch, no jewelry of any kind decorated him.”
Alex intimated to Wilder that he had spent his childhood in Long Branch, New Jersey, and that there was, or had been, money in the family. Wilder describes how Alex spoke “educated Eastern Seaboard English”, with an impressive vocabulary, and used language colorfully, as a form of “oral poetry”. Alex was a verbal gymnast, giving quick retorts and enigmatic responses.
Following a period of military service in a communications unit in the Pacific, Alex returned to civilian life after the second world war, with a metal plate in his head, and used his G.I. Bill funding to take art classes at the South Side Community Art Center in Chicago. Alex’s magnetic appeal helped foment the nascent jazz and poetry scene of the Art Circle (a housing community for artists) on the near north side of Chicago. Among the poets that Alex became close to were Bob Kaufman, ruth weiss—who would herself visit Ajijic in the late 1950s—Gwendolyn Brooks, and Lorraine Hansberry (inspired by Brooks), who attended a summer art school in Ajijic in 1949.
Alex’s influence on ruth weiss was profound. He is credited with persuading her to read her poetry to live jazz for the very first time:
In 1948 weiss took a room at the Art Circle on the near north side of Chicago. She began listening to Bop and reading her poetry to audiences there. In 1949 an African American painter named Ernest Alexander asked her to read with the Art Circle jazz ensemble. She accepted the invitation and has been reading to jazz ever since.” (Blows Like a Horn: Beat Writing, Jazz, Style, and Markets in the Transformation of U.S. Culture, by Preston Whaley, Harvard University Press, 2009)
Ernest Alexander: Sketch of Gwendolyn Brooks (frontispiece of Annie Allen)
Gwendolyn Brooks, a close friend of Alex, became the first black writer to win a Pulitzer when she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1950 for her second collection, Annie Allen, published the year before. The frontispiece of Annie Allen is Alex’s simple, yet powerful, portrait of Brook’s head, an illustration also used on the book’s dust jacket.
According to George E. Kent, the author of A Life of Gwendolyn Brooks, Brooks’s poem “A Lonely Love”, published in 1960, is entirely about her intense personal relationship with Ernest Alexander.
In 1949, the same year that his illustration was used for Annie Allen, Alex had a painting chosen for inclusion in the “53rd annual showing by artists of Chicago and vicinity”, a major exhibit at the Art Institute of Chicago. This was a significant achievement for a painter who was apparently largely self-taught. The painting in question, entitled “Shop Front and Doors”, was priced at $350.
Among the other artists included in the exhibition were George Buehr (a professor of art for many years at the Art Institute of Chicago) and his wife Margo Hoff. Buehr, and possibly Margo, had spent some time in Ajijic a few years previously, and may well have provided the inspiration for Alex’s decision to transfer his G.I. Bill funding to the Fine Arts school of the University of Guadalajara later that year.
In Mexico, Alex studied painting, sculpture and photography, and also met Dorothy Whelan, a Canadian whose husband was serving seven years in a Mexican jail for passing bad checks. Alex and “Dolly”, as she was known, set up house in Ajijic, where Dolly, at least for a time, was a cook at the Posada Ajijic. Among their close friends were painter-potter David Morris and his wife Helen, a former dancer. San Francisco Bay area sculptors Robert McChesney and his wife Mary Fuller were also both in Ajijic at this time.
Dorothy Whelan in Alex’s studio in Club Alacrán, Ajijic, ca 1952. Photo reproduced by kind permission of Katie Goodridge Ingram.
In Ajijic, Alex opened a restaurant-bar named Club Alacrán (Scorpion Club), which was in operation from about 1950 to 1952. The club attracted locals and expatriates alike. Alex instituted a two-tier pricing system, charging Mexicans less than Americans for their drinks.
Katie Goodridge Ingram remembers the building well, because it had previously been the studio of her step-father, the artist and sculptor Mort Carl. The Club Alacrán, on Calle Constitución at its intersection with Ramón Corona, “was set up in a small two-room house with a patio and kitchen area. Alex was a very jolly, welcoming and bright host. It briefly became “the” place.” Ingram also recalls that Alex was a fine cook with a penchant for hosting massive barbecues on the beach.
While he was running Club Alacrán, Alex was visited by the ethnomusicologist Sam Eskin. The second part of Eskin’s sound recording entitled Mexican firecrackers: a prayer and a festival (Smithsonian Folkways, 2001) was recorded from the patio of the Scorpion Club and features a religious festival in Ajijic, complete with church bells and pre-dawn firecrackers.
Eskin is quoted in the cover notes as recalling that,
I was rudely awakened at three or four in the morning. The uproar was really deafening. I reached out from my bunk and flipped the tape machine on, set level and dozed off again. Fifteen minutes later firecrackers started going off, and sleep was no more that night…. Strangely enough, El Escorpion’s patio was infested with black widow spiders.”
Ernest Alexander: Photo of typical lane in Ajijic, ca 1949. Photo reproduced by kind permission of Katie Goodridge Ingram.
Ernest Alexander: Photo of Lake Chapala fishermen and nets, ca 1950. Photo reproduced by kind permission of Katie Goodridge Ingram.
Little is known about the whereabouts of Alex’s artwork from this time, though in the late 1950s he showed Sean Wilder some small masks that he had sculpted and some photos of paintings. Wilder describes one of Alex’s paintings, almost certainly of Lake Chapala:
His paintings were as calm and meditative as his sculpture was full of violent vitality. One of them made a particularly strong impression on me: what appeared to be a fisherman’s shack (I recall a net and floaters hung out on a wall to dry) in the full golden blast of a sun-drenched late afternoon, while above and behind it the sky was blue-gray with ominous storm clouds.” (Alex, p 173)
Unfortunately, the good times for Alex did not last long. In December 1951 or early in 1952, a serious altercation broke out in the bar during which he almost strangled one of his patrons. Even the birth of Alex and Dolly’s son Mark a few months later was only a temporary respite for the couple. Soon afterwards, Dolly’s husband (John Thomas Babin), having escaped or completed his sentence, returned to Ajijic demanding his wife back. Another huge scene ensued. Alex was forced to give up the Club Alacrán. By April of the following year (1953), he had been expelled from Mexico under the infamous Artículo 33, that section of the constitution which allows Mexican authorities to expel “undesirable” foreigners without due process. Dolly and Mark accompanied him to San Francisco. (Coincidentally, their friends David and Helen Morris returned to the San Francisco Bay area at about the same time.)
In 1953, Ernest Alexander was one of 14 artists (with Robert McChesney, Lenore Cetone and others) exhibiting in Sausalito, California, at the annual Spring Art Show at the Sausalito Art Center from 29 March to 12 April 1953. A Sausalito News piece in June 1953 refers to Alex and his wife as “the Ernie Alexanders of Marin City”, when listing the artists who attended an art show at the Tin Angel on the Embarcadero in San Francisco. In August 1953, the same newspaper lists Ernest Alexander, of “208 Second Street”, as the chairman of the exhibition committee for the second annual Sausalito Arts Center Fair to be held at Shell Beach in mid-September, alongside the annual Regatta.
By 1955, Alex’s world began to unravel. In February 1955, police were called to a “fracas” at the annual Sausalito Artists Ball. According to a press report:
“Charles Carmona, an employee of St. Vincent’s School for Boys north of San Rafael, was given first aid by the Sausalito fire department to check the bleeding from severe facial cuts. He told police that Ernest Alexander, former Sausalitan now living in San Francisco, hit him in the face with a beer bottle after he had danced with Alexander’s wife. Carmona claimed the blow splintered the bottle and police said the injured man had deep cuts on his forehead, nose, chin and both cheeks. Alexander denied he hit Carmona with the bottle and witnesses to the fracas said they did not see Alexander wield the weapon.” No charges were laid because “Carmona refused to sign a complaint against Alexander”.
At some point in 1955, Dolly died in hospital while undergoing a second mastectomy. Alex, distraught, began to fall apart. As Alex slid towards insanity (perhaps due to general paresis caused by late-stage syphilis), Mark was taken into the local foster care system.
For the remaining 15 years or so of his life, Alex was never the same. He stopped painting, spent time in state mental institutions, developed paranoia, and lived for extended periods on hand-outs. It is at this stage of his life that Sean Wilder first met him. Wilder recalls that while Alex no longer painted, he enjoyed listening to the music of Billie Holiday and loved cookbooks, reading and valuing them like other people read poetry or novels.
The final chapter in the tragic story of Alex’s final years ended in February 1974. The precise date is unknown because he died alone in his apartment at 138-6th St, San Francisco, and his body was not found until four months later. He was buried in Willamette National Cemetery, Portland, Oregon, on 25 July 1974.
While Alex’s contributions to the Ajijic art scene have been largely forgotten or ignored, his place in the Chicago art scene has been recognized by the inclusion of his paintings in two major group exhibitions: “Black on Black: The Works of Black artists from Chicago Black Collectors” (University of Illinois at Chicago, 1983) and “The Flowering: African-American Artists and Friends in 1940s Chicago: A Look at the South Side Community Art Center”, (Illinois State Museum, 1993).
Note and acknowledgments:
An earlier version of this post incorrectly named Ernest Alexander’s son as “Luke”. This has now been corrected to “Mark”.
My sincere thanks to Katie Goodridge Ingram for sharing her memories of Alex (and photo of his studio) and for permission to reproduce examples of his fine photographs.
Reference:
Sausalito News. 19 March 1953, p 7; 2 April 1953, p 7; 25 June 1953, p3; 27 August 1953, p 5; 25 February 1955, p 1.
Wilder, Sean. 2011. Alex (self-published via Lulu.com).
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Born in 1928, ruth weiss is a renowned American poet, playwright and artist, best known for reciting her poetry to the accompaniment of live jazz. She visited Ajijic and Chapala briefly during an extended road trip to Mexico in 1958-1959, with her husband and her dog.
weiss was born in 1928 into a Jewish family in Berlin. Her family left Berlin for Vienna in 1933 and then relocated to New York in 1938. weiss lived for a time in Chicago, but eventually settled in San Francisco in 1952.
Alex’s magnetic appeal helped foment the nascent jazz and poetry scene of the Art Circle (a housing community for artists) on the near north side of Chicago. Among the poets that Alex became close to were Bob Kaufman, ruth weiss—who would herself visit Ajijic in the late 1950s—Gwendolyn Brooks, and Lorraine Hansberry (inspired by Brooks), who attended a summer art school in Ajijic in 1949.
In Chicago, in 1949, weiss was a resident of the Art Circle (a housing community for artists) on the near north side of Chicago. This is where she first met Ernest Alexander (“Alex”), who played a decisive role in persuading her to start reading her poetry to jazz. In I Always Thought You Black (a tribute to her African American artist friends), weiss wrote that,
ERNEST ALEXANDER long & brown listens to my poem. in my black blue-bulb room. pulls me upstairs. sez now read to these folks. they gotta hear this. my first own home. my first turntable. my first modeling nude. my first poetry aloud. someone blows a horn. someone brushes a drum. i’m reading to jazz man.”
This quickly became a trademark of readings by ruth weiss.
A year or so after they first met, Alex left Chicago for Mexico where he lived and worked for a few years in Ajijic on Lake Chapala. weiss moved to San Francisco, where she became a prominent member of the counter-culture movement of San Francisco, and good friends with the likes of Jack Kerouac, BobKaufman and surrealist poet Philip Lamantia. In the 1960s, she started to use only lower case for her name in a symbolic protest against “law and order” since in her birthplace of Germany all nouns are capitalized.
weiss mentions Alex several more times in I Always Thought You Black.
For example, weiss writes about how she and Alex used to work together:
Oh ALEX lover of my first woman-lover JERI WANTAJA. your paintings of birds. your studio bright & wild with their flight. your studio a three-cornered touchstone where i write in a corner. look out at warehouses trucks dawn. come rain come shine.
weiss also describes how she met Alex again several years later, in San Francisco, after Alex’s return from Mexico in 1953:
oh ALEX. is it 1955 or 6 or 7. THE CELLAR. san francisco north beach. where i had started poetry & jazz. you walk in. i carry glasses & bottles. almost drop them. we hug. your wife with you. your first-born soon after. it’s all a blur. your wife and boy dead. mexico.
you become a legend. it’s the beat-time. day after day in & out of the CO-EXISTENCE BAGEL SHOP. you stand outside. you sit inside. you walk up & down. you talk at. you talk at. you talk at. you hold my eye in your hand. it slips from your hand. it is wet with tears.”
weiss’s links to the Lake Chapala area would be tenuous at best (and only by proxy via Alex) were it not for her extended road trip to Mexico in 1958-1959, with her husband, Mel Weitsman, and dog, zimzum. They left San Francisco on Tuesday 14 October 1958 and returned in early February 1959.
oct. 31 … ajijic aside-town where many i have known have been … divided … there the square and park … we leave the car … to wander slowly pebbled street … sleepy hot … a place … a face familiar … we must have known each other’s presence … then … the house to look for … he was in it … bill filling the window now … the girl in jeans and black is smile and small … ny to sf … mexico city … she is here now … art later … bill and he split one scene for this one … we fill the house … it’s lori’s … a legend … romana is the maid or more than … two nights around … past halloween … the ghosts have dog-voices against the moon … another stranger met again … she is blonde in the dark house … all in the hosue … the glass room catches us … each one … the orange cat the guardian … we leave the halloween by day … the lake around … the road is village … the space between … the lake is low … or have the lake-plants grown this noon … each cow a slow a sudden focus … the earth people move slow … each step an earth-beat … the burro the boy the woman the urn … the man the wood … eyes in the stone … blue mountains from the far red plain … the sky the whirr the clouds … rain a shaft between two black mountains … red road to a red town in a red plain … the corn is dry …
As Matt Gonzalez has written, “Part travel journal and part surreal dreamscape, no text of the beat era captures Mexico with more authenticity and immediacy than weiss’s 80-page COMPASS.”
Books by ruth weiss include: Steps (1958), Gallery of Women (1959), South Pacific (1959), Blue in Green (1960), Light and other poems (1976), Desert Journal (1977), Single Out (1978) 13 Haiku (1986), For these women of the beat (1997), A new view of matter (1999), Full circle (2002), Africa (2003), White is all colors (2004), No dancing aloud (2006), Can’t stop the beat (2011), Fool’s journey (2012). ruth weiss has appeared in several short films by Stephen Arnold, including Liberation of Mannique Mechanique (1967), The Various Incarnations of a Tibetan Seamstress (1967), Messages, Messages (1968), Luminous Procuress (1971); Pyramid (1972).
Weiss died on 31 July 2020.
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The great German landscape artist Johann Moritz Rugendas traveled in Mexico from 1831 to 1834, much of the time in the company of Eduard Harkort. In January 1934, they explored the shores of Lake Chapala, and remarked on its “solitary and tranquil beauty”. During the trip Rugendas completed at least two sketches of the lake, having spent some time seeking the best vantage points.
Rugendas: Drawing of Lake Chapala, January 1834
These drawings (now in the collection of the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung in Munich, Germany) were the basis for two oil paintings of the lake: “Lake Chapala” and “View of Lake Chapala from San Jacinto hill”. (There may well be earlier paintings of Lake Chapala, but if so, they have yet to come to my attention. Neither Humboldt, who visited the area in 1803, nor Mrs Henry Ward, who accompanied her husband to Lake Chapala in 1827, is known to have drawn or painted the lake).
Rugendas: Lake Chapala
From Lake Chapala, the travelers went southwards towards Colima, where, among other accomplishments, they climbed Colima Volcano, and Manzanillo. In March 1834, Rugendas was jailed, and subsequently expelled from Mexico, for his involvement in a failed coup attempt against the then-president, Anastasio Bustamante.
Rugendas was born into a family of well-known painters and engravers and studied first with his father and then with Albrecht Adam before entering the Munich Arts Academy. Inspired by the writing and work of earlier German naturalists such as Johann Baptist von Spix (1781–1826) and Carl von Martius (1794–1868) Rugendas traveled to Brazil in 1821, where he found work as an illustrator for Baron von Langsdorff’s scientific expedition to Minas Gerais and São Paulo. Rugendas remained in Brazil until 1825, when he returned to Europe and published his monumental work Voyage Pittoresque dans le Brésil, which included more than 100 illustrations.
Rugendas had no sooner returned to Europe in 1825 than he met (in Paris) noted explorer and naturalist, Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859), and was inspired to seek funding for an ambitious project to “become the illustrator of life in the New World”. In 1831 he traveled to Haiti, and then Mexico, where he executed numerous oil paintings. Following his expulsion from Mexico in 1834, he traveled through South America for more than a decade, returning to Europe in 1846, at the age of 44.
Rugendas’ superb drawings and paintings of Mexican landscapes, people and monuments were beautifully executed and helped give European viewers a glimpse into the geographic and cultural riches of the New World. Most of Rugendas’ works were eventually acquired by King Maximilian II of Bavaria in exchange for a life pension.
An exhibition displaying some of Rugendas’ paintings was held in the Instituto Cultural Cabañas in Guadalajara in July 1986.
Eduard Harkort (1797-1836) was a German mining engineer, geologist and cartographer whose journal “In Mexican Prisons: The Journal of Eduard Harkort, 1832-1834” (published by Texas A&M University Press, 1986) recorded his two years of fighting and imprisonment in Mexico.
Pablo Diener. Johann Moritz Rugendas: Bilder aus Mexiko. (1993)
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Elizabeth Bartlett (1911-1994) was a poet and writer who lived for a time in the Lake Chapala area with her artist-author husband Paul Alexander Bartlett and son Steven James Bartlett in the early 1950s. Later, in the 1970s, the family revisited the Chapala area several times from their then home in Comala, Colima. Bartlett gave several poetry readings in the Chapala area, though the precise dates and locations are unclear.
In addition to her poetry, Bartlett is remembered as an author of fiction, essays, reviews, translations, and as an editor. She was also founder of the international non-profit organization Literary Olympics, Inc.
Elizabeth Bartlett, circa 1973. Photograph courtesy of Steven James Bartlett, literary executor for Elizabeth Bartlett.
Eizabeth Roberta Bartlett (née Winters) was born in New York City in 1911. She was awarded her degree from Teachers’ College in 1931 and then undertook postgraduate studies at Columbia University (1938-40), before dedicating herself to writing and teaching.
She first met her husband in Mexico in 1941, and the couple married in Sayula (Jalisco) in 1943. Their son Steven was born in Mexico City two years later. The family divided their time between the USA and Mexico. In Mexico, the family lived in numerous different states while Paul Bartlett was researching his book on Mexican haciendas.
Elizabeth Bartlett had a distinguished teaching career, including spells at Southern Methodist University (1947–49), San Jose State University (1960–61), the University of California at Santa Barbara (1961–64), San Diego State University (1979–81), and the University of San Diego (1981–82). She was a visiting poet at universities in Canada, California, Florida, and Texas, and Poetry Editor for ETC: A Review of General Semantics and for Crosscurrents.
Bartlett was founder and president of the international non-profit organization, Literary Olympics, Inc., which was established to reintroduce a cultural component to the Olympic Games. In relation to this, Bartlett edited three international multi-language anthologies to coincide with the Olympics, beginning in 1984. A fourth volume was published in 1997 in memory of Bartlett, to honor her for her work with the Literary Olympics, and to commemorate the 1996 Olympic Games.
Bartlett’s writing has been published in numerous journals, anthologies and books of collected poetry, including Poems of Yes and No (1952), It Takes PracticeNot to Die (1964), Address in Time (1979), Memory is No Stranger (1981), TheGemini Poems (1984), Candles (1988), and Around the Clock (1989).
Acknowledgment.
Sincere thanks to Steven Bartlett for sharing his memories of the family’s time in Mexico.
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American artist and author Paul Alexander Bartlett (1909-1990) was a frequent traveler to Mexico who developed an obsession with Mexico’s ancient haciendas. Bartlett devoted years of his life to studying and documenting these haciendas (the mainstay of the colonial-era economy), gradually compiling an artistic record covering more than 350 of them throughout the country.
While it is not entirely clear precisely when Bartlett lived in the Chapala region, during his time there he painted and drew exquisite pen and ink drawings, such as this one of the Hacienda de Zapotitán, a short distance north of Jocotepec.
Pen-and-ink drawing by Paul Bartlett of Hacienda de Zapotitán, Jalisco
Bartlett explored Mexico with his wife, poet and writer Elizabeth Bartlett (1911-1994). The couple first met in Guadalajara in 1941 and married two years later in Sayula. Their son Steven James Bartlett (born in Mexico City and now a widely published author in the fields of psychology and philosophy) subsequently accompanied them as they roamed all over Mexico looking for photogenic and noteworthy haciendas.
Steven Bartlett recalls that the family definitely lived for some months in the Chapala-Ajijic area in the early 1950s. He remembers that his father knew author Peter Lilley (who, with first one writing colleague and then another, used the pen-name of Dane Chandos to craft, among other works, Village in the Sun and House in the Sun, both set at Lake Chapala). The Bartlett family also revisited the Chapala area several times in the 1970s, during the time they were living in Comala, Colima. During these later trips, his father gave lectures about haciendas while his mother gave poetry readings.
Bartlett eventually compiled the beautifully-illustrated book The Haciendas of Mexico: An Artist’s Record, first published in 1990 and readily available now as a free Gutenburg pdf or Epub. The book has more than 100 photographs and illustrations made in the field from 1943 to 1985 and is an excellent starting point for anyone interested in the history, economics, art and architecture of Mexico’s colonial haciendas. For a brief review of this book, see The Haciendas of Mexico: An Artist’s Record on the Geo-Mexico website.
Bartlett’s hacienda art work has been displayed at the Los Angeles County Museum, the New York City Public Library, the University of Virginia, the University of Texas, the Instituto Mexicano-Norteamericano in Mexico City, and at the Bancroft Library, among other places.
An archive of Bartlett’s original pen-and-ink illustrations and several hundred photographs is held in the Benson Latin American Collection of the University of Texas in Austin. A second collection of hacienda photographs and other materials is maintained by the Western History Research Center of the University of Wyoming in Laramie.
Paul Alexander Bartlett (1909-1990) attended Oberlin College and the University of Arizona, before studying art at the National University of Mexico (UNAM) and in Guadalajara. He was an instructor in creative writing at Georgia State College and Editor of Publications at the University of California Santa Barbara (1964-70).
Bartlett had dozens of short stories and poems published in magazines such as Southwest Review, Crosscurrents, Antenna, Etc, Greyledge Review, Prospice, and Queen’s Quarterly, and also wrote the short novel Adios, mi México (1983), and the novel When the Owl Cries (1960). Free online editions of several of his books are available via his author page on Project Gutenberg.
Acknowledgment
Sincere thanks to Steven Bartlett for sharing his memories of the family’s time in Mexico.
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Distinguished American poet and painter John Brandi (born in California in 1943) and his wife Gioia lived in Jocotepec for about eighteen months, from the winter of 1968-69 to mid-1970. The couple’s youngest child, Giovanna, was born in Jocotepec.
Brandi graduated in 1965 from California State University, Northridge, with a B.A. in art and anthropology, before working as a Peace Corps volunteer with Andean farmers in Ecuador from 1966 to 1968. In Ecuador, he began to keep detailed, illustrated journals, a practice he continued while in Mexico. He was an early proponent of “do-it-yourself” self-publishing, producing hand-sewn mimeograph editions.
During his time in Jocotepec, Brandi composed illustrated “myth masses”, as well as hand-made poetry books.
In April 1969, Brandi took part in a collective exhibit that opened 18 April 1969 at La Galería, Ajijic. The announcement in Guadalajara daily Informador (20 April) lists the artists as John Kenneth Peterson, Charles Henry Blodgett (guest artist) and “El Grupo” (John Brandi, Tom Brudenell, Peter Paul Huf, his wife Eunice (Hunt) Huf, Jack Rutherford, Shaw, Cynthia Siddons and Robert Snodgrass).
In June 1969, and in a bid to challenge the artistic status quo in the Lake Chapala area, John Brandi joined with Brudenell and Shaw (all three artists were living in Jocotepec) in staging the Chula Vista “happening”. Brandi contributed drawings, milagros (folk charms) and poems to the happening, which opened, perhaps appropriately, on Friday 13 June.
Sketches by John Brandi for Chula Vista Happening
Brandi, a life-long political activist who joined protests against the American War in Vietnam, was living in the San Francisco Bay area, when he found his first publishing success, with a collection of poems entitled Desde Alla (Christopher’s Press, 1971). While he was living for a summer in a miner’s shack in the Sierra Nevada foothills of California, he met Gary Snyder, immortalized by Jack Kerouac in The Dharma Bums as Japhy Ryder. Snyder introduced him to Japanese poet-wanderer Nanao Sakaki.
In 1971, Brandi moved to New Mexico, where he built a cabin in a remote canyon, and founded Tooth of Time Books, which became a nationally-recognized poetry press.
John Brandi has had numerous collections of his poetry published, including Desde Alla (Christopher’s Press, 1971); Chimborazo: Life on the Haciendas of Ecuador (Akwesasne Notes Press, 1976); That Back Road In (Wingbow Press, 1985); Shadow Play: poems 1987-1991 (Light and Dust Books, 1992); Weeding the Cosmos (La Alameda Press, 1994); Heartbeat Geography: Selected & Uncollected Poems (White Pine Press, 1995); A Question of Journey: travel episodes India, Nepal, Thailand (Book Faith, India, 1999); Reflections in the Lizard’s Eye: High Desert Notes (Western Edge Press, 2000); Empty Moon : Belly Full, Haiku from India & Nepal (Pilgrims Publishing, India, 2000); In What Disappears (White Pine Press, 2003); One Cup and Another (Tangram Press, 2004); Water Shining Beyond the Fields (Tres Chicas Press, 2005); Staff in Hand, Wind in Pines (Tangram Press, 2008); Facing High Water (White Pine Press, 2008); Road to the Cloud’s House (with Renée Gregorio, La Alameda Press, 2009); Seeding the Cosmos: New & Selected Haiku (La Alameda Press, 2010); and The World, the World (White Pine Press, 2013).
Brandi has also undertaken translations, including parts of An Eye through the Wall: Mexican Poetry, 1970-1985 (Tooth of Time Books, 1986).
Brandi’s paintings have featured in numerous exhibitions including: San Francisco Public Library; Roswell Museum of Art, Roswell; New Mexico History Museum, Palace of the Governors, Santa Fe; Loka Cafe Gallery, Taos; Harwood Art Center, Albuquerque; Cruz Gallery, Santa Fe; Randall Davey Audubon Center, Santa Fe; Claudia Chapline Gallery, Stinson Beach, California; North Columbia Cultural Center, Nevada City, California; Woodland-Pattern Book Center, Milwaukee; Laurel Seth Gallery, Santa Fe; University of New Mexico Thompson Gallery, Albuquerque; Return Gallery, Taos; Moody Gallery, Houston, Texas.
Source
http://www.johnbrandi.com/art-oils-acrylics.html [14 May 2015]
Sombrero Books welcomes comments, corrections or additional material related to any of the writers and artists featured in our series of mini-bios. Please use the comments feature at the bottom of individual posts, or email us.
Christian Reid was the nom de plume chosen by Frances Christine Fisher (later Tiernan). As a woman writing in a man’s world, presumably she felt that her pen name would enable her to better compete with her male counterparts. Fisher was very familiar with the Lake Chapala area and must have visited it, or stayed there, in the late nineteenth century, though the precise details remain unclear. In 1890, Fisher published A Cast for Fortune: A Story of Mexican Life, which had the hacienda and village of Atequiza as its setting. (At that time, Atequiza was the railway station closest to the town of Chapala.)
Frances Christine Fisher. Credit: Archive.org
In the slightly later travel story, The Land of The Sun: On Lake Chapala (1893), the protagonists agree that Mexico’s constant sunshine makes any discussion of the weather irrelevant, unlike north of the border. They are on their way from Guadalajara to visit “Don Rafael’s hacienda.” After taking the train to Atequiza, they ride horses to Chapala. The horseback ride, about four leagues in distance, takes longer than they expected since, as one of the characters aptly comments, “Leagues in this country are very elastic.”
Once in Chapala, they comment favorably on the beauty of the surroundings, the thermal water with medicinal qualities, and the local hostelry with its equipal furniture.
Fisher (1846-1920) was born in Salisbury, North Carolina. Her father invested in mining ventures and was the president of the North Carolina Railroad. The family was left penniless in the aftermath of the Civil War, so she began writing for money at quite an early age.
Among early pieces was “Regret”, a poem written “in memory of Julian Fairfax, MA, University of Virginia”, in 1861, when Fisher was about 15 years old. Her first book was Valerie Aylmer, published in 1870, when she was 23. She was a prolific writer, especially of very popular and financially successful light romances. In all, she had almost fifty novels and travel narratives published. In several cases, the books used material that had been previously serialized in magazines. Her best-known book is The Land of the Sky (1876) set in the now homonymous western part of North Carolina. Many believe the region took its popular name from the book.
In 1887, Fisher married James M. Tiernan, a widower who had interests in silver mines in Mexico. In letters to her, Tiernan describes meeting President Díaz, and is critical of Americans who displayed prejudice against Mexicans. He also related his problems involving an embezzling official and a recalcitrant British engineer. It is unclear if the couple actually lived together in Mexico for any extended period, but she certainly must have visited frequently. The couple traveled widely, and Fisher used the knowledge she gained to write novels set not only in Mexico, but also in New York, the West Indies and Europe.
After her husband’s death in 1898, Fisher turned to the church. She continued to write, in her hometown of Salisbury, until her own death in 1920. Frances Fisher (aka Christian Reid) was inducted into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame in October 2002.
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Comments, corrections or additional material related to any writers or artist featured in our series of mini-bios are welcome, whether via the comments feature or email.
Sylvia Fein, one of America’s foremost female surrealist painters, spent several formative years in Ajijic in the 1940s.
Born in Milwaukee in November 1919, she was only 19 when she met her future husband William “Bill” Scheuber. She studied at the University of Wisconsin, and the couple married on 30 May 1942. Even at that time, a contemporary newspaper described her as “Wisconsin’s foremost woman painter.” Fein was one of a group of six painters known as the Wisconsin group who exhibited together and remained life-long friends. The others were Gertrude Abercrombie (1909-1977), Marshall Glasier (1902-1988), Dudley Huppler (1917-1988), Karl Priebe (1914-1976) and John Wilde (1919-2006).
Sylvia Fein, Ajijic, c 1944. Photo reproduced by kind permission of Sylvia Fein.
While her husband was away on military service (as an Air Force cryptographer), she moved to Mexico in 1943 to recuperate from pneumonia. Initially, she visited her mother in Mexico City, but a casual encounter with a former high school classmate, Charmin Schlossman Levy, led to her traveling to Ajijic on the shores of Lake Chapala, where she lived and painted until 1946. Interviewed by the press more than sixty years later in Mexico City, Fein said that ever since that time, “I have loved Mexico and could cry on my return because I have the dust of Mexico on my heart”.
During the years she lived in Ajijic, Fein was busy completing paintings for her first solo exhibition at the Perls Galleries in New York City in 1946. A sample of her works from this time can be seen at Work in Mexico, 1943-47, which includes images titled “Muchacha de Ajijic” (below) and “Insects that inhabit my studio in Ajijic.”
Sylvia Fein: Muchacha de Ajijic (1945). Reproduced by kind permission of the artist.
she helped rebuild the adobe house in which she had her studio, taught English to a few young people eager to go to work in Mexico City, and started an embroidered blouse industry for women who owned the two foot-pedaled sewing machines in the village. In exchange for exotic insects brought to her by the children for her own drawings, she provided paper, pencils and crayons and noted thoughtfully how spontaneously the children drew, and their meticulous observation, dexterity, humor and enjoyment.” (Elsewhere, she is said to have also worked with a local women’s cooperative and helped on a friend’s farm during her time in Ajijic.)
She knew, and worked with, Neill James (who first arrived in Ajijic in September 1943), and this quote means that Fein was already helping local children develop their artistic talents almost a decade before James began a more formal program for children’s art in 1954.
In Dust on my Heart (1946), Neill James describes how Sylvia Fein “worked out some original designs” for embroidery as her role in one of the first village enterprises that allowed local women and girls to earn some money at home during their spare time. In addition, Fein played a key role in marketing the embroidered blouses in Mexico City.
Victor Serge, a Russian exile in Mexico, visited Ajijic over the Christmas-New Year period, 1944-45, and describes Fein in his diaries as having an:
irregular face where the forehead is too big, anxious and frustrated: her husband has been a long time in the war somewhere in the islands of the Pacific. She’s afraid of bad news and is hard hit by being on her own. She has the first-rate drawing of a diligent beginner, gladly turns over the pages of old albums, knows water-color, treasures Persian miniatures. As she’s dominated by frustration and anxiety, the canvases of a very mournful young girl result, naive, delicate and falsely naive, with remarkable symbolics of cats, birds, eyes.”
After Ajijic, and when her husband returned from the war, the couple lived for a time in Mexico City before driving, with Fein’s paintings, back to the U.S.. Before leaving Mexico, Fein did some exporting of silver jewelry, seeking out fine pieces and shipping them to an uncle who had a shop in Milwaukee. Fein dealt with many of the most famous silversmiths of Taxco.
At the U.S. border crossing on their return, the customs agent asked about all the paintings. After a brief discussion, it was apparently agreed that they were “antiques” and therefore exempt from duty!
Fein’s first solo exhibition was a great success. Reviewing the show for The New Yorker, Robert M. Coates wrote that, “The Perls has a first one-man exhibition by a young Milwaukee artist named Sylvia Fein… whose work somehow manages to suggest the German Gothic and the Oriental at practically the same moment… her technique—firm, precise, and clear—is always authoritative.”
Later that year, her work was included in the 1946–47 Whitney Annual exhibition, alongside paintings by Max Ernst, Roberto Matta, and Jackson Pollock.
When WW2 ended and her husband Bill Scheuber returned from military service, they made their home in the San Francisco Bay area where Fein completed her MFA at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1951. Writing in the San Francisco Chronicle in 1962, Alfred Frankenstein extolled the virtues of Fein’s art: “Clarity, finesse, and perfection of draftsmanship are other virtues Sylvia Fein possesses. She is one of the most highly individual painters in the Bay Region and one of the most accomplished”.
After their daughter Heidi was born, Fein kept a meticulous record of her early drawings and artwork, which prompted her to write two landmark books about children’s art: Heidi’s Horse (California: Exelrod Press, 1976) and First Drawings: Genesis of Visual Thinking (Exelrod, 1992). The books have had a major influence on child development specialists interested in the creative process of young children.
Like Carrington, Kahlo and other great women artists of the past century, Fein is a solitary genius who has created a rich world on her own terms.” – Michael Duncan, Art in America, April 2008
Only late in life, did Fein finally receive the recognition long due her as one of America’s foremost surrealists. A series of major shows then placed her art alongside that of other great painters such as Leonora Carrington and Frida Kahlo, Louise Bourgeois, Lee Miller and Dorothea Tanning:
“With Friends: Six Magic Realists 1940-1965”, Chazen Museum of Art, Madison, Wisconsin (2005)
Sylvia Fein’s other major solo exhibitions include: Perls Galleries, New York (1946); Feingarten Galleries, San Francisco (1957, 1959, 1961); Sagittarius Gallery, New York (1958); Lane Galleries, Los Angeles (1958); Saint Mary’s College, Moraga, California (1960); Kunstkabinett, Frankfurt, Germany (1960); Mills College Art Gallery, Oakland, California (1962); Ruthermore Galleries, Oakland, California (1962); Maxwell Art Galleries, San Francisco (1963); Nicole Gallery, Berkeley, California (1965); Bresler Galleries, Milwaukee, Wisconsin (1966).
Sylvia Fein died in California on 1 April 2024, at the age of 104.
Acknowledgment
My sincere thanks to Sylvia Fein for her warm hospitality during a visit to her home and studio in February 2015, and for being kind enough to review a draft of this post.
Sombrero Books welcomes comments, corrections or additional material related to any of the writers and artists featured in our series of mini-bios. Please use the comments feature at the bottom of individual posts, or email us.
Lorraine Vivian Hansberry was an African American playwright, artist and author of political speeches and essays. She studied art in Ajijic at Lake Chapala in the summer of 1949, mid-way through her studies at the University of Wisconsin, where she took classes in art, literature, drama and stage design.
Hansberry was born in Chicago on 19 May 1930 and died of cancer at the age of 34 in New York City on 12 January 1965.
Lorraine Hansberry (1959)
Her father, Carl Hansberry, was a prominent Chicago realtor who, in 1938, challenged the city’s racially segregated housing laws, by moving his family into a “restricted” area near the University of Chicago. The resulting violence, in which bricks and concrete slabs were thrown through their windows, prior to them losing their legal suit challenging the legality of restrictive covenants and being evicted from that home, subsequently inspired Lorraine Hansberry to write her best-known play, A Raisin in the Sun (1959).
A Raisin in the Sun was the first play written by an African American woman to be produced on Broadway. The 29-year-old author became the youngest American playwright to receive the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play over Tennessee Williams‘s Sweet Bird of Youth. The play was translated into 35 languages. A movie version of A Raisin in the Sun was released in 1961, starring Sidney Poitier, Claudia McNeil and Ruby Dee. The movie was nominated “Best Screenplay of the Year” by the Screen Writers Guild and won a special award at Cannes Film Festival. Raisin, a musical based on the play, opened in New York in 1973.
Lorraine Hansberry was only 15 years old in 1945, when her father, “in a final desperate act to escape racial oppression in the U.S.”, moved to a suburb of Mexico City. Carl Hansberry was making arrangements to relocate his family to Mexico when he died there the following year from a cerebral hemorrhage.
In 1948-49, Lorraine was a resident of the Art Circle (a housing community for artists) on the near north side of Chicago. The poets she met there included Bob Kaufman, ruth weiss—who would herself visit Ajijic in the late 1950s—and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Gwendolyn Brooks, who was a particular inspiration for her. (Lorraine’s poem “Flag from a Kitchenette Window” was greatly inspired by Brooks’ “Kitchenette Building.”)
Lorraine spent the summer of 1949 in Ajijic studying art, at a University of Guadalajara extension Mexican Art Workshop in Ajijic run by Mrs. Irma Jonas. Teachers at the Mexican Art Workshop that year included Alexander Nicolas Muzenic, Ernesto Butterlin and Tobias Schneebaum.
The following summer she studied art at Roosevelt University in Chicago before moving to New York City, where she took courses in jewelry-making, photography and short story writing at the New School for Social Research. While living in New York, she became actively involved in peace and freedom movements.
Hansberry wrote several other plays, including The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, which played for 101 performances on Broadway and closed the night she died.
Hansberry’s life and achievements inspired her close friend Nina Simone to write the song “To Be Young, Gifted and Black” (lyrics by Weldon Irvine), first recorded in 1969.
At Hansberry’s funeral, a tribute message from Martin Luther King Jr. praised “her commitment of spirit” and “her profound grasp of the deep social issues confronting the world today.”
Lorraine Vivian Hansberry was posthumously inducted into the Chicago Gay and Lesbian Hall of Fame in 1999, and the American Theatre Hall of Fame in 2013.
Reference:
Steven R. Carter. 1980. “Commitment amid Complexity: Lorraine Hansberry’s Life in Action”, in MELUS, Vol. 7, No. 3, Ethnic Women Writers I (Autumn, 1980), pp. 39-53.
Imani Perry. 2018. Looking for Lorraine: the radiant and radical life of Lorraine Hansberry. Boston: Beacon Press.
Charles Shields. 2022. Lorraine Hansberry: The Life Behind A Raisin in the Sun.
Comments, corrections or additional material related to any of the writers and artists featured in our series of mini-bios are welcomed. Please use the comments feature at the bottom of individual posts, or email us.
Artist Ray Cooper, a friend of Tom Brudenell, traveled with Brudenell from Berkeley to Jocotepec in late 1967 and remained in the town for several months until April 1968. It was during the town’s annual January fiestas in 1968 that Brudenell drew a barefoot Cooper, working by candlelight at a desk, under the protection of a typical Jocotepec tiled roof:
Tom Brudenell: Ray Cooper in Jocotepec, 1968
Brudenell recalls his Berkeley friend as long-haired, usually barefoot, and absorbed in his art and his family.
Cooper has vivid memories of their trip to Mexico, perhaps because it was his first trip abroad. He remembers that he did not want to be seen as a hippie, given that at that time “hippies were being deported” from Mexico. To that end, he kept his hair short, never wore shorts, and “wore long sleeve white or light blue dress shirts and clean Levi’s… We dressed to a middle class Mexican standard, avoided marijuana and were sober.”
Cooper, born in 1942, studied at the Cornish School of Allied Arts in Seattle (1962-1963) and the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland (1964-1967). Disillusioned by the direction art education was taking, and demoralized by the Vietnam War, Cooper dropped out of art school, and jumped at the chance to travel with Brudenell to Mexico.
Cooper recalls that they entered Mexico after a detour to Phoenix to collect a dark-haired, bespectacled girl named Peggy who was on her way down to San Miguel de Allende to start a photography class. He remembers that, after an adventurous trip, they left Peggy in San Miguel and returned to Lake Chapala, where they looked for a house to rent. Deciding that rents were too high in Chapala and Ajijic, they settled on a small home in Jocotepec, where both painters soon became immersed in their work.
(Coincidentally, Ray Cooper’s brother Stanley and one of his brother’s close friends, the artist Billy King, would both later live in the Lake Chapala area for many years.)
Cooper loved Mexico. He liked the people, enjoyed the food and found new artistic freedom in being there. His trip turned out to be the start of extensive travels in various parts of the world, including Costa Rica, Mauritius, France, Greece, Italy, Tunisia and Egypt.
Ray Cooper: Travelers (ca 1970). Reproduced by kind permission of the artist.
While in Mexico, Cooper discovered Huichol Indian art for the first time. He greatly admired the ceramics skills of pre-Columbian potters in Colima, renowned for their beautifully-proportioned portrayals of animals and zoomorphic figures. Spending time in Guadalajara, contemplating the striking, large-scale murals by artists such as José Clemente Orozco, also had a powerful influence on his art.
Shortly after his return to the U.S., Cooper utilized his memories of the art of Huichol Indians, Colima potters and Mexican muralists, to help him draw a stage backdrop of imaginary figures for a Halloween Ball fund-raiser for the (later controversial) Synanon rehabilitation program in San Francisco.
Cooper’s fine paintings have been featured in many exhibitions, including at the California Biennial Competitive Show, Richmond, California (1968); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1968); Geyser Peak Winery Reception Center, California (solo show, 1975); Napa Sonoma Wine Industry Competitive Exhibit, California (Prize-winning, 1975); Oregon Episcopal School Faculty Exhibitions, Portland (1979-1993); Botanical Garden, Asheville, North Carolina (solo show, 2002); Muse Salon, Haywood Park Hotel, Asheville (2003); The Casbah, Tunis, Tunisia (2004); Holy Ground, Asheville, North Carolina (solo show, 2007); Converse College, Spartanburg, South Carolina (collaborative exhibit with Tunisian artist Hamadi Ben Saad, entitled “Trans-Atlantic Voyages”, 2010); Opportunity House, Hendersonville, North Carolina (solo show and workshop, 2012); Starving Artist Art Supply and Gallery, Hendersonville, North Carolina (2012); The Arts Arena Gallery, Delray Beach, Florida (2014).
Ray Cooper: Temple (2013). Reproduced by kind permission of the artist.
Alongside his art, Cooper worked for many years in landscape design. This is especially evident in many of his later paintings which are powerfully simple depictions of the natural world.
On his website, Cooper explains that,
My work explores the mystery of life using easily read symbols that imply passage of time and evolution. The earth, sky, water, clouds, ferns, flowering trees, and fruit are essences abstracted to represent everything.”
While we cannot know how all this came to be, we must wonder. Science can only describe, it does not explain. A transcendent element in science is possible, and faith without rational thought does not necessarily rise above superstition. To know anything, both are necessary.
Questioning the nature of Nature, plus having faith in the existence of a Divine ultimate reality are equal in my attempt to understand the world. The profound mystery of life requires a leap of faith and my paintings are about that.”
Want to learn more?
Ray Cooper’s website – http://www.raycoopergallery.com/ – had numerous examples of recent work but is no longer active.
Sincere thanks to both Tom Brudenell (first interviewed at his home, 1 Feb 2015) and Ray Cooper (first interviewed by phone and email, 15 April 2015) for sharing their memories of Mexico.
Robert Penn Warren, the great American poet, novelist and literary critic, was born in Kentucky on 24 April 1905 and died in Vermont on 15 September 1989. Warren lived and wrote in Chapala for several months in the summer of 1941.
Warren entered Vanderbilt University in 1921, where he became the youngest member of a group of Southern poets known as the Fugitives. Other members included John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Donald Davidson and Merrill Moore. Warren’s first poems were published in The Fugitive, the magazine published by the group from 1922 to 1925.
From 1925 to 1927, Warren taught at the University of California, while earning his master’s degree. He also studied at New College, Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. After marrying Emma Brescia (nicknamed “Cinina”) and returning to the U.S. in 1930, he taught at Vanderbilt, Louisiana State, the University of Minnesota, and Yale University.
2005 U.S. stamp commemorating Robert Penn Warren
Warren was a charter member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers, and founded the influential literary journal The Southern Review with Cleanth Brooks in 1935. He and Brooks also co-wrote a textbook Understanding Poetry (1938), which would prove to have a profound influence on the study of poetry in American colleges.
Warren, accompanied by his wife Cinina, visited Chapala in 1941, two years after the publication of his acclaimed first novel Night Rider.
Relatively little is known about their stay at Chapala, or their motivation in choosing to go there. However, Warren did have a family connection to the nearby city of Guadalajara. In Portrait of a Father, published in 1988, the year before his death, Warren wrote about the similarities between his father’s life and his own. Among the family members recalled in the book is Warren’s uncle Sam, who had worked in mining and lived in Guadalajara. Warren adds that he had often been there “during a long stay at Chapala”.
A few tantalizing snippets of information can be gleaned from the correspondence between Warren and his colleague Cleanth Brooks, published by the University of Missouri Press in 1998.
In a letter dated 17 July 1941, and signed “Red” (Warren’s nickname on account of the color of his hair), he wrote, from the Hotel Nido in Chapala, that Chapala was “a tiny town on a lake, surrounded by mountains, with a fine climate”, before providing some details of his living arrangements:
We have rented a little house, new and verminless, for which we pay six dollars a month, though getting it screened raised the rent several dollars more. A cook is a dollar a week, and food is cheap. The place beautiful, smelly and picture-postcardy. There are some Americans about, including Witter Bynner – who, in fact was about, very much about, with a palatial establishment, but he left yesterday for Colorado. But we have led a pretty isolated life here. Cinina was pretty busy for a few days getting the domestic machinery in motion, and I’ve been working and studying Spanish and swimming and going to the can more often than usual. Not that I’ve got a bug in me yet, but the complaint seems to be usual here upon first arrival…” (Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren: A Literary Correspondence, p 55)
He bemoaned his lack of access to American magazines,
We’ve seen one copy of Time, Latin America edition, but you can’t buy it here at Chapala, and we don’t go to Guadalajara, thirty miles away, but once a week…”
Chapala did offer him, though, a good space in which to think and work:
I’ve got some ideas for new poems, but haven’t done anything on them since arrival. The novel occupies most of my thoughts.”
“The novel” is presumably his second novel, At Heaven’s Gate, first published in 1943.
The following month, August 1941, he wrote that he had mailed a manuscript from Guadalajara to The Southern Review, but had to go to the city by bus because he was temporarily without his car:
We still like Chapala, but are getting awfully anxious for Baton Rouge. It seems that our car may be ready within a few days–though one can’t be too sure. I saw the body work the other day in Guadalajara, and you can’t even tell that the thing had taken a beating. But it has shore [sic] God played hell with what passes for the Warren budget.”
Warren also referred in this letter to “the unexpected arrival of the Albrizios”, friends from the U.S., whom “Cinina just happened to see”, “on the street at Chapala”. He excused his relative lack of work progress as being due to “matters of weather, stubbing toes, catching colds, having hangovers, and such…”
By coincidence, the house rented by Warren was later the home in 1952/1953 of Willard Marsh, author of the novel Week With No Friday (set at Lake Chapala), and his wife George. The owner of the house remembered “Red” as “a nice person with “red” hair who drank a lot – and gave wonderful parties!”
Warren’s marriage to Cinina ended in 1951; the following year, he married Eleanor Clark. He received numerous awards for his work, including the 1947 Pulitzer Prize for the novel All the King’s Men (1946), as well as the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in both 1958 and 1979. Warren is the only person to have won Pulitzer Prizes for both fiction and poetry. He was appointed as the first poet laureate of the United States (1986 -1987).
The art group known as Grupo 68 was founded in 1967 and initially comprised Peter Huf, his wife Eunice (Hunt) Huf, Jack Rutherford, John Kenneth Peterson and Shaw (the artist Don Shaw). Jack Rutherford dropped out after about a year, but the others remained as a group until 1971.
Grupo 68 exhibited regularly (most Sunday afternoons), from early in 1968, at the Hotel Camino Real in Guadalajara, at the invitation of the hotel’s public relations manager Ray Alvorado (a singer) and also held many group shows in Ajijic, both at Laura Bateman’s Rincón del Arte gallery, as well as (later) in “La Galería”, the collective gallery they founded at Zaragoza #1, Ajijic. In addition, the group also showed in Guadalajara with José María de Servín, El Tekare, and at Ken Edwards store in Tlaquepaque.
January 1968 – 20 January 1968 – All four artists included in a group show at Ken Edwards (El Palomar), Tlaquepaque – 9 artists in total. Opened Saturday 20 January 1968. Artists: Eunice Hunt, Peter Paul Huf, Shaw, John Kenneth Peterson, Coffeen Suhl, Hector Navarro, Gustavo Aranguren, Rodolfo Lozano, Gail Michaels [“Michel” on invite].
1968 – 1971 Camino Real Hotel, Guadalajara. Grupo 68 members held weekly shows most Sundays by the hotel pool. Participation varied, but usually included works by all four artists.
July 1968 – Tekare penthouse, 16 de Septiembre #157, 10th floor, Guadalajara. All four members of Grupo 68 (Eunice Hunt, Peter Paul Huf, Shaw, John Kenneth Peterson). Opened on Tuesday 23 July 1968, and was very favorably reviewed by Allyn Hunt in “Art Probe” (Guadalajara Reporter, 27 July 1968) :
“four highly independent artists (with four very different styles) who have the discipline, while regularly showing together, not to adopt a group means in approaching pictorial problems.”
“Most immediately charming are Eunice Hunt’s acrylic and pen and ink pieces, “Fleurs du Mal”, “Ophelia” and “Aurora”.”
“Peter Huf exhibits two serigraphs of exceptional strength… these are among the show’s best works.”
“Donald Shaw is probably this group’s most exploratory imagination, the one that when working at peak thrust, dominates technique and pictorial concepts most thoroughly.”
“John Peterson displays several mosaic-like watercolors, the best of which are his ferris wheel pictures and “Butterfly”.”
September 1968 – “re-opening” of the Rincon del Arte gallery in Ajijic – Calle Hidalgo 41, 21 Sep 1968 – 10 October. Group show, including all four Grupo 68 members, opened Saturday 21 September – Eight painters, one sculptor (Joe Wedgewood, recently arrived from Santa Monica, California). Artists: Tom Brudenell, Alejandro Colunga, Coffeen Suhl, Eunice Hunt, Peter Paul Huf, John K Peterson, Jack Rutherford, Donald Shaw, Joe Wedgewood. [by then Shaw had been identified as Donald Shaw]
October 1968 – Works of Jose María de Servín and Grupo 68, at Galería del Bosque, Calle de la Noche 2677, Guadalajara; opened 24 October 1968. All four members of Grupo 68 (Shaw, John Kenneth Peterson, Eunice Hunt, Peter Paul Huf) in a joint show, as part of the Cultural Program of the International Arts Festival for the XIX Olympics.
December 1968 – “Art is Life; Life is Art” at La Galería, Ajijic. All four Grupo 68 members joined with other artists in a group show “The Group” (“El Grupo”) at the re-opening of La Galeria in Ajijic; show ran from Friday 13 December 1968 to 10 January 1969. Artists: Tom Brudenell, Alejandro Colunga, John Frost, Paul Hachten, Eunice Hunt, Peter Paul Huf, John Kenneth Peterson, Jack Rutherford, José Ma. De Servin, Shaw, Cynthia Siddons, Joe Wedgewood. A review in Guadalajara Reporter said that,
“The very entryway bristles with such attention-grabbing pictures as Paul Hachten’s etching of the map of the United States, John Frost’s delicate photoprint nude, Eunice Hunt’s haunting “Labyrinth” – in which webs of gentle orange have been deftly squeezed against a gray and black background. One of the best works in the show is hung here: Donald Shaw’s tour de force serigraph, “Spore Box”, presenting us with brilliantly-conceived chromatic ideas and imaginative forms which do not relay on optical illusionism, excessive optical vibration or three-dimensionality. This is undoubtedly the best serigraph Shaw – who has executed several series of rewarding prints – has produced.”
February 1969 – Three of the Grupo 68 exhibited at the Tekare penthouse restaurant-gallery, 16 de Septiembre #157, 10th floor, Guadalajara; opened 4 February. Artists: Eunice Hunt, Peter Paul Huf, Shaw.
April 1969 – All five members of the original Grupo 68 showed works in a collective exhibit that opened 18 April 1969 at La Galería, Ajijic. The announcement in Guadalajara daily Informador (20 April) lists the artists as John Kenneth Peterson, Charles Henry Blodgett (guest artist) and “El Grupo” (John Brandi, Tom Brudenell, Eunice Hunt, Peter Paul Huf, Jack Rutherford, Shaw, Cynthia Siddons and Robert Snodgrass).
June 1969 – Grupo 68 show at Instituto Aragon, Hidalgo 1302, Guadalajara, opened 25 June. All four Grupo 68 artists (Shaw, Eunice Hunt, Peter Paul Huf, John Kenneth Peterson) were involved (see image).
September 1969 – (3 September for a month) – Three Grupo 68 artists exhibited together at Galeria 1728 (owned by Jose María de Servin), Hidalgo 1728, Guadalajara. The show was entitled 7-7-7 (7 works each by Eunice Hunt, Peter Paul Huf and Shaw, the show’s title derived from the Olympics scoring system); opened on Wednesday 3 September.
Sources:
Peter Paul Huf and Eunice Hunt (interviewed in 2014); photos and gallery invitations in collections of Peter Paul Huf, Eunice Hunt, Tom Brudenell and others.
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Small began painting from an early age and attended the Derby School of Art before completing a Master of Fine Arts degree at the University of Washington. She also studied at Cranbrook Academy of Arts (Michigan), Chicago School of Design, University of California at Berkeley, the University of Havana and the University of Tokyo.
Known not only for paintings, but also for prints and illustrations, Small exhibited her work in numerous galleries around the world from New York (the Riverside Gallery) to Japan and Mexico (Monterrey, Saltillo, Hermosillo). She held more than 500 one-woman shows and won first prize awards for oils (Florida Art Fair); watercolors and lithographs (Wisonsin Art Fair). An inveterate traveler, and honorary president of the National Association of Women Painters, Small was known as the “traveler with a sketch book.”
