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). Amazon Author Page Facebook Page

More than 120 years ago, Gwendolen Overton wrote a short story set at Lake Chapala!

1920s and earlier No Responses »

Oct 072021

Is this the first English-language short story about Lake Chapala?

More by luck than judgment, I recently happened upon a short story titled “The White Rebozo,” which turned out to be set at Lake Chapala. The story was written by Gwendolen Overton and first published more than 120 years ago in 1900.

Gwendolen Overton, c 1903 [Ancestry]

Research into the author’s life showed that she wrote this story when she was just 26 years old. Now forgotten, Overton was something of a literary prodigy, whose short stories had been accepted by major magazines from when she was a mere teenager.

The precise timing and circumstances of her visit to Chapala are unknown. But she certainly made good use of the local knowledge she acquired while there.

In Overton’s story, Nuñez, a Mexican man who likes to practice his English, is chatting with an American acquaintance Lingard about a woman and explains to him that,

… the eyes of women do not show the things which are under them. They are like this lake, I think. It is so blue and beautiful. You would never know that there is a city far down beneath the water, eh?”

Lingard forgot the woman. “A city – under this lake?”

“The Mexican was delighted with his effect and the still further chance of more display of English. “You do not know the story of Lake Chapala, then?” Truly. Under it, so deep, deep under it – it is very profound – there is a city, an Aztec city, perhaps. The lake came, I think, maybe, by an earthquake. It was like Pompeii, but that it was buried by water and not by cinders. Some times, when there is a storm, after it you can find on the shore little things which the water bring up; carved stones, little gods, little spools, like for the embroidery and the sewing; little cups, always of stone, and always very small, so that they shall not be too heavy.

They called to him [Lingard] from the balcony of the hotel and he went away, with a princely sweep of his begilt and besilver sombrero….”

This excerpt is interesting from a number of perspectives. At the end of the nineteenth century, rumors of a submerged city in Lake Chapala were taken sufficiently seriously by distinguished anthropologist Frederick Starr that he undertook a three-month visit to Guadalajara and Lake Chapala over the winter of 1895-1896 to investigate.

The rumors were presumably based in part on the large number of pottery fragments recovered from the lake bed every time the water level was low. Starr was unable to find any additional evidence. But the romantic idea of a lost city (and lost idols) was sufficiently attractive that it brought lots of attention to the lake.

In addition, the reference to a hotel balcony must refer to the Hotel Arzapalo, the only hotel that had a balcony in the region at the end of the nineteenth century. Built by Ignacio Arzapalo, it was the first purpose-built hotel in Chapala. Opened in 1898, and designed for foreign travelers, it was the catalyst that helped transform the village into an important international tourist destination.

Just who was Gwendolen Overton? Born in Kansas on 19 February 1874, Overton was the daughter of a retired US Army captain, Gilbert Edmond Overton (1845–1907), and his wife, Jane Dyson Watkins (1849–1905). Overton had a younger brother, Eugene Overton (1880–1970), with whom she was very close. As a child, she lived at a succession of army posts throughout Arizona and New Mexico; these experiences had a strong influence on her later writing. When Overton was a teenager, the family lived for several years in France.

Even before her 21st birthday, Overton had been published regularly in The Argonaut and was described as having a “marvelous memory and industry,” who “rarely spends over an hour and a half on a story and never rewrites.”

According to her author biography in her novel The Golden Chain (1903):

… when Miss Overton was about twenty-one or twenty-two the family came to live in Los Angeles, California. Here Miss Overton lives when she is not on one of her long periodical trips to the East, to Mexico, to Canada, or elsewhere. She has picked up a good deal of Spanish, as well as an exceptionally fine and accurate knowledge of the French language, of French life, and of the best French literature….

Miss Overton is at her desk by 8.30 every morning, and works until luncheon. She spends her afternoons in recreation. In particular she likes sailing, and much of her playtime is spent on the water in company with her younger brother.”

Her first short stories about Mexico were published several years earlier than “The White Rebozo.” (An earlier version of this profile suggested that a 1894 short story set in La Barca might also be her work; that story, however, is now known to have been written by Edwin Hall Warner.)

In addition to her short stories in magazines such as The Argonaut and Harper’s, Gwendolyn Overton was the author of a number of popular novels, all published by MacMillan, including The Heritage Of Unrest (1901), The Golden Chain (1903), The Captain’s Daughter (1903), Anne Carmel (1903) and Captains of the World (1904).

Overton, who married Melville Wilkinson in Los Angeles on 10 February 1910, was an active speaker and campaigner for gender equality and women’s right to vote. Gwendolyn Overton died in Los Angeles on 15 October 1958.

This profile was updated in February 2024.

Sources

Author bio in The Golden Chain (1903).
Gwendolyn Overton. 1900. “The White Rebozo.” The Argonaut, 23 July 1900, 4.
The Los Angeles Herald, 11 February 1910.
Anon. “Los Angeles’ Authoress.” The San Francisco Call, 10 July 1895, 3.

Comments, corrections or additional material related to any of the writers and artists featured in our series of mini-bios are welcome. Please use the comments feature at the bottom of individual posts, or email us.

Hungarian-Canadian artist Michael Fischer painted Lake Chapala in the 1990s

1990s onwards 2 Responses »

Sep 302021

Hungarian-Canadian artist Michael Fischer visited Lake Chapala several times in the early 1990s, including a lengthy stay one winter at San Juan Cosalá. He was in the final stages of planning to bring a group of artists and art students from Canada for a three-week stay at Lake Chapala when his wife was taken seriously ill. Her subsequent passing derailed all Fischer’s plans for the three-week workshop, which had the endorsement of the Northumberland Art Gallery in Cobourg, Toronto. The workshop was to have included classes taught by Fischer and by Jocotepec-based Austrian artist Georg Rauch.

Michael Fischer was born in Budapest, Hungary, and educated in that city at the City College, Academy of Art and the Orkenyi Strasser School of Art. His most influential teacher was Ödön Márffy, one of Hungary’s leading expressionist painters, a founder member of the group of Eight, and credited with introducing cubism, Fauvism and expressionism to the country.

Michael Fischer. c 1993. Ajijic. Credit: Tony Burton, all rights reserved.

Alongside his own painting, and regular exhibits at art shows in Hungary, Fischer was the art director for the Budapest City Theatre, where he specialized in set design. Fischer was multi-talented and also produced graphic panels and advertising art for trade shows and the movie industry.

A year after the Hungarian Uprising of 1956, Fischer moved to Toronto, Canada. He quickly found his feet, becoming involved in creating advertising, editorial and book illustrations, as well as undertaking commissions, both for private individuals and for institutions such as the Canadian Red Cross, Toronto Dominion Bank, and major insurance firms. He also painted numerous murals for restaurants and private homes. He was represented by Studio 737 Art Gallery (now closed) which was located a short distance north of Tweed, Ontario.

Michael Fischer. c 1993. Laundry in Lake Chapala. Credit: Tony Burton, all rights reserved.

From 1975 to 1987, Fischer taught illustration and composition at George Brown College.

His works are represented in many private and public collections in Canada, the USA and several European countries. “Proficient in all media… his landscapes, still life, figurative compositions and portraits are unique in their execution and excellence.”

Fischer undertook extensive research trips to Latin America and he painted many portraits of native people in Canada and Mexico. He particularly liked Mexico, and the Lake Chapala region, saying that “In Mexico it’s inspiring, the way people live so simply in religious and national customs.”

Fischer died in Toronto on 20 April 2018.

If anyone can supply more details about Michael Fischer’s life and work, please get in touch.

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.

Erik Erikson: Identity Crisis in Ajijic in 1957

1950s No Responses »

Sep 232021

Erik Homburger Erikson (1902-1994), who coined the term ‘identity crisis’, spent several weeks in Ajijic in 1957 while writing Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and History, published the following year.

Erikson had been persuaded that Ajijic was a quiet place in which to write by Helen Kirtland and her husband Dr Larry Hartmus. After an exchange of letters, Erikson ended up renting the “cottage” on Calle Independencia belonging to the Sendis family, whose son, Gustavo, was a super talented painter and guitarist.

Erikson, born in Germany to Danish parents, had become a US citizen after moving across the Atlantic. He became world famous for his ideas on identity and his contributions to the field of psychoanalysis and human development. Among Erikson’s best-known books are Observations on the Yurok: Childhood and World Image (1943), Childhood and Society (1950), Identity and the Life Cycle (1959), and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Gandhi’s Truth: On the Origins of Militant Nonviolence (1969).

There are two references to Ajijic in Young Man Luther, one right at the beginning and the other at the end. In the preface, Erikson acknowledges the help of Larry Hartmus, who “read some of the medieval Latin with me in Ajijic.” In the epilogue, this paragraph serves to sum up how Erikson saw the village, and the impossible-to-ignore influence of religion:

“I wrote this book in Mexico, on a mirador overlooking a fishing village on Lake Chapala. What remains of this village’s primeval inner order goes back to pre-Christian times. But at odd times, urgent church bells call the populace to remembrance. The church is now secular property, only lent to the Cura; and the priest’s garb is legally now a uniform to be worn only in church or when engaged in such business as bringing the host to the dying. Yet, at night, with defensive affront, the cross on the church tower is the only neon light in town. The vast majority of the priest’s customers are women, indulging themselves fervently in the veneration of the diminutive local Madonna statue, which, like those in other communities, is a small idol representing little-girlishness and pure motherhood, rather that the tragic parent of the Savior, who, in fact is little seen. The men for the most part look on, willing to let the women have their religion as part of women’s world, but themselves bound on secular activity. The young ones tend toward the not too distant city of Guadalajara, where the churches and cathedrals are increasingly matched in height and quiet splendor by apartment houses and business buildings.” [266]

Source

Erik Erikson. 1958. Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalyses and History. New York: W.W. Norton.

American artist Hazel Hannell worked in Ajijic in the 1980s

1980s No Responses »

Sep 162021

Noted American artist Hazel Hannell was already in her eighties when she chose to spend the winter months in Ajijic. Hannell became a regular visitor for several years in the 1980s. This charming costumbrista woodblock from those years was sold on eBay. Hannell continued to paint and produce artworks until she was 103 years old.

Hazel Hannell. c 1985. “By Lake Chapala.” Woodblock.

Mary Hazel Johnson (later Hannel) was born on 31 December 1895 in LaGrange, Illinois, trained as a secretary, and studied art at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago and the Emma Church School of Art in Chicago. She was an extraordinarily versatile artist. In her lengthy career she had success in a variety of media, from watercolor painting, woodblocks and red clay pottery, to tiles, murals and commercial fabric and wallpaper designs for Marshall Field.

Hazel celebrated her 28th birthday in 1923 by marrying Finnish-American artist Vinol Hannell (1896-1964). After visiting artist friends in Furnessville, Indiana, the couple built a summer home there, before moving there permanently in the 1930s.

[Coincidentally, Furnessville has a particularly strong connection to Lake Chapala. Dwight Furness, a member of the family after whom Furnessville is named, settled in Mexico in the late nineteenth century and built the famous Hotel Ribera Castellanos on a lakeside estate between Ocotlán and Jamay in the early 1900s.]

Hazel Hannell was an activist in the suffragette movement, and she and her husband were both active environmentalists and instrumental in the 1950s in helping to preserve the Indiana Dunes. The Hannells also served as leaders in the No-Jury Society and the Chicago Society of Artists, and helped found the Association of Artists and Craftsmen of Porter County.

Hannell was accompanied on her trips to Ajijic by several other noteworthy artists, including Harriet Rex Smith (1921-2017), Elizabeth Murray and Jan Sullivan (1921-2016). She moved to Oregon in 1988 to live and work with Rex Smith, and died there on 6 February 2002 at the age of 106.

Hannell often chose not to sign her work. At about the time of her final visit to Lake Chapala, she was quoted in a newspaper interview as saying: “Hamada, a Japanese master potter, says you really ought not have to sign things, your works should be recognizably yours.”

Hannell’s woodblock art was featured in the Chicago Society of Artists annual calendar, and her varied works have been shown in major exhibits at the Brauer Museum of Art (Valparaiso University), Dankook University, Indianapolis Museum of Art, Northern Indiana Art Salon, Gary Southern Shores Exhibit, Dunes Art Foundation, and South Bend Art Center. The Valparaiso University has numerous works by Hannell and her husband in its permanent collection.

Sources

Biography from Brauer Museum Of Art
Dani Dodge. 1996. “While the Light is Good, Hazel Hannell, 100, Paints.” Seattle Times, 21 January 1996.
Margaret L Willis. 1987 “Artist’s Story Is a Tale of the Dunes.” The Chesterton Tribune, 14 August 1987, 4.

Talented artist John Thompson lived in Jocotepec in the mid-1960s

1960s, 1970s 2 Responses »

Sep 092021

The accomplished and enigmatic artist John Thompson (1929-1988) lived in Jocotepec from about 1963 to 1968.

Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, on 20 July 1929, Thompson landed in Jocotepec by chance, having accepted a ride to Mexico with Miriam Bisbee, who was on her way to visit friends there: Peter and Nancy Spencer then managing the La Quinta hotel. (Apparently, Miriam was completely besotted with Nancy and hoped to tear her away from Peter! She was only partially successful; the Spencers later ran Posada Ajijic for a short time before returning to the US “for personal reasons” in September 1965.)

John Thompson.

When photographer John Frost and his wife, novelist Joan Van Every Frost, first arrived in Jocotepec in 1966, they learned that John Thompson was considered the painter in the town. Thompson had left working for the defense industry in southern California, and his wife, to live in Jocotepec, where he rented a place across the street from the historic La Quinta Inn.

Thompson became a good friend of the Frosts and of several other artistic Jocotepec residents, including painter and muralist Tom Brudenell, and photographer Helmuth Wellenhoffer and his wife, Antonia. Thompson was also good friends with Peter Paul Huf and his wife, Eunice (Hunt) Huf, who lived in Ajijic from 1967 to 1972.

Thompson was able to subsist in Jocotepec only because he had two small trust funds which gave him a combined $40 a month to live on. This was supplemented by the occasional check from the US: before he left, he had sold several paintings by offering purchasers the chance to pay in installments, provided they sent the funds to Mexico.

Quoting John Frost, Thompson—and his then girlfriend, Gertha—were “pillars of the underground community.” Thompson was slight of build with a full red beard. He dressed in khaki, and his menu was structured around a typical Mexican working man’s diet. Beer in hand, he would rail at length against the evils of plastics and the modern world; he was a regular at Ramon’s bar on the north side of the plaza, the focal point of Jocotepec social life at the time.

Artist and Andreas Wellenhoffer with Jocotepec painting dated 1965.

Artist (rt) and Andreas Wellenhoffer with Jocotepec painting dated 1965.

Gayle Thompson was a 17-year-old student at the six-week University of Arizona summer school in Guadalajara when she first met Thompson through a mutual friend, Marilyn Hodges. Hodges was opening an art gallery in Guadalajara and offered Thompson free room and board if he helped paint and decorate the building (8 de Julio #878). Among the prominent Lakeside artists who held solo exhibits at the 8 de Julio gallery during its short lifespan were John Frost, Tom Brudenell, Joe Vines, Peter Huf, Eunice Hunt, Robert Neathery and Georg Rauch.

Gayle’s enrollment in summer school was her pretext for having a full year in Mexico. Having a Mexican boyfriend, she rebuffed Thompson’s initial advances. The charismatic, intelligent and stubborn Thompson, however, was persistent and determined. When Gayle returned to the US, preparing to enter college in New York, Thompson left his belongings in Mexico and hastened north in pursuit. He traveled north in the company of Dave Bennett, another Jocotepec resident, who, coincidentally, was from Monterey, California, and knew Gayle’s parents. Gayle again spurned his advances, so Thompson retreated to Mexico. But he reappeared again a few months later and this time, finally, Gayle conceded defeat.

John Thompson. Untitled. Jocotepec, 1965.

Resistance overcome, Thompson still had the problem of getting all his paintings and possessions back from Mexico. Bennett stepped in and persuaded Thompson to buy and convert an old school bus for this mission. The school bus made two trips to Mexico before being rear-ended somewhere in the US and written off.

After John and Gayle married, they lived for five years on the coast of Croatia (then known as Yugoslavia), and another decade in Europe, before they returned to the US. During this time Thompson was able to visit his old friends, Peter Paul Huf and his wife, Eunice Hunt, at their home in Bavaria, southern Germany.

Thompson was a self-taught artist. Tom Brudenell, who met Thompson in the late 1960s, told me that Thompson’s local artistic patron at Lake Chapala had been Marian Powell, a wealthy American who owned a lakefront home in Ajijic. Gayle Thompson told me how Powell would sometimes lend John her huge Cadillac, but that she (Gayle) felt overly conspicuous and self-conscious whenever he took her for a drive.

As for Thompson’s art, Joan Frost considered that Thompson “promoted himself as a painter of the Miro school. His works were colorful with lots of mysterious figures floating about in the air above towns like Joco.” [1]

John Thompson. Untitled.

However, as Gayle explained to me, and judging by those paintings that have survived (while living in France the artist built a bonfire and destroyed most of his work), his paintings were far more akin to Chagall than Miro. The paintings are darker in tone and subject matter than those of Chagall, more brooding, with elements of the macabre and surrealism.

Thompson was never very enthusiastic about holding exhibitions, believing that artists did what they did out of a sense of purpose not financial needs, just as those who held down regular jobs did so out of necessity not enjoyment.

The only solo show he is known to have held while in Mexico was a two-week show at Posada Ajijic in the summer of 1965. He was in illustrious company. The three other artists exhibiting there that summer were Charles Littler (who exhibited widely and taught at the University of Arizona), Dick Poole (professor of art in Pasadena), and the Black American Beat artist Arthur Monroe. [2]

Thompson died in San Bernardino, California, on 3 September 1988.

References

[1] Joan Frost, writing in Ajijic, 500 years of adventures (Thomas Paine Chapter NSDAR, 2011).
[2] Guadalajara Reporter, 5 August 1965.

Acknowledgments

This is a greatly revised version of a post first published 6 August 2015. My heartfelt thanks to Gayle Thompson for sharing details of her former husband’s life and photos of his work. Images reproduced courtesy of Gayle Thompson and Andreas Wellenhoffer.

Dr Leo Stanley described San Luis Soyatlán and Tuxcueca in 1937

1930s 4 Responses »

Sep 092021

The following excerpts come from the detailed account written by Dr. Leo Leonidas Stanley (1886-1976) after visiting Lake Chapala in October 1937. (For ease of reading, accents and italics have been added and spelling standardized.)

Note that early descriptions (in English or Spanish) of the villages on the south shore of the lake are exceedingly rare, making Stanley’s account especially valuable.

San Luis Soyatlán

Our next objective was San Luis Soyatlán, the Cathedral spires of which town we could see at a long distance. In the flat Mexican villages, the church always stands out prominently. There were a number of smaller vi11ages, at which we stopped for a few moments, and at one place we were able to get some beer. The Mexican girl who served us was a rather pretty señorita, and evidently a friend of Ramón’s. She had not seen him for several weeks, and greeted him in a very friendly manner. As Ramón was not married, Alonzo and I began to josh him a little and accused him of liking the girls. This seemed to please him very much.

Leo Stanley. 1937. Post Office on south shore of Lake Chapala. Reproduced by kind permission of California Historical Society.

In going through one village, we saw the post office. On a blackboard in front of it were the names of those for whom a letter was waiting. This did not seem to be a very bad idea.

Far out in the country we came across a young Mexican who was hunting. He was looking for doves, or pa1omas. He had a muzzle-loading shotgun, and carried his powder and caps in a container made of a cow’s horn. It was an interesting old weapon, and was made in 1850. The date was on the barrel. He offered to sell it to me for ten pesos, which is about three dollars, but it would have been difficult to transport, and I had to refuse this old relic. [56-57]

At this point, Stanley realized that his original plan to ride all the way around Lake Chapala was impossible in the time he had available. He decided to stay overnight in San Luis Soyatlán and then ride on the next morning to Tuxcueca in time to catch the daily boat to Chapala, leaving Ramón to “retrace our steps with the animals.”

They reached San Luis by mid-afternoon and found somewhere to stay. While the others finished their meal in a fonda which had “large quantities of flies,” Stanley strolled down to the lake shore:

It was a very pretty afternoon, and off in the distance across the lake toward San Juan could be seen a peculiar phenomenon. By landslides and erosions in the mountains, the natural form of a spread eagle was displayed in brown against the green verdure. This marking could be seen very distinctly from the southern shore of the lake.

Because of road building activities around San Luis there are a number of new trucks being used. One of the drivers had directed his new Chevrolet truck into the water along the shallow margins of the lake, and was giving it a very thorough cleaning. He took as much care of his truck as the ordinary private chauffeur of his owner’s limousine. As he polished, he sang, and seemed to enjoy the occupation very much. [58-59]

Upon returning, I stopped at a number of the Spanish houses along the street, and there saw the women and some of the children weaving material for hats, or sombreros. A very tough reed is used. It is woven into strips about half and inch wide, the women work very deftly with their fingers, and area able to braid the reeds without even looking at them. These strips are then rolled up as much as one would roll a tape, and are then sent to a central shop where the hat maker forms them into the sombreros. This headgear is very durable, and serves the purpose of keeping off the rain as well as the tropical sun.

The following morning (13 October 1937) they rode on towards Tuxcueca:

We rode on out through the town, and toward the east… During the middle of the forenoon, we arrived at an adobe school house which overlooked the lake. We went in and found the maestra, or teacher, quite friendly and highly pleased that anyone should care to visit her school. She apologized for the appearance of the place, but it really was quite tidy and comfortable. The children were delighted to line up for their pictures. One child had absolutely no clothing on at all, but the others had enough to cover their nakedness. [63]

Leo Stanley. 1937. Shore of Lake Chapala. Reproduced by kind permission of California Historical Society.

When they reached Tuxcueca, Stanley was asked if he would see two girls who were quite ill:

It was about two cuadras, or blocks, away. The captain of the boat said that he would hold the launch for me. This house was a make-shift hospital, and run by a practical nurse.

There were two girls in a very dark room, one aged seventeen, and the other about eleven. Both were ill with pneumonia, and the small one’s lungs were almost entirely congested. She was comatose, and I felt that the end was not far away. There was very little that I could do under the circumstances, but I gave them some instructions, which they seemed to appreciate. They asked for a bill for my services, but of course I told them that there was no charge.

While we were waiting on the stone pier for the departure of the boar, four or five burros were driven to the eater’s edge to unload their burdens. These little animals each had four or five immense planks which they had carried from forests across the mountains. Each load must have weighed between three and four hundred pounds.

A few minutes later, Stanley and Alonzo took the gasoline boat—described as “about forty feet long, fairly narrow, and made of metal”— back to Chapala, arriving just in time to enjoy a late lunch.

Source

Leo L. Stanley. “Mixing in Mexico”, 1937, two volumes. Leo L. Stanley Papers, MS 2061, California Historical Society. Volume 2.

Acknowledgments

My heartfelt thanks to Frances Kaplan, Reference & Outreach Librarian of the California Historical Society, for supplying photos of Stanley’s account of his time at Lake Chapala. I am very grateful to Ms Kaplan and the California Historical Society for permission to reproduce the extracts and photos used in this post.

American journalist Edgar Ellinger described Ajijic in 1953

1950s No Responses »

Aug 262021

Edgar Mitchell Ellinger junior was in his mid-forties in 1953 when he wrote about “the small, captivating town of Ajijic” for the Arizona Republic under the title, “Mexican Town Offers Peaceful Way of Life.”

Edgar Ellinger. 1953. Ajijic church. Credit: Arizona Republic.

Ellinger was born in New York on Christmas Day 1906. After attending Horace Mann School for Boys, he became a Wall Street securities analyst and financial executive. His (first) wife was the NBC vocal star Sarah Schermerhorn, better known by her performing name of Sally Singer. The couple married at Ellinger’s home in New York City on 27 March 1936.

In 1945, Ellinger was the executive vice-president of the Jefferson-Travis Corporation, which specialized in radio equipment and the continuous sound recording field.

To quote The New York Times, Ellinger “left Wall Street in 1947 to live in Sedona, Arizona, where he raised quarter-horses and became a writer and photographer.” Ellinger published articles in several publications, including Desert Magazine in Palm Desert, California.

Here are two excerpts from his piece about Ajijic for the Arizona Republic:

Today, this small fishing village throbs with the interesting and varied activities of a growing international population—attracted by a satisfying climate, inexpensive living, and an atmosphere of “mañana.” The “urgency of life,” so well known to Americans, is strangely lacking.
Artists, writers, musicians, and just “plain folks” have settled in this picturesque haven. Accommodations are available in the two hotels in addition to about 40 renovated old houses owned or rented by non-Mexican.

After commenting on the diverse foreign population, which included “an attractive red-haired ex-violinist and his beautiful wife” and “a world-traveled and world-weary Englishman named H. B. Thompson,” Ellinger explained that:

Ajijic has achieved its popularity in part through the efforts of two Englishmen who… wrote a widely-read book called “Village in the Sun,” which extols the naive simplicity of this harmonious settlement. Neill James has also written extensively on the same subject and occupies a delightful home which encloses wide patios outlined by myriads of brilliant flowers. She grows Japanese silkworms and weaves the silk into blouses beautifully hand-embroidered by a handful of native women who work on the premises.”

Ellinger died at his home in Mountain View, California, on 10 June 1974.

Sources

Daily News (New York City), 28 March 1936, 174.
Edgar Ellinger, Jr. 1953. “Mexican Town Offers Peaceful Way of Life.” Arizona Republic, 2 August 1953, Section 2, 8.
New York Times. “Edgar Ellinger Jr.” (obituary). New York Times, 12 June 1974, 48.

Charlotte Wax painted in Ajijic in 1947-48

1940s No Responses »

Aug 192021

I would love to learn more about Charlotte Speight, aka “Mrs Melvin S. Wax,” who held an exhibit of paintings and drawings of Ajijic at the Carpenter Art galleries at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, in July 1947.

The exhibition included “six oils, several pen and ink sketches and a gouache, depicting scenes in Ajijic, a primitive Tarascan Indian village bordering Lake Chapala, where Mr and Mrs Wax lived last winter.”

Charlotte Frances Speight (of British heritage) had married Melvin Sumner Wax the previous year and the couple had spent several months in Mexico as a wedding trip.

Charlotte Wax and her painting “Desolation”. Chicago Tribune, 9 September 1956

Born in Berkeley, California, on 15 April 1919, Charlotte graduated from George School in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and then attended Swarthmore for a couple of years, before studying art in Paris, France. She also studied art at the Yale School of Fine Arts and the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills.

She married Melvin Wax, a journalist, on on 29 September 1946, and their daughter Martha Anne was born on 25 July the following year.

A semi-illegible news clipping strongly suggests that Charlotte Wax exhibited some works in a joint show in January 1947 at the Villa Montecarlo in Chapala. Other artists with works in the show included Charmin Schlossman, Ernesto Linares, Muriel Lytton Bernard and Dick Kitchin.

By the 1960s the family was living in Sausalito, California, where Charlotte taught art at Dominican Upper School for about four years and did set design and costumes for Sausalito Little Theater and the Marin Shakespeare Festival. At about the time her husband was elected mayor of Sausalito, Charlotte began studying sculpture at the San Francisco Art Institute, from where she graduated with a bachelor of fine arts degree in sculpture in 1967.

Please get in touch if you have any more information about this artist or examples of her work.

Sources

Daily Independent Journal, San Rafael, California, 5 June 1967, 13.
Rutland Daily Herald (Rutland, Vermont), 26 July 1947, 7.

Dr Leo Stanley stayed overnight in Jocotepec in 1937

1930s No Responses »

Aug 122021

On 11 October, Stanley and his two Mexican companions, José Alonzo and Ramón, rode from Chapala to Jocotepec, where they found somewhere to stay overnight and then went out for a walk:

It was only a block to the plaza, with its bandstand and garden. There was quite a crowd of people walking about, and in front of a building, evidently a show piece, the nondescript band was playing. Around the edges of the plaza were numerous small stands where oranges, bananas, and various fruit, together with soft drinks, were being vended. We went to a corner restaurant, or fonda. It was far from clean, but was the best that the town furnished, flies were in preponderance, but after our long ride of about twenty miles the first day, we were fairly hungry. Alonzo and Ramón ate the full bill of fare, but I was satisfied with some tortillas, hot beans, a little stewed meat, and plenty of water which I ordered to be boiled. The boys evidently were satisfied with their repasts.

Leo Stanley. 1937. Presidencia, Jocotepec. Reproduced by kind permission of California Historical Society.

On this night there was a show in town, and on the street corner was a little Mexican who, through a megaphone, announced to the assembled groups in the plaza that this great spectacle was to take place, that in the show was a renowned professor who could read the past, present and future, that this show was one which no one could afford to miss. Its spieler advised that, instead of spending their money for fruit and sweets in the plaza, they should spend it going to this world renowned show. The little fellow really put in a great deal of effort persuading the townspeople to come. In the meantime, the band gave forth its music. [49-50]

The following morning (12 October 1937) the three men were up and about even before it got light:

We went out into the starlight toward the plaza, in order to buy some feed for the horses. A few people were already on the streets, but the feed store did not open until six—thirty. We spent the next half an hour in our room by candlelight, adjusting the stirrups and making the saddles more comfortable. Upon going to the plaza again just before daylight we met some Mexicans who told us that a man had been killed the night before, and that his body was lying in the patio of the jail.

We went over to the Presidencia, and there we met the Comandante. Alonzo told him who we were, and that we would like to see the defunto or dead man. There was a squad of about ten Mexicans in the patio, dressed in their broad sombreros, and covered by serapes. They each had a rifle and really looked quite dangerous, and none too careful with their firearms….

Leo Stanley. 1937. Jail, Jocotepec. Reproduced by kind permission of California Historical Society.

… we went into the patio of the jail, and there found sprawled out on his back, the blood—covered body of a short, middle-aged Mexican. His large sombrero, covered with blood, lay on the flagstones near him. He wore white soiled pantaloons rolled to his knees, and a soiled shirt open at the front. He had a large cut over his left wrist which had almost disarticulated the joint. Over his breastbone and through it was a deep stab wound which had gone entirely through the breastplate and entered the heart. In addition to this, he had been shot through the head. His assailant wanted to be sure that he was dead…..

With this rather auspicious, and perhaps awe-inspiring beginning of our second day in the country, we felt it would be well to go over to the fonda and have a bite of breakfast. [51-52]

Stanley also describes the family who had been their overnight hosts:

All of the family at the home of Señora Theresa Medina at Calle Matamoros No. 6, were awake and interested in talking to us. There were three very bright and alert girls, and four or five boys of school age. I took a number of pictures of them, and talked with them for some time. Having been told that I was a doctor, almost all of them wished to have me prescribe or examine…. The three pretty girls had finished all the schooling which they could acquire, and were waiting until some village youth might claim them in marriage. One of them, a rather tall and intelligent señorita, said, however, that she was not at all interested in marriage, that she did not like children, and that she hoped to get away from Jocotepec at her first opportunity. They were all quite happy, and were greatly entertained by talking with the gringo from Los Estados Unidos. [53-54]

Source

Leo L. Stanley. “Mixing in Mexico”, 1937, two volumes. Leo L. Stanley Papers, MS 2061, California Historical Society. Volumes 1 and 2.

Acknowledgments

My heartfelt thanks to Frances Kaplan, Reference & Outreach Librarian of the California Historical Society, for supplying photos of Stanley’s account of his time at Lake Chapala. I am very grateful to Ms Kaplan and the California Historical Society for permission to reproduce the extracts and photos used in this post.

Albert Alfredson painted at Lake Chapala in the early 1950s

1950s 3 Responses »

Aug 052021

Little is known about Albert Alfredson’s visit to Lake Chapala, though a realist oil and crayon painting by him entitled “Humble Homes” with the notation “At Lake Chapala Mex,” and believed to date from about 1950, was offered for sale on eBay in July 2021.

Albert Alfredson. c 1950. “Humble Homes.” Image from eBay.

Alfredson was born in Chicago, Illinois, in 1907 and died in 1977.

He studied at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts, The Art Institute of Chicago, the Palette & Chisel Academy of Fine Arts, and studied portraiture with Wellington J. Reynolds.

Alfredson was a member of numerous art groups, including the Brown County Art Guild Gallery of Nashville, Indiana; the Brownsville Art League in Texas; the American Artists Professional League; and the Oak Park Art League.

He was President of the Palette & Chisel Academy of Fine Arts from 1962-64, and was the Artist Director of the Municipal Art League of Chicago.

The mysterious author “A Gringo” visited Chapala in the 1880s

1920s and earlier No Responses »

Jul 292021

“A Gringo”—an English-speaking traveler about whom very little is known—arrived in Mexico in 1883. He was an observant and enthusiastic visitor. In the preface to his book Through The Land of the Aztecs or Life and Travel in Mexico (published in 1892), “A Gringo” states that his objective “is simply to give a plain account of several years experience in the country, to show its recent progress and to enable the reader to judge the future,” based on “prolonged periods of travel over the greater part of its territory, by rail, stagecoach and steamer, on horseback and in canoes [which] have afforded me exceptional facilities for studying the country and all classes of the people.” Contemporary adverts for the book claimed it was based on “seven years’ life and travel in Mexico.”

Who was “A Gringo”?

In a previous version of this post “A Gringo” was identified as Arthur St. Hill. This identification echoed my introductory comments to a short extract of his work published in Lake Chapala Through the Ages: an anthology of travellers’ tales (2008).

The attribution of the pen name “A Gringo” to Arthur St. Hill was based on the bibliographic details given for Through The Land of the Aztecs in the catalogue of the Bodleian Library of the University of Oxford (and subsequently used by several booksellers offering secondhand copies of the book).

I am now certain that this attribution is incorrect. Digging into genealogical databases reveals only two individuals named “Arthur St. Hill” living at about the right time. One was born in Barbados in the West Indies, and the other in the UK.

The Barbados-born Arthur St. Hill (Arthur Bertram St Hill) lived from 1872 to 1911. He was a cricketer and the author of a report on the Barbados health system published in 1896; he has no obvious connection to Mexico.

As an adult, the other Arthur St. Hill (1878-1969) lived in Bristol, UK, and worked as a structural engineer specializing in the use of steel. In any event, given that Through The Land of the Aztecs is a book based on several years of residence in Mexico in the 1880s, when Arthur was only a child, he clearly could not have been its author.

However, his father—Charles Manwell St Hill, born in Trinidad in 1849—does have provable connections to Mexico. At the time of the 1881 UK census, Charles, then aged 32, lived in London and worked as a commercial clerk. He had married Louisa Le Maitre de Rabodanges in March 1871 and the couple had five children. Their eldest child, Mabel, was born in Sevilla, Spain. Her siblings were Eva, born in Calais, France; Hilda and Arthur, both born in Mortlake, Surrey; and Houghton Oliver, born in Middlesex.

The 1891 UK census lists Louisa St. Hill as head of the household; she is living in Bristol with her five children and her mother. This census describes Luisa as “married” and does not mention Charles, who was presumably living in Mexico at the time. The next census, a decade later, lists Louisa as “widowed,” so Charles must have died between 1891 and 1901. The notice of Arthur’s marriage in 1911 lists his father as “the late Charles Manwell St. Hill, banker, of Mexico.” [Western Daily Press, 16 June 1911] A family tree on Ancestry.com, which states that Charles died in Mexico, provides no further details or sources.

Based on these admittedly scant details, I believe that the likely author of Through The Land of the Aztecs was Charles Manwell St. Hill. The misattribution of authorship to Arthur St. Hill in the Bodleian Library and elsewhere may have come about because Arthur registered his inherited rights to the book after his father’s death.

Through the Land of the Aztecs

One contemporary review called the work an “interesting little book descriptive of life and travel in Mexico from 1883 until a recent date,” and congratulated the author “on the felicitous manner in which he has performed his task.” The reviewer found that the book was “a pleasantly written handbook” though it lacked a map, an omission that “is really unpardonable.”

“A Gringo”‘s visit to Chapala definitely took place prior to 1889, though it was not published until a few years later (1892). The author starts by summarizing his trip to Chapala, which would have taken close to 12 hours:

Taking a carriage, which ran weekly between Guadalajara and Chapala, a town on the border of the lake of that name, I set forth one morning, and, after climbing a hill, from which a grand view of the city and surrounding countryside was obtained, I reached Chapala.”

He provides only the briefest of descriptions of the village of Chapala, commenting on the inn where he stayed and the moonlight on the lake:

Chapala lies at the foot of a hill, overlooking the lake, the waters of which lapped the little garden of the inn where I put up. After a supper, with the agreeable addition of a bottle of lager beer, I spent the evening chatting with the pleasant old people who kept the inn, and enjoying the still night as I watched the moonbeams playing on the lake, on which loomed the black shape of the paddle steamer that was to take me tomorrow across its waters.”

“A Gringo” gives us a rare description of taking a trip aboard the Libertad (“Freedom”) paddle steamer around the lake to the various lakeshore villages. The San Francisco-built Libertad had been brought to Lake Chapala in 1868 by the Compañía de Navegación por Vapor en el Lago de Chapala (Lake Chapala Steamboat Company), whose managing director was a transplanted Scotsman, Mr. Duncan Cameron.

It was a wonderful old tub, evidently built in the days when shipbuilding was “in its infancy, judging from its uncouth shape and old timbers, that creaked at every movement of the paddles. Our voyage took in several villages round the lake. At each stopping place we would land on the little mud jetties to suck a piece of sugar-cane or quaff a festive glass of tequila. At one of the villages a sad accident has since occurred; the crazy old steamer toppled over with her living freight of over two hundred passengers just as she reached the landing-stage, nearly all being drowned… One heroic American, employed on the Central Railroad, who was on board at the time, succeeded in saving the lives of sixteen by his pluck and great swimming powers.”

The tragic accident referred to by “A Gringo” occurred on Sunday 24 March 1889 when the steamship capsized at Ocotlán. Even though this took place only six meters from the shore, 28 people were drowned. The American referred to by “A Gringo” was the Railway Superintendent, Mr. C. E. Halbert.

“A Gringo” also noted that efforts had been made to exploit an underwater petroleum deposit at Lake Chapala:

At one place the captain called my attention to a spot where the water was bubbling, and told me that at the bottom of the lake there was a petroleum well. Although efforts had been made to utilize it, they had hitherto been unsuccessful.”

“A Gringo” disembarked from the Libertad at La Barca, from where he continued his wanderings around Mexico.

If anyone can supply any additional biographical details about “A Gringo”, please get in touch!

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Note

This an updated and revised version of a post first published 11 June 2020.
All excerpts are taken from chapter 35 of my Lake Chapala through the ages: an anthology of travelers’ tales.

Source

“A Gringo.” 1892. Through The Land of the Aztecs Or Life and Travel In Mexico. London: Sampson, Low, Marston & Company.

Austrian sculptor Leonie Trager lived at Lake Chapala in the early 1970s

1970s No Responses »

Jul 222021

Austrian sculptor Leonie Trager lived and worked in the Lake Chapala area in the early 1970s. She held a solo exhibition in the Galería del Lago, Ajijic, in 1973, when she was living in Chula Vista (mid-way between Ajijic and Chapala).

Leonie Trager: Exhibit invitation, 1973

The catalog for that exhibition includes a brief biography stating that she had graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, Austria and had “worked with great sculptor Ivan Mestrovic” in Dubrovnik (Croatia, then Yugoslavia). She apparently held several solo shows in London, UK, and also exhibited in the New York area, while her works were prized by private collectors in the USA and elsewhere.

Very few of her pieces have appeared at auction.

Her solo exhibit in Ajijic opened on 22 April 1973 and was comprised of 32 works, mainly sculpted in clay, but also using willow, jacaranda, pink alabaster, yellow Carrara marble, Indian jade, mimosa and mahogany. Titles of pieces exhibited on that occasion include “Moondance”, “Snowflake”, “Sensuousness”, “Sleeping Boy”, “Flower Girl”, “Tzaddik”, “Satyr”, “Cleopatra”, “Flight” and “Despair”.

Her “Mothers and Daughters” limestone sculpture (see image below), reported to be 14″ in height, was also shown in that show.

Leonie Trager: Mothers and daughters. Limestone. Exhibited in 1973.

Very little is currently known about Leonie Trager’s personal life. According to her gravestone in Tucson, Trager was born in 1922 (presumably in Vienna, Austria) and died in 1984.

Her husband was Hanns Trager (1900-1989). Hanns was born in Vienna on 25 April 1900 and was living in London, UK, in 1939, where he was working as a textile salesman.

In June 1940, shortly after the start of the second world war, Hanns was subject to an internment hearing . He declined the offer of repatriation and, to avoid internment, was shipped off to Australia on the SS Dunera. He appears to have remained in Australia until the end of the war in 1945, when he returned to London to be temporarily interned on arrival.

The following year he married Leopoldine (“Leonie”) Trager in Hampstead. In August 1948 the couple left the UK for New York, on board the Queen Elizabeth, with 2 trunks and 13 suitcases between them, to start a new life in the USA. By then Hanns was describing himself as a designer.

It is unclear whether or not Hanns accompanied Leonie during her time living in Mexico. The couple were certainly traveling together when they returned from Venezuela to the port of Baltimore in 1960. Hanns’ last known address was in Tucson, Arizona.

This is an updated version of a post first published on 16 July 2015.

Physician Leo Stanley kept a detailed diary of his 1937 trip to Lake Chapala

1930s No Responses »

Jul 152021

Dr. Leo Leonidas Stanley (1886-1976) visited Guadalajara and Lake Chapala in October 1937 and kept a detailed diary of his trip. Stanley was the physician for the California State Prison at San Quentin from 1913 to 1951, and was a meticulous observer. Fortunately for us, his detailed typewritten account of his trip, illustrated by dozens of superb photographs, survives to this day in the archives of the California Historical Society.

Stanley was attending the annual conference of the Pacific Association of Railway Surgeons, held that year in Guadalajara. While in the city he met up with José Alonzo, a former San Quentin inmate who had worked as his medical assistant during his incarceration. The two men had exchanged letters after Alonzo’s parole in 1932. Alonzo had returned to Mexico and settled with his wife in San Juan de los Lagos. Also in 1932, Stanley had visited the newly-opened Penal de Oblatos in Guadalajara. After the 1937 conference, Alonzo accompanied Stanley on his trip to Lake Chapala.

Aside: The murals painted later in San Quentin prison have a direct link to Lake Chapala: see Inside job: Alfredo Santos, muralist and painter.

Just getting to the lake posed its own challenges in 1937. One photograph shows part of a timetable for buses from Guadalajara to Chapala. The first truly regular bus service to Chapala had only just been established by the Cooperativa Autotransportes Guadalajara Chapala y Anexas, S.C.L. (now Autotransportes Guadalajara Chapala, S.A. de C.V.). The company ran hourly buses each way from 7.00am to 8.00pm. Passengers paid $1.50 (pesos) one-way, $2.50 return. [1]

Leo Stanley. 1937. Guadalajara-Chapala bus timetable. Photo reproduced by kind permission of California Historical Society.

Leo Stanley. 1937. Guadalajara-Chapala bus timetable. Reproduced by kind permission of California Historical Society.

On 11 October 1937, Alonzo and Stanley caught the 9.00am bus for Chapala. The crowded, ramshackle, bus broke down part-way there and the passengers were asked to get out and push. Eventually the next bus arrived and everyone was able to get to Chapala in time for lunch.

Alonzo and Stanley hired a guide (Ramón), a horse and two mules so that they could ride west to Jocotepec and then explore part of the lake’s southern shore. Stanley quickly realized that,

“The road, or trail, around the lake was very rough and narrow, and evidently was used only for burros and oxen. It certainly could not have been used for any vehicle.” Stanley did not have time to stop in Ajijic as he rode along the track that skirted the lake, from village to village, to stay overnight in Jocotepec. He did remark, however, on the many groves of papaya, and mangoes, fields of corn, and small plots of beans and garbanzas (chickpeas) that he saw near Ajijic, and the number of campesinos who were cultivating their plots with animal-drawn wooden ploughs.” [2]

We look more closely at selected portions of Stanley’s trip in two further posts:

But just who was Leo Stanley? Born in Oregon, Stanley was raised in San Luis Obispo County, California. He was awarded his bachelor’s degree at Stanford University in 1903, and during later studies at Cooper Medical College, he served his residency at San Quentin State Prison. In 1913, he was appointed the prison’s Chief Physician and Surgeon, a position he held —with the exception of the war years— until 1951. Stanley’s experiments on prisoners at San Quentin, especially those involving testicular transplants, were highly controversial and attracted national media attention. [3]

Stanley was an inveterate traveler and saw, and wrote about, many parts of the world. In the mid-1950s he was the ship’s doctor for various luxury cruises. Wherever he went, Stanley took a keen interest in the local prisons and work camps.

Stanley wrote several books, including Men at Their Worst (1940), My Most Unforgettable Convicts (1967), and San Miguel at the Turn of the Century (1976).

He spent the final years of his life writing and working on his farm in Marin County, California.

References

[1] Javier Medina Loera. 1991. “Camino a Chapala: del trazo de carretas a la autopista.” El Informador, 17 March 1991, 37.
[2] Leo L. Stanley. “Mixing in Mexico”, 1937, two volumes. Leo L. Stanley Papers, MS 2061, California Historical Society. Vol 1, 46.
[3] Google “The Buck Kelly case” and see Ethan Blue, “The Strange Career of Leo Stanley: Remaking Manhood and Medicine at San Quentin State Penitentiary, 1913–1951″ in Pacific Historical Review, Vol. 78, No. 2 (May 2009), 210-241.

Acknowledgments

Watercolorist Paul Fischer (1864-1932)

1920s and earlier 25 Responses »

Jul 082021

German painter Paul “Pablo” Fischer lived in Mexico for many years and painted at least two watercolors of Lake Chapala. Fischer (1864-1932) was born in Stuttgart, Germany, and earned a medical degree at the University of Munich in 1884.

He traveled to Mexico in about 1890 to administer an inheritance in the northern Mexico state of Durango. From 1890 to 1895, Fischer worked was the resident doctor in the Mina del Promontorio mine in that state.

During those years he became known as Pablo Fischer. He went into private practice in the City of Durango in 1895, the same year he married a local Mexican girl, Gertrudis; they had a son and two daughters.

The family later moved to Lerdo and still later to Torreón (Coahuila) where Paul Fischer died in 1932.

Fischer painted watercolors for pleasure and was completely self-taught. Painting was clearly his passion, He made preliminary sketches for his paintings during the family’s vacation trips to various parts of Mexico. Fischer rarely dated his paintings, but is known to have painted scenes in numerous states, including Durango, Mexico City, Cuernavaca, Cuautla (dated 1897), Puebla, Oaxaca, and Chapala.

Paul (Pablo) Fischer: Chapala (date unknown)

It is not known for sure when Fischer painted his small watercolors of Chapala, though they were probably all painted at roughly the same time. The first is a view of the lakeshore and fishing boats, as seen from west of Chapala, looking back towards the main church. [Note: This painting is incorrectly attributed on several art websites–presumably because of the coincidence of name–to Danish painter Paul Gustave Fischer (1860-1934), though there is zero evidence that the Danish Paul Fischer ever visited Mexico.]

Pablo Fischer’s second view is from a boat on the lake, looking back towards the town of Chapala, the church, and the Hotel Arzapalo. Since the Hotel Arzapalo is shown as complete (with its second story), we know that this painting was completed after 1898, the year when the hotel opened.

Paul (Pablo) Fischer: Chapala (date unknown)

Art researcher Juan Manuel Campo has informed me that a third painting of Chapala by Fischer is also known. Painted from a very similar position to the image above, apparently from several years later, it shows the typical sail canoes (canoas de vela) used to transport passengers and cargo from one lakeside village to the next. The whereabouts of this painting is currently unknown.

Several of Fischer’s paintings of Lake Chapala were used for postcards by Guadalajara-based publisher Juan Kaiser, and one of them may have been the inspiration for a 1986 painting by Ignacio Ramírez.

Fischer’s landscapes are keenly observed and painstakingly executed, with exquisite details and a wonderful grasp of color. Fischer signed most of his paintings simply “PF” though on occasion he used “P. Fischer”. He often gave his paintings as gifts, and there appears to be little evidence that he sold any of his works, but his outstanding watercolors became quite well known.

I was mistaken to claim in an earlier version of this post that Fischer never held an exhibition of his works in Mexico. It is now known that he definitely held an exhibit of watercolor paintings at the retail store of the Sonora News Company (Gante #4, Mexico City) in December 1914. (Mexican Herald) The fact that the store received “a new collection of Paul Fischer water colors of Mexican scenes” in March 1915 suggests that Fischer maintained an ever-changing selection of his paintings for sale at the store, one of the main locations where tourists could purchase artwork and souvenirs while visiting Mexico.

It is quite likely that Fischer would have known fellow artist August Lohr (1842-1920), who was also living in Mexico City at that time.

Fischer had close links to El Paso, Texas. In June 1906 he declared he was carrying $1000 with him—a considerable sum of money for the time—when he entered the US via El Paso. Fischer held more than one showing of his works in El Paso.

A Fischer painting in the SURA (formerly ING) collection in Mexico was included in a touring exhibition entitled “Horizontes. Pasión por el paisaje,” which showed in Guadalajara and several other cities, from 2005 to 2010. The biography of Fischer attached to the SURA collection in Mexico says that he held his first exhibition in El Paso in 1910. The precise location is unclear. In April 1926 an exhibition of his work was held in the Woman’s Club of El Paso.

The El Paso Museum of Art, El Paso, Texas, has amassed a significant collection of his works, and hosted a showing, with catalog, in September-October 1963, entitled: An Exhibition of Watercolors by Pablo Fischer, 1864-1932. Several members of the artist’s family attended the opening reception. Prior to the exhibition, the museum asked local residents for the loan of any Pablo Fischer paintings in their possession, since “The painter was very popular in this area about 50 years ago.” It is believed that some of his paintings were brought to the El Paso area by his son.

Painting must run in the family since two direct descendants – Lilia Fischer-Ruiz, who paints under the pseudonym Rhiux A. and her daughter Liliana – have also both become successful professional artists.

Note – This is an updated version of a post first published 15 January 2015.

Acknowledgment

I am very grateful for the help offered by art researcher Juan Manuel Campo in improving this post.

Sources

Mexican Herald: 9 Dec 1914, 3; 31 Dec 1914, 3; 11 Mar 1915.
Suramexico.com Biography (Spanish) of Paul Fischer

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.

Canadian artists and authors associated with Lake Chapala

Other 2 Responses »

Jun 302021

For those Canadians who celebrate 1 July as Canada Day, here is a list of Canadian artists and authors who have historical connections to Lake Chapala and who have already been profiled on this blog. Enjoy!

Visual artists

Henry Sandham (1842-1910), a well-known Canadian illustrator of the time, illustrated Charles Embree‘s historical novel, A Dream of a Throne, the Story of a Mexican Revolt (1900), the earliest English-language novel set at Lake Chapala. Embree, who published several novels and numerous short stories, was a genuine Mexicophile if ever there was one, but died in his early thirties.

Way back in the 1940s, painter Hari Kidd (1899-1964), who had served in the Royal Canadian Air Force, lived in Chapala. This is when he first met and fell in love with fellow artist Edythe Wallach, his future wife, who was then living in Ajijic.

Love was in the air at Lake Chapala in the 1940s. In Ajijic in 1949, Canadian writer Harold Masson (1915-2011) met and married English nurse Helen Rigall, who was in Ajijic visiting her uncle, Herbert Johnson , and his wife, Georgette.

American artist Gerry Pierce (1900-1969), who painted several watercolors in Ajijic in the mid-1940s, began his art career in Nova Scotia, Canada, in the late 1920s.

Canadian artist Clarence Ainslie Loomis painted Ajijic in the early 1990s. I would love to learn more about this elusive character whose paintings are very distinctive.

Loomis was following in the footsteps, so to speak, of Canadian artist Eunice Hunt and her husband Paul Huf who spent many years working in Ajijic in the 1960s and 1970s. The couple married in Ajijic and their two sons were both born in Mexico. The family subsequently moved to Paul’s native Germany to continue their artistic careers.

In the 1950s, a young Canadian woman, Dorothy Whelan, became the partner of artist and photographer Ernest Alexander (1921-1974) who ran the Scorpion Club in Ajijic. “Alex” led an extraordinary life but, sadly, things spiraled out of control after the couple left Ajijic and moved to San Francisco.

Swedish-American visual artist Carlo Wahlbeck (born in 1933) studied at the Winnipeg School of Art in Canada and lived in Chapala for two or three years in the mid-1970s.

Multi-talented Mexican guitarist and artist Gustavo Sendis (1941-1989) lived many years in Ajijic and had an exhibition on Vancouver Island at Malaspina College (now Vancouver Island University) in Nanaimo, B.C., in July 1980. If anyone knows any details of this exhibit, then please get in touch!

Toronto muralist and painter John Russell Richmond (1926-2013) lived and painted in Ajijic for several years in the 1990s. In Ajijic, he became known (and signed his work) as Juan Compo.

Margaret Van Gurp (1926-2020), a well known artist from eastern Canada, sketched and painted in Jocotepec in 1983, while living with her daughter Susan, then working at the Lakeside School for the Deaf.

Poets, authors, writers and playwrights

Several Canadian poets have been inspired by Lake Chapala. For example, Earle Birney visited Ajijic in the 1950s and Canadian performance poet Canadian performance poet Leanne Averbach visited the lake many years later. The great Al Purdy first visited Chapala on a quest to explore the haunts of D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930) and later produced a limited edition book based on his trip. [Lawrence wrote his novel “The Plumed Serpent” while staying in Chapala in 1923.] Purdy also wrote a travel piece about Ajijic.

Canadian historian and non-fiction writer Ross Parmenter (1912-1999) only ever spent a few days at Lake Chapala, in 1946, but has left us detailed descriptions of the local villages and of what life was like at the time. His accounts of the difficulties of traveling from Chapala to Ajijic, first by car, and then by boat, in the 1940s are interesting reading.

The enigmatic Maxwell Desmond Poyntz, who was born in British Columbia on 4 January 1918 and died in Canada, at the age of 81, on 29 November 1999, is known to have visited Jocotepec while working on a “proposed trilogy”. It is unclear if he ever finished this magnum opus; there is no record of its publication.

Former CBC war correspondent and author Captain William (“Bill”) Strange (1902-1983) and his wife Jean Strange, one of Canada’s earliest female architects, lived in Chapala for decades and, in the 1960s, produced several radio documentaries about Mexico.

The famous Canadian playwright and novelist George Ryga (1932-1987) had a holiday home in San Antonio Tlayacapan for many years in the 1970s and 1980s and frequently visited and wrote while staying there. His play “Portrait of Angelica” is set in Ajijic. Several literary friends and relatives of Ryga also visited or used his holiday home. They include Ryga’s daughter Tanya (a drama teacher) and her husband Larry Reece, a musician, artist and drama professor; Brian Paisley, and the multi-talented Ken Smedley and his wife, the actress, artist and model, Dorian Smedley-Kohl. Ken and Dorian Smedley were instrumental in mounting the first (and only) Ajijic Fringe Theatre – “El Fringe” – in 1988.

Canada was a safe haven for Scottish Beat novelist Alexander Trocchi (1925-1984), who worked on his controversial novel Cain’s Book (1960) in Ajijic in the late 1950s. The group of friends that helped smuggle Trocchi into Canada to escape prosecution in the U.S. included American novelist Norman Mailer (who first visited Ajijic in the late-1940s).

American Buddhist author Pema Chödrön, known at the time as Deirdre Blomfield-Brown, lived with her then husband, the poet and writer Jim Levy, for about a year in Ajijic from mid-1968 until May 1969. Chödrön moved to Canada in 1984 to establish Gampo Abbey in Nova Scotia, Canada. She became the Abbey’s director in 1986 and still holds that position today.

Additional profiles of Canadian artists and authors associated with Lake Chapala are added periodically. This post was last updated on 30 June 2021.

Photogenic Ajijic gave Stanley Twardowicz his second strand of fame as an artist

1940s 1 Response »

Jun 242021

Prior to becoming a noted abstract expressionist painter, Stanley Twardowicz (1917-2008) lived in Ajijic in about 1948. Three years later, he exhibited about twenty photographs from that visit in New York, and won instant acclaim as a talented fine arts photographer.

Remarkably, Twardowicz had only taken up photography a short time before arriving in Ajijic, and he only took a camera with him to help supplement the preliminary sketches he needed to compose paintings on canvas. When the photos were developed, Twardowicz realized that the images he had captured were artistically satisfying in, and of, themselves. This began a lifelong love of photography, alongside his passion for painting.

Stanley Twardowicz. c.1948. Fishing nets, Ajijic. (Credit unknown)

Stanley Jon Leginsky was born to Polish parents in Detroit on 8 July 1917 and grew up with his godfather; he formally adopted his godfather’s surname in his early twenties, shortly before marrying Pauline (aka Apolonia) Jaszek (1921-2012) in October 1940. The marriage did not last and the couple divorced after six years.

Twardowicz attended summer school programs at the Chicago Art Institute and studied photo-retouching at the Meinzinger Art School.

He held his first exhibition of paintings in Detroit in 1944. Two years later he won a scholarship to the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine.

Despite having no formal qualifications, Twardowicz was then offered a teaching position at Ohio State University. He taught there for about five years and became close friends with another instructor, Roy Lichtenstein—they were later best man for each other on their respective wedding days.

Twardowicz won a $1500 fellowship in 1948 in Pepsi-Cola’s Fifth Annual Paintings of the Year Competition; his work was included in a show at the National Academy of Design in New York City.

Stanley Twardowicz. c.1948. Fishing nets, Ajijic. (Credit unknown)

It is unclear how he came to learn about Ajijic but he traveled there in 1948-49, seeking inspiration for more paintings; while there he took a series of eye-catching photographs of fishermen and their nets. His “stunning photographic journal of the Mexican people” (New York Times) was the basis for his Mexican series of paintings, completed between 1948 and 1951.

Safely back in the US in 1949, Twardowicz held the first of several annual solo shows at the Contemporary Arts Gallery in New York, and married an Ohio State student, Ruth Ann Mendel (1929–1973). Mendel (the spelling used on the marriage certificate is given as “Mandel” in Twardowicz’s obituary and elsewhere online) later became known for her wood-cut prints. According to one source, the couple lived for a time “near Guadalajara” (presumably in Ajijic), though I have yet to find any hard evidence for this assertion.

Twardowicz’s photographs of Ajijic went on show at Wittenborn & Co., 38 East Fifty-seventh Street, New York, in October 1951, shortly after Ann graduated from Ohio State and he resigned his teaching position there. The New York Times included one of the photos—of fishing nets in Ajijic—alongside its very positive review:
“The show… consists mainly of poetic impressions of fishing nets billowed by the wind and photographed about two years ago, a year after Mr. Twartowicz began to use a camera…. The pictures convey an artist’s emotional response to the mood of a situation rather than a literal rendering of material.”

Stanley Twardowicz. 1951. (Oil on canvas) Fish Nets (Ajijic). Credit: Berner’s Auction Gallery, Ohio

Twardowicz’s paintings based on these photographs include an oil on canvas entitled “Fish-Nets”, completed in 1951, which was auctioned in 2015 at Berner’s Auction Gallery in Donnelsville, Ohio.

Twardowicz and Ann left for Europe on 23 November, bound for Le Havre. When they returned to the US six months later, in June 1952, they lived in Plainfield, New Jersey, near enough to New York to enjoy its vibrant arts scene. From late-1952, the couple were Saturday evening regulars at the Cedar Tavern in Greenwich Village, where they became friends with Jack Kerouac and a group of artists (later recognized as Abstract Expressionists) including Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline and others.

By 1953, Twardowicz’s own painting had shifted away from semi-abstraction to full abstraction. The following year he was introduced to Zen philosophy and began a series of bio-morphic paintings, developing a technique to pour household paint onto canvasses stretched flat on the ground.

Twardowicz’s innovative artworks brought him major success with numerous solo shows, including annual one-person shows in the Peridot Gallery for twelve consecutive years.

In the 1960s, Twardowicz moved to Northport on Long Island. While visiting Twardowicz there, Kerouac wrote “The Northport Haiku” (1964), which first appeared in print in Street in Spring 1975. By this time, Twardowicz had been married to artist Lillian Dodson for four years.

Twardowicz continued to work also in photography. His best known later photographs are the portraits of Jack Kerouac he took in June 1967, a few months before his good friend died. The friendship was mutual: Kerouac considered Twardowicz “the most compassionate man I’ve ever met.” Despite their long friendship, the portraits were the first photographs of Kerouac that Twardowicz had ever taken.

Towards the end of the 1960s, Twardowicz became fascinated by color field theory and its relationship to visual perception; this led to him painting a series called “Disappearing Ovals.” He kept developing and experimenting as an artist. His style during the 1990s was aptly dubbed “Moving Color” by the Phoenix Museum when it held the a retrospective of Twardowicz’s work in 2001. The artist had three other retrospectives during his lifetime, all in New York: Heckscher Museum (1974), Nassau Community College (1987) and Hofstra University Museum (2007)

After a prolific career spanning 65 years, Twardowicz retired from painting in 2005 and died in Huntington, New York, on 12 June 2008.

Main sources

Paul Kowalchuk. 2008. “Renowned American Abstract Expressionist Painter and Photographer, Stanley Twardowicz, Dies at Age 90 in Huntington, NY.” TheDeepArchives Inc, 19 June 2008. [1 April 2021]
New York Times: 28 October 1951, 104.

Writer and illustrator Renee George visited Ajijic in 1947

1940s No Responses »

Jun 172021

Born on 18 January 1924 in Berlin, Germany, artist Renée George (birth name Renate Judith Georg) emigrated to the US as a stateless fifteen-year-old in August 1939, just as the second world war broke out in Europe.

George visited Ajijic during her three month trip to Mexico in the summer of 1947. When she returned to New York she was employed by the public relations magazine Modern Mexico, which published a short article she wrote and illustrated about her experiences in Mexico. The title illustration for her article is a street scene in Ajijic.

Renée George. 1947. Street scene in Ajijic. (Modern Mexico)

George had studied at Hunter College and taken courses in watercolor painting with William Starkweather, as well as attended night classes at the Art Students League with William McNulty, John Groth, and Howard Trafton. At the Art Students League she met her future husband Thomas O’Sullivan; they married in 1952. From 1959 onward the couple had a summer home in Martha’s Vineyard, where George was a founder member of the Martha’s Vineyard Art Association.

George later undertook illustration assignments for several books, including The River Horse by Nina Ames Frey (1953); Here come the trucks by Henry B Lent (1954); Inside the Ark and other stories by Caryll Houselander (1956); and Sixty Saints for Girls by Joan Windham (1979). She also contributed humorous drawings to the New York Times Book Review and several other publications.

Her article in Modern Mexico was written as a series of letters home to her parents.

George explains that the title of her article, “Ay Naranjas!” is the same title she would use if she ever wrote a book about all her adventures in Mexico:

– “Ay Naranjas! as I was told by a helpful Mexican has a spicy double meaning. When someone calls out Ay Naranjas! at you, and he is not selling oranges at the time, you better beware, for it is the call of the Mexican wolf.”

While in Mexico City she had the good fortune to see Diego Rivera and Siqueiros at work, and also saw paintings by Tamayo, which subsequently inspired her in the use of color.

Adjusting to Mexico brought some challenges:

“I am just beginning to understand the meanings on signs and boxes. Mexico City is particularly devoid of mail boxes, and I, being used to one at every corner, have probably mailed many a letter hopefully in a garbage can.”

Two later letters in the article are written from Ajijic, where she is staying with a friend named Hanna.

In the first, she sums up her thoughts about Ajijic:

“Am writing you this from my cot by the light of a flickering candle… Ajijic seems to the hideout for authors who have written books on Mexico (“Little Villages in the Sun,” etc) and those who are in the act of doing so. Without electric light and plumbing they get the feel of the primitive, and when they get tired of that they can always slosh through the mud to somebody’s cocktail party.

Don’t ever tell anybody you are going to Ajijic, unless of course you are talking to an artist, because you will be classed as demented. Have found no cause here for such prejudiced classification. This is one of the most charming, uninhibited places, where man and beast run around loose, enjoying their life on the shores of the lake.”

In her second letter from Ajijic, George describes the rainy season and a frustrated burglary attempt:

“It has been raining quite steadily lately, and a knee-deep river is flowing in front of our door step. Am unhappy because… all the mangos around here are spoiled because of some fly that must have sneaked through.

A few robberies have been committed lately, and our neighbor was practically paralyzed when she saw a man in a black sarape jump over her wall. When he saw here he got so scared that he climbed right back over again without touching anything. No one is wearing black sarapes around town today.

The grapevine is whispering that the charming young man who escorted Hanna and me home from the costume party last night is one of the ring leaders. I guess time will tell if no one else will.”

From Ajijic, George carried on to Cordoba and then Veracruz on the Gulf Coast, where, as she was about to return home, she was serenaded at dawn by mariachis hired by two traveling Campbell’s Soup salesmen!

George died in New York on 10 October 2010. A posthumous retrospective exhibit of her art was held at the Old Sculpin Gallery in Martha’s Vineyard in 2011.

Sources

Renée George. 1949. “Ay Naranjos.” Modern Mexico, Vol 22, #2, Mar-Apr 1949, 16-17, 28-29.
Ask art. Entry for Renee George O’Sullivan.

Art mystery: Where did August Lohr paint this scene?

1920s and earlier 2 Responses »

Jun 102021

This scenic view was painted in 1911 by Austrian artist August Lohr (1842-1920).

August Lohr : his life and connection to Lake Chapala

Lohr lived in Mexico City for almost thirty years. He undertook commissions, including interior decorations and murals, and is known to have traveled to many other locations to paint.

August Lohr. 1911. (Unknown location in Mexico) Photo courtesy Juan Manuel Campo.

This painting (above) was sold at auction in the US, at which time it was described as a view of Lake Chapala.

Doubts have been raised about this description. Please get in touch if you recognize this view or can suggest a likely location.

Acknowledgment

My sincere thanks to researcher Juan Manuel Campo for bringing this painting to my attention.

John Sinclair visited Ajijic in the 1940s to write “Death in the Claimshack”

1940s No Responses »

Jun 032021

New York-born author John Sinclair was already the successful author of a “Western cowboy” novel, published by MacMillan, when he decided to hide out in Ajijic for a few weeks in 1946-47 to write his next novel.

According to a newspaper article in December 1946, Sinclair planned to:

“write another novel in Ajijic, which is a hamlet of 2,000 Mayan-Indians and 14 white people, three of whom are from Europe. Sinclair said he was inspired to move to Ajijic for at least six months by the book “Village in the Sun.” It is by the late Dane Chandos, an English writer. Sinclair pronounced the book, which is published by Putnam, an English classic.”

We can quibble about details (“Mayan-Indians”) and ponder precisely who was included in the “14 white people, three of whom are from Europe,” but clearly Sinclair was keeping up with the latest books. Village in the Sun had been published in fall the previous year, and Nigel Millett—one half of the ”Dane Chandos” writing duo—had died unexpectedly in March 1946, only months before Sinclair announced his intention to travel to Lake Chapala.

Getting to Ajijic in 1946 was not that simple. Sinclair, who was based in Santa Fe, New Mexico, took a bus to Tucson, followed by a train to Guadalajara, bus to Chapala and finally a small launch to Ajijic, where he planned to stay several months. However, less than two months later, it was reported that Sinclair was on his way back to Santa Fe, earlier than anticipated, “because he has important mail communication with his publishers in the East and wanted to be sure of deliveries, going and coming.”

Apparently, Sinclair had already completed his next book, Death in the Claimshack, announced in February 1947, despite also writing regular “fascinating letters of the beauty and charm of the life on the edge of Lake Chapala, in the land of perpetual Indian summer.”

Sinclair had an adventurous upbringing. Born to a wealthy family in New York City in 1902, his father died when he was young and he was brought up from age 10 by a grandfather and uncle, both in Scotland. Sinclair graduated from Cambridge University and completed an apprenticeship in animal husbandry before returning to North America, where his family was prepared to finance the establishment of a family-owned ranch in British Columbia. A stop-off in New Mexico, where he fell instantly in love with saddle ponies, cowboys and the landscape, completely changed his life. When he told his family of his intention to live in New Mexico, he was disinherited.

Sinclair worked as a cowboy for fourteen years in New Mexico, before turning his hand to writing. By 1936, he was living in the growing literary community of Santa Fe. He worked for the Museum of New Mexico and established the Lincoln Historic Site in the old courthouse of Lincoln, while working on his first novel, In Time of Harvest, published in 1943. He wrote his other novels while employed as superintendent of the Coronado State Monument near Bernalillo. He described his life as “like that of Thoreau, one of simplicity and solitude.”

Sinclair’s other novels were Cousin Drewey and the Holy Twister (1980) and The Night the Bear came off the Mountain (1991). He also wrote several non-fiction works, including New Mexico, The Shining Land (1980), Cowboy Riding Country (1982), and A Cowboy Writer in New Mexico: The Memoirs of John L. Sinclair (published posthumously in 1996), as well as articles and short stories for the New Mexico Magazine and The Saturday Evening Post.

Among the many awards he won for his writing were two Western Heritage Wrangler Awards, the Western Writers’ Golden Spur Award, a New Mexico Governor’s Award for Excellence and Achievement in the Arts, and an honorary life membership in the Cowboy Hall of Fame.

John Sinclair died in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in December 1993.

Sources

Ben E. Pingenot. 1998. “Review of A Cowboy Writer in New Mexico: The Memoirs of John L. Sinclair By John Sinclair.” Great Plains Quarterly, Spring 1998 (University of Nebraska – Lincoln).
The Santa Fe New Mexican (Santa Fe, New Mexico), 06 Dec 1946, 11; 22 Jan 1947, 5;
Los Angeles Times, 20 Dec, 1993, 199.

Austrian landscape artist August Lohr (1842-1920) painted Chapala at the start of the 20th century

1920s and earlier 3 Responses »

May 272021

August Lohr was an Austrian landscape artist, born in 1842 in Hallein, near Salzburg. Lohr lived and worked in Europe, the U.S. and Mexico. After studying at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, Germany, Lohr initially specialized in painting Alpine scenery. He and his Austrian wife, Franziska Geuhs, had three daughters, Rosina, Elise and Elsa, all born in Munich. From 1879 to 1881 Lohr worked with the Munich art professor Ludwig Braun to paint a panoramic view of the Battle of Sedan. The two men also worked on panoramic scenes of the battles of Weissenburg and St. Privat.

By 1884, Lohr had traveled to New Orleans to supervise the installation of the panoramic painting The Battle of Sedan, displayed for the World’s Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition in New Orleans (1884-1885). Later in 1884, Lohr joined William Wehner in establishing the American Panorama Company in Milwaukee, where they commissioned approximately twenty German artists to paint monumental “cycloramas” depicting the Storming of Missionary Ridge, the Battle of Chattanooga and the Battle of Atlanta.

In 1887, Lohr, in association with Frederick Heine, purchased the Wells Street studio from the American Panorama Company and created the panorama Jerusalem on the Day of the Crucifixion. Several other panoramas were also produced at the Wells Street studio.

Although his name was still listed in the 1890 Milwaukee city directory, he left Milwaukee for Mexico in December 1890.

August Lohr : Lake Chapala, Mexico. ca 1905

Lohr established himself in Mexico City and began to take on commissions including interior decorations and murals.

In September 1898, when it was reported that “Mr August Lohr, the well known landscape painter,” had just left the city for California to paint “a grand panorama representing the battle of Manila for an American syndicate,” Lohr had only just “completed painting the interior decorations of a restaurant” with his daughter, Elsa. While Lohr was in California, Elsa was busy painting decorations for the Requiem mass about to be held “in the Profesa church in memory of the Empress Elizabeth of Austria.” That church is in downtown Mexico City. (Mexican Herald)

“The Battle of Manila Bay” was painted in 1898, after the end of the Spanish American War (1895-1898), by Lohr and several other panorama artists in San Francisco. The following year, the San Francisco Sentinel reported that he was the manager of a company that was planning to exhibit panoramas in Mexico.

The Lohr home in Mexico City was in the Santa María suburb.

Only a few months before Lohr embarked on a trip to Europe in 1909, he had designed the decorations for the Aztec parlor at the then recently opened Hotel Geneve on Calle Londres. According to a contemporary news report, the Hotel had “four public parlors, each with different decorations.” The Aztec parlor was intended to showcase “an invaluable collection of genuine Aztec relics” which “should prove of immense interest to the tourists…”

Lohr continued to reside in Mexico with his family until his death in 1920. Mexico paintings by Lohr are known with dates ranging from 1899 to 1915.

In 1891, Lohr’s painting of Chapultepec Castle was exhibited at the San Carlos Academy in Mexico City. In 1899, Lohr exhibited two landscape paintings (of Mt. Tamaulipas and the Santa Cruz Mountains in California) in San Francisco at the Mechanics Institute Fair.

Lohr’s oil painting “Lake Chapala, Mexico” (image) was probably painted circa 1905.

Acknowledgment

This is an updated version of a post first published in 2014. My sincere thanks to researcher Juan Manuel Campo for correcting various details in the original version, thereby greatly improving the content of this post.

Sources

German-American Artists in Early Milwaukee, A Biographical Dictionary, by Peter C. Merrill.
August Lohr (1842-1920) (Museum of Wisconsin Art)
The Mexican Herald: 23 Sep 1898, 8; 15 Oct 1899, 2; 14 February 1909.

H. Owen Reed’s innovative composition “La Fiesta Mexicana” was inspired by Lake Chapala

1940s No Responses »

May 202021

American composer and conductor H. Owen Reed (1910-2014), a professor at Michigan State University, spent five months in Mexico over the winter of 1948-49. After several weeks in Mexico City and Cuernavaca, with side trips to Taxco and Acapulco, he spent a couple of months in Chapala. This trip, funded by a Guggenheim Fellowship, was the inspiration for his most famous composition, “La Fiesta Mexicana: a Mexican Folk Song Symphony for Band.”

H. Owen Reed

The idea for the symphony first came to him after reading Stuart Chase’s fine book, Mexico; a study of two Americas (1946). Reed envisioned a three-movement symphony referencing folk songs and popular music that would also lend itself to choreography. And, indeed, though usually performed by dedicated wind orchestras, “La Fiesta Mexicana” has sometimes been presented in conjunction with costumed dancers and staging.

The opening movement of the symphony, Prelude and Aztec Dance, is based on a march Reed heard in Cuernavaca and Aztec dance music from central Mexico. The second and third movements—Mass and Carnival—were inspired by Reed’s time at Lake Chapala: “In a small choir loft in Chapala, I heard the chant from the Liber Usualis which I used in the second movement…. The two-against-three rhythm of the two bells used throughout “La Fiesta Mexicana” was a standard cliche of the young musicians who seemed to have little respect for my early morning sleep. Again this was in Chapala.” Part of the third movement makes use of a mariachi rendition of El Son de la Negra. [1]

The work was premiered by the US Marine Band in 1949. The first major label commercial recording, released in 1954, “burst on the classical record scene and became an overnight sensation. Music lovers were dazzled by the color and inventiveness of the score.” [2]

YouTube: performance of “La Fiesta Mexicana” by the Detroit Symphony Civic Wind Ensemble

The work marked a milestone in the “genre of long-form compositions for wind ensemble” and has been recorded dozens of times since.

The score includes the following notes on each movement:

“I. Prelude and Aztec Dance — The tumbling of the church bells at midnight officially announces the opening of the Fiesta, which has previously been unofficially announced by the setting off of fireworks, the drinking of tequila and pulque, and the migration of thousands of Mexicans and Indians to the center of activity — the high court surrounding the cathedral. After a brave effort at gaiety, the celebrators settle down to a restless night, until the early quiet of the Mexican morning is once more shattered by the church bells and fireworks. At mid-morning a band is heard in the distance. However, attention is soon focused upon the Aztec dancers, brilliantly plumed and masked, who dance in ever-increasing frenzy to a dramatic climax.”

“II. Mass — The tolling of the bells is now a reminder that the Fiesta is, after all, a religious celebration. The rich and poor slowly gather within the great stone walls of the old cathedral [for reverent] homage to their Virgin.”

“III. Carnival — Mexico is at its best on the days of the Fiesta — days on which passion governs the love, hatred and joys of the Mestizo and the Indio. There [are] entertainment and excitement for both young and old — the itinerant circus, the market, the bullfight, the town band, and always the cantinas with the ever present band of mariachi.”

Notes:

[1] Reed’s lecture notes on La Fiesta Mexicana [6 May 2021]

[2] Phillip Nones. 2013. “H. Owen Reed at 103: The Dean of American Composers Celebrates a Birthday.” Blog post dated 19 June 2013. [27 April 2021]

Modernist artist Hari Kidd and his connection to Lake Chapala

1940s 9 Responses »

May 132021

Hari (Harry) Matthew Kidd (1899-1964) was a painter, printmaker and writer associated with Philadelphia (Pennsylvania), El Paso (Texas) and Key West (Florida). Kidd was living in Chapala in the mid-1940s when he first met his future wife Edythe Wallach, then living in Ajijic. Kidd had his paintings in a group show at the Villa Montecarlo in Chapala in December 1944, a month after Wallach had held her own one-person show there.

Born in Detroit to an Englishman and his Canadian wife, Hari Kidd attended high school in El Paso before enlisting as a teenager in the Royal Canadian Air Force which later sent him to England to paint a portrait of General Hugh Montague Trenchard (later 1st Viscount Trenchard). Kidd returned from Europe in 1923 and studied art at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. His first wife, Elizabeth, also an artist, was possibly a fellow student. The young couple left from Boston in May 1927 on an extended trip to Europe, returning to Philadelphia in early April of the following year.

In 1933, apparently on health grounds (Kidd had lifetime mobility issues), and seemingly without Elizabeth, he moved to El Paso. He soon acquired a reputation as a fine artist and mixed in an illustrious social circle that included sculptor Urbici Soler. He was also a good friend of the British conductor Leopold Stokowski, director of the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra.

Hari Kidd. Men riding freight cars. undated. Sold by Heritage Auctions, 2015.

Kidd’s work was in numerous local exhibits including a one-person show at the Crouse Galleries in El Paso in 1937. During his years in El Paso, Kidd gave art classes from his studio. Among his students was the El Paso artist Jake Erlich who stood 2.59 meters (8 feet 6 inches) tall and was widely believed at the time (even if inaccurately) to be the tallest man in the world.

Hari Kidd also turned his hand to writing, sending letters, columns and articles (often illustrated with charming drawings) to the El Paso Herald-Post. From El Paso, he made several trips into Mexico, including one to San José Purua in 1939 and another, in about 1942, further south into Oaxaca, spending close to a year in Tehuantepec and Ixtepec. These trips provided material for several illustrated articles for Mexico Magazine whose editor, Lloyd Burlingham, lived in El Paso.

The 1940 US Census lists Kidd as “divorced”, living on his own in El Paso. He had already had a painting included in the All Texas General Exhibit which opened in January 1940 at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. A year later, his first major solo show, of oil paintings at the Palace of Legion of Honor in San Francisco was warmly received by knowledgeable critics. Simultaneously he had a solo show of watercolors at Gump’s store in the same city.

That same year, further east, his work was chosen for the Texas-Oklahoma General Exhibition and he had a solo show (in October 1941) at the Witte Museum in San Antonio, where a reviewer commented (favorably) that Kidd was a “colossal egotist, sure of himself as a creative artist.”

Kidd’s social realism pictures frequently depicted Mexican people and topics, based on explorations along the Río Grande. According to several accounts, Kidd was sufficiently famous to have been visited in El Paso by Diego Rivera and Frieda Kahlo.

Harry Kidd. Date unknown. Untitled. Coll: University of the South, Sewanee, Tennessee

Back in El Paso in 1944, Kidd persuaded a local hospital for wounded Army soldiers to hang his paintings in their rooms as inspiration to speed their recuperation. He also held a show of painting at the Mexico Magazine Galleries in El Paso, which was operated by fellow artist (and Lloyd’s wife) Hilda Burlingham. That exhibition was then sent to the American Airlines office in New York City.

In late 1944, Kidd was back in Mexico and living at Lake Chapala. He is one of just three artists named in a short piece in the Guadalajara daily El Informador about the founding of a “Chapala Art Center” and its first exhibition, held at the Villa Montecarlo in Chapala from 10-17 December. (Edythe Wallach, his future wife, had held a solo exhibition at the same venue a month earlier). Betty Binkley of Santa Fe and English artist Muriel Lytton-Bernard are also named in the newspaper. The show also included works by the famous American surrealist Sylvia Fein, Ann Medalie, Otto Butterlin, Ernesto Linares (Lyn Butterlin), and Jaime López Bermúdez.

Hari Kidd was friends with Tennessee Williams and it may even have been Hari Kidd who first suggested that the great writer spend the summer of 1945 in Chapala.

Hari Kidd married Edythe Wallach in Key West, Florida, in March 1946. Later that year, the Miami News reported that Mr Kidd was preparing for a solo show at the Philadelphia Art Alliance in December. That show was followed by a second solo show, at the same venue, of Kidd’s “new and sensational” War Series of watercolors, which firmly established his reputation as an artist of note.

In September 1947, Kidd held another solo show of watercolors, at the Pittsburgh Water Color Society.

Hari Kidd. “Spring” (mother and child). Painted at Key West; undated. Sold by Butterscotch Auction Gallery, 2017.

Both Edythe and Hari Kidd were in a three-person show at the Miami Beach Art Center which opened in January 1948. The third artist was Eugenie Schein of New York. Edythe exhibited oil paintings “favoring Mexican themes” while Hari showed both oils and watercolors. According to the press notice, “Both artists have spent a number of years in Mexico and Spain and their work reflects this influence.” They also participated, with Elvira Reilly, in another three-person show at the Martello Towers Gallery in Key West in January 1954.

In 1964, due to her husband’s declining health, Edythe and Hari moved to Tucson, Arizona, where Hari Kidd-artist extraordinaire-died in hospital four months later.

A retrospective of Kidd’s art opened at the El Paso Museum in October 1967; his widow attended the opening. Individual works by Kidd have also appeared periodically in group shows, including two at the Harmon Gallery in Naples, Florida in 1975.

In 1990, Edythe Kidd donated 135 of her husband’s works (the largest known collection of his work, comprising oils, lithographs, water-colors, gauches and cancels) to the University of the South, a private, coeducational liberal arts college in Sewanee, Tennessee. According to the university journal, “It is not known why the collection was donated to Sewanee, however it may have been on account of his friendship with Tennessee Williams, donor of ten million dollars to the University following his own death in 1985.”

A posthumous retrospective of his work was held in 2010 at the El Paso Museum of Art (EPMA). Examples of his work are in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Atlanta Art Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Acknowledgment

My sincere thanks to Mary O’Neill, Visual Resources Librarian at The University of the South, for graciously providing me with copies of documents and images in the library archives.

Sources

Andrew Erlich and Cara Van Miriah. 2012. The Long Shadows (a fictional work about Jake Erlich; chapter 25 is entitled “Harry Kidd”). eBookIt.com.
El Paso Herald Post: 18 March 1946, p 6; 21 January 1937, p 8; 20 Jan 1944, p6; 4 Oct 1967, Showtime, p 14.
The Miami News: 8 Sep 1946, p 23: 25 Jan 1948, p 59.
Oakland Tribune: 19 Jan 1941, p B-7.
John and Deborah Powers. 1946. Texas Painters, Sculptors & Graphic Artists.
San Antonio Express: 5 Oct 1941.
San Antonio Light, 5 Oct 1941, Part Three, p 8,
The Sewanee Purple, 25 February 1991, p 2.

The poem “Ajijic” helped Jan Richman win the 1994 Walt Whitman Award

1990s onwards No Responses »

May 062021

Californian poet and novelist Jan Richman’s poem “Ajijic” was first published in 1994, and included in her first poetry collection, Because the Brain Can Be Talked Into Anything, which won the 1994 Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets.

Born in La Jolla, Richman graduated from Torrey Pines High School before studying English and Theatre at University of California, Irvine. She then completed a BA degree in Creative Writing and English at San Francisco State University and a Masters in Creative Writing at New York University.

Richman taught at the City College of San Francisco, and lost a job at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco (following a controversy over a gratuitously violent story written by a student), before working as a freelance proof reader and copy editor. She has also been an associate editor and columnist for SFGate.com (San Francisco Chronicle).

Poems by the multi-award winning Richman have appeared in numerous magazines including The Nation, Ploughshares, Comet, Kenyon Review, The Bloomsbury Review and Luna.

Richman is also the author of the novel Thrill-Bent (2012) in which she gives her own name to the narrator, a writer for BadMouth Magazine, “NYC’s Premier Cultural Crap Detector,” who is given an assignment to report on roller coasters around the country set for demolition. Her final stop is in California.

Precisely when or why Jan Richman visited Ajijic is currently unknown. Her poem “Ajijic” first appeared in the Winter 1993-94 issue of the literary journal Ploughshares. (The journal is archived online and the poem can be read in its entirety via the link in “Sources”)

Here are a few sample lines from “Ajijic” –

I came down to the water
to escape the feuding, infallible generations.
In my grandfather’s eye is my father’s eye, and so on.

* * *

These clean girls will circle the plaza clockwise,
entwined in pairs, throbbing to be plucked from the wheel.
I’ll dance in the bar with Mexican boys
who’ll squeeze my ass and tell my white throat, You,
alone, are beautiful.

Sources

Jan Richman. 1994. “Ajijic.” Ploughshares, Vol. 19, No. 4, Borderlands (Winter, 1993/1994), 16.
Jan Richman. 1995. Because the Brain Can Be Talked into Anything: poems. Louisiana State University Press.
Jan Richman. 2012. Thrill-Bent. Tupelo Press.

Gerald van de Wiele and his painting entitled “Chapala”

1950s No Responses »

Apr 292021

Gerald van de Wiele was 19 years old when he visited Ajijic briefly with his good friend and fellow artist George “Jorge” Fick in 1951. Sixty-six years later, and despite never having returned to the area, van de Wiele completed an abstract painting entitled “Chapala.”

What were the circumstances of van de Wiele’s original visit, and why was it so long before he painted “Chapala”?

Born in Detroit in 1932, van de Wiele and Fick (1932-2004) visited Mexico more or less on a whim. After studying for a few months at the Art institute of Chicago on a national scholarship, van de Wiele had applied to Black Mountain College. The same day he received his acceptance letter, he also received his draft notice.

Gerald van de Wiele. 2017. Chapala (artist-made-frame). Credit: Artist Estate Studio.

Gerald van de Wiele. 2016-17. Chapala. (Acrylic on panel with artist’s handmade frame.) Reproduced by kind permission of the artist.

Before turning up for training, van de Wiele and his good friend Fick took a road trip out to California, where they spotted Lake Chapala while looking at a map of Mexico, and decided to catch the train to Guadalajara to see the lake for themselves.

It was November 1951. During the day or two they spent in Guadalajara, before catching the bus to Chapala, the two young men explored the city on foot. Beautiful classical piano music coming from a house they passed led them to knock on the door to thank the occupant. They were invited inside and introduced to a female pianist who was—said their host—“one of Mexico’s most famous pianists.” To this day, van de Wiele has no idea who the pianist was, but the young men were amazed by the hospitality and enthralled by the music. The magic of Mexico had struck again.

When Fick and van de Wiele got off the bus in Chapala they entered a hotel (possibly the Hotel Nido) where they met an American journalist who invited them to stay at his chalet overlooking the lake.

Even though van de Wiele stayed only two weeks at Lake Chapala, the visit was memorable and remained “every vivid” in his mind. (Fick stayed on in Chapala for a few months.)

On van de Wiele’s return to the US, he did his basic military training in San Diego. By lucky coincidence, he was then posted to join the 2nd Marine Division in Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, from where he was able to use a couple of weekend passes for quick visits to Fick who was now studying at Black Mountain College. Having been forced to postpone his own studies, Van de Wiele, with funding from the G.I. Bill, attended the college from 1954 to 1956.

In addition to van de Wiele and Fick, other artists and writers linking Black Mountain College to Lake Chapala include painter Nicolas Muzenic (1919-1976) and writer Elaine Gottlieb (1916-2004).

The year after leaving Black Mountain College, van de Wiele, now married, joined with several friends to open Wells Street Gallery in Chicago. This gallery was partly financed by Stanley Sourelis (1925-2006), who later lived and painted in Ajijic for many years.

Van de Wiele held his first solo show at the Wells Street Gallery in October 1957. Two years later, van de Wiele moved to the much larger and more competitive art scene in New York City, which has been his home ever since.

Van de Wiele has exhibited regularly in New York, and his works can be found in numerous major private and institutional collections.

And van de Wiele’s painting, “Chapala”? Well, it turns out—the artist told me— that it has absolutely nothing to do with Chapala apart from the title! After completing the painting in 2017, van de Wiele was pondering the best title and “Chapala” popped into his head at just the right moment. “Chapala” was first exhibited in 2018 at a major retrospective of van de Wiele’s work, covering seven decades of painting and sculpture, at the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center in Asheville, North Carolina.

For more about Gerald van de Wiele and his amazing art, please visit his website.

[Note: Fick’s biography, as submitted to art websites by his widow, Judy Perlman, shows Fick as attending a “Mexican Art school Ajijic, Guadalajara” in 1951. However, van de Wiele has confirmed to me that Fick had not been in Ajijic previously, that they arrived in late November or early December 1951, and that their trip did not involve any formal art classes. There are no records of any winter art classes in Ajijic at that time.]

Acknowledgment

My sincere thanks to the artist for sharing his memories of his trip to Mexico with me, and for allowing me to reproduce “Chapala.”

Sources

Jason Andrew. 2018. “Gerald van de Wiele: Ever the Dreamer.” Introduction in the catalog of “Gerald van de Wiele: Variations Seven Decades of Painting, Drawing and Sculpture”, exhibition curated by Jason Andrew at Black Mountain College Museum + Art Center, 19 January to 19 May 2018.

Thriller by Louis Charbonneau captures the essence of Ajijic in the 1970s

1970s 2 Responses »

Apr 222021

Journalist and author Louis Henry Charbonneau (1924-2017) includes numerous passages about Ajijic in his book The Lair, first published in 1980. Presumably Charbonneau visited Ajijic in the mid-1970s. (If you can supply any details about his time in Ajijic, please get in touch)

Louis Henry Charbonneau, Jr. was born in Detroit, Michigan, on 20 January 1924 and died in Lomita, California, on 11 May 2017. He completed his B.A. and M.A. at the University of Detroit.

After serving in the US Army Air Force in the second world war, he taught at the University of Detroit for several years before moving to California, where he was a journalist at the Los Angeles Times from 1952 to 1971. He also wrote several radio plays and worked as an editor and copywriter.

In his prolific writing career, he published about forty novels in a variety of genres, from science fiction to thrillers and Westerns (written under the pen name Cartis Travis Young). His first novel was No Place on Earth (1958), a dystopian scifi tale which earned him a nomination for the Hugo Award for Best New Author of 1958. His scifi writing continued with Corpus Earthling (1960), The Sentinel Stars (1963), Psychedelic-40 (1965) and Antic Earth (1967). His other works include The Sensitives (1963), The Specials (1965), Down to Earth (1967), Barrier World (1970), Embryo (1976) and Intruder (1979).

Charbonneau’s The Lair, first published in 1980, was republished as an ebook in 2014. This story of a kidnapping and its ramifications begins in Los Angeles in 1972 and includes several brief period descriptions of Chapala, Ajijic and the (Old) Posada Ajijic. Here are a few sample snippets:

“They swept over a high crest and came into view of Lake Chapala, blue in the pale light of evening under an early evening quarter-moon that had just appeared over the mountains as if on cue. The small village of Chapala, now a retirement paradise for retired American admirals and colonels, with American-style golf-and-country-club developments to the east and west, grew away from the lake shore and climbed the foothills.”

+ + + + +

“There were supposed to be many Mexicos, Charmian Stewart commented, but this one didn’t seem to belong to Mexicans any more. All they had left was the Chapala pier for Sunday family promenading, and even there the music that sounded in the cafés and clubs for young people to dance to was hard rock, not soft guitar. Their chaperoning abuelas must be bewildered by it all, Charmian mused, anxiously watching their grandchildren turn into something they could not understand.”

+ + + + +

“They drove past the Chula Vista Country Club development and the huge Camino Real. The latter, a blaze of lights, was at the edge of Ajijic. The town itself was another of those picturesque Indian villages whose climate and setting on the shore of the lake, with narrow cobbled or dirt streets and tiny adobe houses behind high walls, had led to its being taken over by the horde of norteamericanos looking for a place to live on their pensions without having to scrimp-and with the luxury of a maid and gardener. Most of the houses had been or were being modernized with U.S.-style bathrooms and kitchens.”

+ + + + +

“The streets of Ajijic seemed crowded with Americans out for a stroll or Mexicans standing in open doorways. The tiny plaza at the center of the village was busy. There was a movie theater featuring Sean Connery in a James Bond rerun. On the corner opposite was a small, brightly lit and very modern supermercado, its shelves lined with American canned goods, cigarettes and magazines.

– “You’ve been here before?” Blanchard asked, as Charmian Stewart turned along a dark, one-way street leading away from the plaza.

– “I bought this skirt at one of the gift shops here. It’s a pretty little town. You should see it in daylight.”

– “Do any Mexicans still live here?”

– She laughed. “Of course, Who do you suppose the servants are?”

+ + + + +

“Charmian parked her compact car along a side street and they walked back to the Posada del Lago . . . . The crooked path brought them to the restaurant on one side and a large cocktail lounge on the right, both almost at the edge of the lake. Blanchard and Charmian Stewart paused at the entrance to the lounge, struck by the beauty of the scene outside. At the water’s edge, just a few feet away, a group of young men and women, most of them with the look and air of affluent Americans, were arranging themselves on horses for an evening ride along the beach, calling out to each other or breaking into sudden laughter.

A handsome, slender Mexican youth with the flashing smile of the Indian signaled and turned his horse along the shore of the lake, leading the riders in single file. The water lapped into their tracks in the wet sand.

The posada was the social center of the town, Charmian told Blanchard, particularly for swingers, or what passed for swingers in this part of the world. At one table a sixty-year-old red-faced American with a bull neck and a stiff back looked exactly like a retired Marine general, which he might well have been. The younger man, who acted as if he wanted to light the general’s cigar and settled for lighting their wives’ cigarettes, was his aide, Blanchard decided. And the two women, dyed blonde and dyed jet-black, respectively fifty and sixty, had the brittle, weathered smartness of career-officers’ wives.

– “Golf and bridge,” Charmian murmured. “Those are the big things around here. And good tequila or Jamaican rum at two dollars a quart. They say the party starts about ten in the morning every day. And as often as not, this is a good place to wind it up at night.”

Sources

Louis Henry Charbonneau. 1980. The Lair. New York : Fawcett Gold Meda; Ebook edition, 2014, Jabberwocky Literary Agency, Inc.
The Detroit News & Detroit Free Press. “Louis Henry Charbonneau, Jr. (Obituary).” 17 May 2017.

Edythe Wallach Kidd painted in Ajijic and Chapala in 1944

1940s 5 Responses »

Apr 152021

Edythe Wallach (1909-2001) lived and painted for most of 1944 in Chapala and Ajijic. Her Lake Chapala paintings were exhibited in both Chapala and in New York.

Edythe (“Edie”) Gertrude Wallach (later Wallach Kidd) was born in New Rochelle, New York, on 10 August 1909 to Dr. William Wallach and his wife Anne Rosenthal. Edythe grew up in New Rochelle which appears to have remained her home at least until the death of her father in 1937. The family, which was Jewish, was clearly well-to-do since the parents were able to spend summer in Europe (with one or both children) every few years, notably in 1926, 1929 and 1933.

It is unclear where Edythe acquired her education or art training.

Edythe Wallach’s mother died in January 1944. Shortly after that, Edythe left for Lake Chapala, where she lived first in Ajijic for several months and then in Chapala. Wallach was one of several artists mentioned by Neill James in her article “I live in Ajijic”, first published in 1945.

Edythe Wallach. 1944. Plaza at Chapala. Coll: University of the South, Sewanee, Tennessee.

Wallach moved from Ajijic to Chapala at the insistence of fellow artist Hari Kidd. After meeting at a lunch for area expatriates at a hotel in Chapala, they strolled to the plaza:

“While seated in the postage stamp plaza, Hari suggested that I move to Chapala from Ajijic where I was preparing a New York exhibition. I said no – but within two weeks I was seated beside the lake, looking through borrowed binoculars for the boatman who was to fetch me. In two days he appeared and I reached Chapala. The following morning Hari stood at my door, rigid as a Rousseau painting, a bouquet in his hand.” (document written by Edythe Wallach Kidd dated 10 June 1966)

Their romance blossomed in Chapala under the soft moonlight reflecting off the serenely beautiful lake…

Even with romantic distractions, by November 1944 Wallach had completed enough paintings to hold a solo exhibition at the Villa Montecarlo in Chapala. The local El Informador newspaper in Guadalajara described this as “one of the most brilliant artistic and social events of the Fall”, saying that guests from Ajijic, Guadalajara and Chapala responded warmly to the bright color and lively designs of the paintings which were being transferred later for exhibition in New York.

Postcard of The Villa Montecarlo, Chapala, ca 1940

The opening on 12 November 1944 attracted many noteworthy guests, including Mr and Mrs Jack Bennett; Nigel Stansbury Millett and his father; Neill James; Pablo García Hernández (representative of Teatro Mexicano del Arte); Otto Butterlin and his daughter Rita; Witter Bynner, the famous American poet; Charles Stigel; Dr and Mrs Charles Halmos; Ann Medalie; and Herbert and Georgette Johnson.

Shortly after this exhibition closed, Wallach took her paintings back to New York. Her New York art show opened at the Bonestell Galleries at 18 East 37th Street in November 1945. It was favorably reviewed as “Mexican in theme but not in manner” with one anonymous reviewer writing that

Miss Edythe Wallach… has just returned from a year’s travel in Mexico where she has been painting….

Walter Pach, eminent art critic, in speaking of Miss Wallach’s work, says, “Your report on Mexico is far beyond what I had hoped for when you went to that country. You have seen its light, you have seen its beauty, and your painting speaks of all these things. What impresses me in your work is that you have retained your central idiom, your own vision and, even when looking at a place so impressive (and so Mexican) as Chapala, you have not even been tempted to imitate, but have told of your impressions with complete freedom to work in a way that is personal with you.”

Edythe Wallach and Hari Kidd married in Key West, Florida in March 1946. Kidd was already a well-known artist and one account of the wedding says that, “The bride, herself an artist of note, recently held her first exhibition of Mexican oils in New York, and is planning a new group of paintings for a forthcoming show.” A similar comment about a forthcoming show appears in The Miami News in September 1946 which says that Edith Wallach, wife of Hari Kidd, “fresh from a painting sojourn in Mexico” is “preparing for a second show in New York of her Mexican interpretations in oils.” I have been unable to confirm whether or not Wallach (presumably with Hari) returned to Mexico in the summer of 1946 (as this piece suggests) or, indeed, to find any further reference to this second U.S. show.

Edythe Wallach Kidd. Untitled. Date unknown. Credit: Stephanie Wallach.

The couple lived in Key West from about the time they married in 1946 to 1964. Due to Hari’s declining health, they then moved to Tucson in summer 1964, where he died in hospital barely four months later.

Edythe remained in Arizona for several years and attended the inauguration of a retrospective of her husband’s art at the El Paso Museum in October 1967.

In late 1968 or early 1969, she returned to live once again in Key West, Florida, where she held a show of her work at DePoo’s Island Gallery in 1969. Several years later, one of her paintings was chosen for the juried 13th Annual Major Florida Artists Show which opened in January 1976 at the Harmon Gallery in Naples, Florida. At that time, the artist was listed as “Edythe Wallach (Key West)” but Edythe later moved to Lake Worth, where she passed away on 17 December 2001.

Acknowledgment

My sincere thanks to Edythe Wallach Kidd’s niece, Stephanie Wallach, for helping clarify details of the artist’s life and for kindly supplying the photograph of one of her paintings, and to Mary O’Neill, Visual Resources Librarian at The University of the South, for graciously providing me with copies of documents and images in the library archives.

Note: This post, originally published in January 2018, was significantly updated in October 2018 and March 2021.

Sources:

The Burlington Free Press (Burlington, Vermont), 19 October 1945, pp 16, 20.
El Paso Herald Post, Monday, 18 March 1946, p 6; 14 Oct 1967, Showtime, p14; 12 April 1969.
El Informador (Guadalajara): 18 November 1944; 3 December 1944, p 11.
Neill James. 1945. “I live in Ajijic”, in Modern Mexico, October 1945.
The Miami News : 7 September 1946; 25 January 1948, p 59; 31 January 1954, p 24.
The Naples Daily News (Naples, Florida), 11 January 1976, p 58.
The New Yorker : 10 November 1945.
Tucson Daily Citizen (Tucson, Arizona), 19 November 1964, p 7.

Salomón Zepeda, the elusive author of “La Ondina de Chapala”

1950s No Responses »

Apr 082021

When I first wrote about Salomón Zepeda several years ago, I confessed that my research had failed to unearth anything of substance about him, despite the fact that he published a Spanish-language novel set at Lake Chapala in 1951.

Salomón Zepeda was the author of La Ondina de Chapala (“The Water Nymph of Chapala”), a 149-page Spanish-language novel published by Imprenta Ruíz in Mexico City. The cover art appears to be by “Magallón.”

Several subsequent attempts to find out more about the author met with equally dispiriting results. Knowing nothing beyond the cover of the novel, I had always assumed, based on the cover art, that it was almost certainly a pocket romance of relatively limited artistic merit.

However, I was forced to revise my opinion after my able and indefatigable research assistant in Mexico, Sra. Maricruz Ibarra, managed to acquire scans of the entire book. Realizing that the novel was not simply a throw-away romance prompted me to try once again to seek more details of its elusive author.

I can finally offer a few tantalizing clues about the author’s life and work. Salomón Zepeda was born in Tala, Jalisco, on 5 May 1917. His parents were Juan Zepeda Lara (then aged 32) and Gregoria Mariscal (29). He apparently had at least two brothers: Feliciano and Jorge. A close reading of his novel strongly suggests that he had a privileged upbringing. He was certainly familiar with European literature, art and history.

Zepeda appears to have lived most of his life in Mexico City, where he died on 26 May 1985. His death certificate lists him as “single” and gives his occupation as “writer.” His home was at Privada Avena 7, Granjas Esmeralda, Tlalpan.

If you are interested in reading La Ondina de Chapala, you may be able to borrow, via inter-library loan, one of the copies held in a number of academic libraries in the U.S. These libraries include the “Southern Regional Library Facility” of the University of California Los Angeles.

While I have yet to find any evidence that he published a second book, the back page of La Ondina de Chapala refers to two works in progress: a collection of stories entitled Los Rostros Alucinados (“The Hallucinating Faces”) and a novel titled La Ciudad Doliente (“The Suffering City”). If you know anything about either of these works, please get in touch!

I take a closer look at La Ondina de Chapala in a separate post.

Note: This is an updated version of a post first published 12 December 2016.

Do you recognize the subject of this portrait by Tink Strother?

1960s No Responses »

Apr 012021

Tink Strother (1919-2007) was, an acclaimed portrait painter who lived in Ajijic from 1961 to 1963. As Peggy Kelly wrote in her obituary of Strother for the Santa Paula News, Strother’s portraits reflect “not only the physical likeness of the subject but also their personality and soul.”

In Ajijic, Tink Strother met Colombian artist Carlos López Ruíz (1912-1972). They subsequently moved to California, where they opened a joint studio and gallery, first in Pico Rivera and then in Whittier.

Biography of Tink Strother

The owner of this striking portrait contacted us in the hope that someone could identify the individual so deftly painted by Strother.

Tink Strother. c1962. Untitled portrait. Reproduced courtesy of Eliot Roberts

By an extraordinary coincidence, this painting is remarkably similar to the one immediately behind her in this image of the artist in her studio in 1962, previously published in our profile of her:

Tink Strother in her Ajijic studio, ca 1962

The two paintings appear to be portraits, from slightly different angles, of the same individual. Please get in touch if you recognize this individual who was the subject of such a superb portrait.

American novelist Sandra Scofield wrote two books set in Mexico

1990s onwards No Responses »

Mar 252021

Sandra Scofield’s first novel, Gringa, was based on the author’s extensive travels in Mexico in the 1960s. The novel is set in the violent turbulence of 1968 when, a few weeks before the opening of the Olympic Games in Mexico City, hundreds of students protesting in Tlatelolco Plaza were massacred by soldiers.

The “gringa” of the book’s title is Abilene “Abby” Painter, a 25-year-old Texan who is trapped in “an abusive, torrid relationship” with Antonio Velez, a famous Mexican bullfighter. In the words of Publishers Weekly, “her self-esteem is so paltry that she serves as a sexual doormat for her swaggering lover” whose “pride in his animal trophies points up the obvious analogy between his mistresses and these slain creatures.” The student protests and their aftermath finally open Abby’s eyes to what she really wants, but can she escape without losing her life? In addition to sex, violence and death, the book explores the full range of animal instincts and the dichotomy between chance and choice in individuals’ lives.

Several acclaimed novels later, Scofield’s A Chance to See Egypt is (despite its title) also set in Mexico, and was written following a trip to Lake Chapala in the early 1990s. Events in A Chance to See Egypt take place against a backdrop of two villages (Lago de Luz and Tecatitlán) on a fictionalized Lake Chapala. The novel, which won the Best Fiction award from the Texas Institute of Letters in 1996, will be considered in more detail in a separate post.

Though she spent most of her adult life in Oregon and Montana, Sandra Scofield was born in Wichita Falls, Texas, in 1943. She attended Our Lady of Victory Academy in Fort Worth before graduating from Odessa High School in 1960. She then studied at Odessa Junior College and the University of Texas, where she completed a B.A. in Speech in 1964. She first visited Mexico shortly before graduation.

After studying theatre at Northern Illinois University (1967-68), Scofield had a one-year acting fellowship at Cornell University the following year. After divorcing her first husband in 1974, Scofield remarried and moved to Oregon, where she returned to academic life to gain a masters degree related to language education (1977) and a doctorate (1979) from the University of Oregon.

Scofield taught in high schools and colleges before deciding to write full time in 1983. After establishing her writing career, she occasionally gave classes at writers festivals (such as the Iowa Summer Writing Festival in 1993) and as a visiting lecturer in MFA programs. Scofield later joined the faculty of the Solstice MFA low residency program at Pine Manor College in Maryland.

Her literary awards include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (1991); the Texas Institute of Letters Fiction Award; the American Book Award; and nominations for a National Book Award (1991); the Oregon Book Award and the First Fiction Award from the Academy of Arts and Letters.

Scofield’s novels are Gringa (1989), Beyond Deserving (1991), Walking Dunes (1992), More Than Allies (1993), Opal on Dry Ground (1994), A Chance to See Egypt (1996) and Plain Seeing (1997).

More recently, Scofield published three long stories as Swim: Stories of the Sixties (2017). One of these stories, “An Easy Pass,” is set in Mexico and relates (in the author’s own words) to “an almost hysterical fascination with bullfighters (especially the young beginning ones).”

Scofield’s non-fiction works include Occasions of Sin: a Memoir (2004); The Scene Book: A Primer for the Fiction Writer (2007); and The Last Draft: A Novelist’s Guide to Revision (2017). She has also written numerous book reviews for major regional publications such as the Dallas Morning News, Chicago Tribune, Newsday, and The Boston Globe.

An archive of papers related to Sandra Scofield and her work are held in the Special Collections Library of Texas Tech University.

Acknowledgment

I am grateful to J. Weston Marshall, Archival Associate of the Special Collections Library of Texas Tech University, for kindly supplying me with a copy of Sandra Scofield’s notes describing the genesis of A Chance to See Egypt.

Sources

Alan Cogan. 2001. “A Chance to See Egypt by Sandra Scofield” (review). MexConnect.
Sandra Scofield. 1996. A Chance to See Egypt. Cliff Street Books (Harper Collins).
Sandra Scofield. 2005. “A Chance to See Egypt; writing history explained by Scofield,” typescript, 2005, Item 53 in Sandra Scofield Papers, 1958-2005 and undated, Southwest Collection/Special Collections Library, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas.

The “Hotel Laguna” in Ajijic (photos by Jacques Van Belle)

1950s, 1960s 1 Response »

Mar 182021

Several photographs of Ajijic by Jacques Van Belle (ca 1924-2012) are captioned “Hotel Laguna.” They are believed to date from the late 1950s.

Jacques Van Belle. ca. 1960. Hotel Laguna, Ajijic.

The main hotels in Ajijic at about the time of the photos were:

Casa Heuer, a rustic lakefront property run by siblings Paul and Liesel Heuer west of the pier in Ajijic. ‘Pablo’ Heuer died in 1957. The architectural style of Casa Heuer does not match the photographs.
Posada Ajijic, the centrally-located hotel, had its main entrance on Calle 16 de Septiembre and extended to the lakeshore. It had been operating an an hotel for more than thirty years before the Eager family ran it from 1976 to 1990. The Eagers closed Posada Ajijic in 1990 and immediately opened their own new hotel, La Nueva Posada, a few blocks further east.
Quinta Mi Retiro (aka Hotel del General). This hotel was most active in the 1950s and 1960s.
Hotel Anita. This small hotel was on Calle Juárez, and is the “Hotel Laguna” shown in these photographs. In 1967 it was renamed Hotel Villa del Lago.

Jacques Van Belle. ca. 1960. Hotel Laguna, Ajijic.

The Hotel Villa del Lago (Hotel Laguna) was originally owned by Anita Chávez de Basulto; the business was later owned by Luis de Alba and his wife, Margaret.

Please get in touch if you can tell me any more about “Hotel Laguna” / Hotel Anita.

Sources

Guadalajara Reporter, 24 June 1967; 8 July 1967.

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