After World War II the New Mexico village of Taos became an important center of American art; the young abstract artists who met at that intellectual and artistic crossroads came to be known as the Taos Moderns.  They arrived from both coasts and often seemed to have little in common except their scorn for the romanticized depictions of scenery and native people typical of Taos in the first half of the 20th century.  The newcomers shared the experience of cataclysmic war, the aesthetic and intellectual upheavals of Europe, and the revolutionary concepts of Abstract Expressionism that exploded in San Francisco and New York in the 1940's.  They were not terribly interested in painting pretty pictures of aspens and Indians.

David Witt, (former) curator of the Harwood Museum in Taos and the foremost authority on the Taos Moderns, describes both how "the New York School and their West Coast counterparts provided a model for how American artists could develop a truly American art.  The possibilities - even where figuration and subject matter re-emerged finally- became the model for a new American art."

Nowhere was this fusion any more apparent than in Taos.  It was a small community , and the artists were necessarily close; also, the newcomers were perhaps more worldly than earlier visitors, and, arguably, in such an exotic landscape this more sophisticated generation might have known instinctively that here something quite special and unique could happen.

                                                                    Ken Canfield, TAOS MODERNS postwar abstract, Canfield Gallery, Santa Fe, 2002