John Marin spent only two summers in Taos, New Mexico, staying on land owned by Mabel Dodge Luhan in 1929 and 1930, but the time he spent there was tremendously important. (Fine, p. 217) The landscape itself played to his sensitivities to geometric abstraction. The vastness of the prairie and the looming mountains clearly attracted and challenged him in much the same way as the Maine landscape and sea had. (Norman, p. 128) Only a handful of works from two productive summers depict people; only two depict groups of people. The artist’s journals—often as colorful and poetic as his watercolors – record a pivotal experience:

Taos, New Mexico, Aug. 25, 1929.

A big Indian dance I attended—I feel my greatest human Experience—the barbaric Splendor of it was magnificent.

The movements within movements are swell –and it kept up for hours.

I drove an hundred miles to this dance—but that’s nothing here—the country is so damn big—So that if you succeed in Expressing a little—one ought to be satisfied and proceed to pat oneself.

Shortly thereafter, he marked the occasion with a watercolor depicting the dance: Dance of the Pueblo Indians. The following summer, Marin returned to Taos. He eagerly anticipated viewing another dance – it seems to have been on his mind, having written to Stieglitz beforehand:

Tomorrow morning I expect to go to the great San Domingo dance—I wonder if I’ll get the kick out of it that I got last year—whether I’ll feel like tearing up my picture made last year.

After the anticipated dance, he continued, to Stieglitz:

I have been to the dance and since I do not feel like painting from having seen just now—I’ll wait a while before tearing up the old—in fact fortunately or otherwise—cannot as it is in the Lincoln Storage.

Certain passages in the dance itself are so beautiful that to produce a something having seen it—becomes well nigh worthless—it’s like grafting on to perfection—it’s like rewriting Bach.

To out brilliance the diamond—to out red the ruby. But man will always continue it seems to try and do just that.

Marin did not tear up either of the watercolors of native dances, but he also never returned to the theme in his work. While scenes in New Jersey drew his attention again and again, the beauty of the culture of the Pueblo and San Domingo peoples seems to have given him an uncharacteristic sense of redundancy.

Marin did not believe in entirely “non-objective art,” insisting always on a relationship to observation. Nonetheless he was admired by proponents of Abstract Expressionism for the affinities expressed in his modestly-scaled watercolors to the vast splatters of the postwar New York School. Writing in 1948, Clement Greenberg wrote of Marin,

He is certainly one of the best artists who ever handled a brush in this country. And if it is not beyond all doubt that he is the best painter alive in America at this moment, he assuredly has to be taken into consideration when we ask who is.” (as quoted in John Marin: The Painted Frame, Hilton Kramer, 2000)

Many of Marin’s works have titles with the word “speed” and “movement”—central preoccupations. Along with energy, Marin was also concerned with its containment. There are some “all over” canvases, but he more often created an enclosing boundary, containing the vitality of image within a central huddled mass, a barrier pressing against the threat of flying apart in all directions.

Here the subject matter was certainly moving to him personally, but equally so it perfectly aligns with these themes of energy and containment. He expresses – admiringly – the “barbaric Splendor” of the dance – the animation of the individual within the loose formal constraint of the dance. Far from a courtly exercise, the dance of the Pueblo people was uniquely suited to Marin’s temperament.

No less interesting was the architecture of the native people. The segmented, stacked brick walls of their buildings expressed an awareness of a geometry, but not a subservience to it. They breathe with a vitality that would be quickly bled from the structure in the hands of a le Corbusier, but at the same time feature a geometric regularity that Marin denoted in the background of the present work. He further suggested native design practices with his dashed black enclosure line. Marin was not alone in connecting modernist abstraction with design of Southwest natives. Theodore Roosevelt, commenting on modernist paintings in the 1913 Armory Show, remarked:

There is in my bath-room a really good Navajo rug which, on any proper interpretation of the Cubist theory, is a far more satisfactory and decorative picture . . . I was interested to find that a man of scientific attainments who had likewise looked at the pictures had been struck, as I was, by their resemblance to the later work of the paleolithic artists of the French and Spanish caves. [Theodore Roosevelt, “A Layman’s Views of an Art Exhibition,” Outlook, 103 (29 March 1913): 718–720. Reprinted in Roderick Nash, ed. The Call of the Wild (1900–1916), (New York: George Braziller, 1970)]

The huddled pueblo in the background and the stair-stepping structures in the picture’s margin demonstrate Marin’s enthusiastic embrace of this new culture. Hilton Kramer commented upon Marin’s framing device: “Its role was to impel the composition in the direction of pure abstraction…to complement the syncopated forms within the picture itself.” The stair-stepped forms of the pueblos are themselves a sort of broken line, and the motif is repeated again outside the boundary line as well.

A contemporary critic reported that

[The New Mexico watercolors] range in mood and manner from the tenderly lyric to the overwhelmingly torrential. Marin says they are the last watercolors he is going to do.” (As quoted in Fine, p. 225)

Of course this turned out not to be the case – Marin continued to produce watercolors, in volume, for the rest of his life. Perhaps the critic was mistaken with regard to watercolor, but Dance of the Pueblo Indians appears to be his ultimate statement on the subject. The other work, Dance of the Santo Domingo Indians, was bought by Alfred Stieglitz and given to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1948.