The Roswell Museum
proudly presents
A Solo Show Featuring Artwork by Louise Ganthiers at the Roswell Museum, Curated by Aaron Wilder
Louise Ganthiers
Abstract Landscape, Date Unknown
Oil on Canvas
September 7, 2024-February 23, 2025 (ended early due to October 2024 Roswell flood)
Founders Gallery
1011 North Richardson Avenue
Roswell, NM 88201
I try to express in my paintings the outer object as seen and my inner response—the particular subject and the universal sense of it—the outer and inner reality. I have accomplished this when I have established within the picture a satisfactory relationship—a complete unity.
- Louise Ganthiers
The Roswell Museum pays homage to underrecognized Taos Modern artist Louise Ganthiers who was born in New York City on October 6, 1907. She was mostly a self-taught artist with occasional mentorship from more established artists, such as Rufino Tamayo, with whom she studied briefly in the mid- to late 1940s at the Brooklyn Museum. According to former Harwood Museum of Art curator David Witt, Ganthiers was an administrator in the textile industry in New York and “she took a leave of absence from her job in November 1948. She headed south for Mexico and never returned to the East. During six months in Guadalajara, Ganthiers produced a new body of abstract paintings. These were successful enough to earn her a show at the State Museum.” By the end of the 1940s, Ganthiers had settled in Taos, New Mexico.
Witt explains Ganthiers’ artistic prospects and simultaneous grim financial situation by saying, “From the time of her first show at La Galería Escondida in 1950, she exhibited widely and received favorable reviews… Good reviews, however, did not always translate into sales. Most of the Taos Moderns lived on the margin of economic survival enduring significant hardships to fulfill their life mission of creativity.” Witt also wrote, “Ganthiers waged a struggle on both artistic and economic fronts. In the 1950’s she sold frozen custard to tourists during the summer; she also went to San Francisco to find work and to show her paintings. There her paintings caught the attention of prominent art critic Alfred Frankenstein, who wrote several reviews of her work over the years.”
Miss Ganthiers is a painter who likes a rich, complex impasto, lays on her color most often with the palette knife, and brings off whatever she does with great skill and finely imaginative design. Her abstractions are excellent.
- Alfred Frankenstein
Witt continued, “When she fared no better in California with a series of clerical jobs, she returned to New Mexico where she could at least paint in the place she loved best. Although non-figurative, the images often have at least a vague sense of landscape.”
I don’t paint with ease. I wish I were capable of the smashing directness of some of my contemporaries… I move toward the lyric, the muted understatement of the beautiful and gentle… I have been struggling to reach further into the abstract to break up forms in new ways to fix a space dimension on the canvas that has not been my approach. Yet if I find that I am saying something that infers crassness or harshness I won’t be happy. I have tried to speak in different ways against tragedy, injustice and waste but my way is not that of harshness.
- Louise Ganthiers
Louise Ganthiers passed away in Santa Fe, New Mexico on July 1, 1982. In her obituary, the unidentified author wrote, “she achieved her greatest recognition in the early 1960s when she was one of 12 American artists selected for the 7th International Exhibition of Women Artists at the Museé d’Art Moderne in Paris, and had one-woman shows at the Museum of Fine Arts in Santa Fe and the Roswell Museum [in 1963]. She was a founding member of the Stables Gallery of the Taos Art Association in 1952.”
From a study of her paintings it appears obvious that the artist is heading toward a completely non-objective type of painting… her work demonstrates how a serious painter holds the mental conception within the bounds of plastic color.
- Alfred Morang
Louise Ganthiers’ work has been exhibited in venues in Arizona, California, Colorado, Hawaii, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Wyoming as well as in France and Mexico. The Roswell Museum and the Harwood Museum of Art, a critical partner in making this exhibition possible, are two of only a few museums with significant holdings in their collections of work by Louise Ganthiers. The Roswell Museum’s exhibition Louise Ganthiers: Further Into the Abstract is a celebration of the artist’s work and also an attempt to (re)introduce the underrecognized Taos Modern painter to museums and collectors as well as to a new generation of viewers. This is the third of a series of exhibitions exploring the output of groundbreaking artists who made significant artistic contributions to our region, following displays of works by John De Puy and Patrociño Barela.
Many of the displayed works by Ganthiers are from the Roswell Museum’s collection and we are deeply grateful to 203 Fine Art in Taos, Aaron Payne Fine Art in Santa Fe, the Harwood Museum of Art in Taos, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation in Taos, David W. Ruttenberg, and Dan and Karen Simmons for generously loaning to us from their collections additional works by the artist. Thanks is owed to the City of Roswell, the RMAC Foundation, and David W. Ruttenberg for their financial support and to Agustín Pozo Gálvez for his translation of text about the exhibition to Spanish.
Curated by Aaron Wilder