Another New Mexico artist I'm a fan of.

I've gushed here on numerous occasions about Georgia O'Keeffe, but there's another artist with ties to New Mexico of whom I'm a fan. You may even have heard of him: Gustave Baumann. The New Mexico Museum of Art here in Santa Fe is running an expansive exhibit of his work through February, and I stopped by a few weeks ago to see it. If you're going to be in Santa Fe this winter, it's worth a visit.

Baumann was born in Germany in 1881 and moved to the United States with his family when he was about ten years old. According to Wikipedia, when he was 17, he worked for an engraving house in Chicago while taking night classes at the Art Institute. He returned to Germany for further studies, but by 1908, he was back in the US, earning a living as a graphic artist and producing color woodcuts. He spent some years in Nashville, IN, as a member of the Brown County Art Colony. While there, he was hired to illustrate a volume of poetry by James Whitcomb Riley, the celebrated (at least back in the day) Hoosier poet, which was published in 1912. The exhibit has a copy of the book on display. They didn't say I couldn't take a photo, so I did. 

Lynne Cantwell 2025

Lynne Cantwell 2025

In case you can't embiggen the second pic, here's what it says: 

James Whitcomb Riley, an Indiana native and the most revered poet of his day, and Baumann, then living in Nashville, was commissioned by the Bobbs-Merrill Company to illustrate his poem All the Year Round. The book featured color scenes of daily life in the rural county, one for each month.

Often overlooked but truly noteworthy, the bold lettering of each poem (skillfully carved backwards) suits Riley's folksy stanzas "to a T." The book was hailed as an innovative and artistic achievement, but even though it was priced at only $2.50, its sales were less than hoped for.

 I do hope you can embiggen the pic, if only to see that the museum staff waggishly printed the word "backwards" backwards.

In 1918, Baumann moved to New Mexico, arriving first in Taos and then in Santa Fe, where Paul Water, the then-curator of the New Mexico Museum of Art (which was new on the scene at the time), convinced Baumann to stay by giving him studio space in the museum's basement.

I was beginning to feel like I'd been following Baumann around. I grew up on the other side of Lake Michigan from Chicago and attended Indiana University, which isn't far from Brown County. And of course now I'm here.

The curators' whimsical nature shown in that label for the poetry book is well suited to Baumann. He created charming annual holiday cards and carved marionettes and painted backdrops for puppet shows, many of which are on display. He also helped another local artist, Will Shuster, create the very first Zozobra, the marionette that has been filled with "glooms" and burned every year since 1924. (The first one was only about six feet tall. They're a lot bigger now.)

None of this is to diminish the effort that Baumann put into his primary craft. One part of the exhibit is devoted to showing the layering technique for Baumann's print, Old Santa Fe. It required eight woodcuts, each with a different color of ink, to produce this result: 

From the New Mexico Museum of Art's website

For those of us, like me, who have made simplistic prints by carving a potato, the precision required for this kind of work boggles the mind. 

Anyhow, go see it if you're in town. The exhibit is on until February 22, 2026.

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Update on cooking Thanksgiving dinner on an induction stove: It was fine. Although the first thing I made, pumpkin pudding, took a little inventiveness. I've made this for years; basically it's pumpkin pie filling baked in ramekins instead of in a pie crust, which saves both calories (if you're counting those) and carbs (if you're counting those). It requires baking the ramekins in a water bath, which is a standard technique for baking custards. Anyway, the first step in the recipe is to heat a large kettle full of water to boiling.

Well. My kettle is ceramic. I bought it years ago, after I got tired of replacing metal kettles that always rusted inside. Ceramic can go right on an open flame, but it won't work on induction.

I ended up heating the water in a pot, then pouring it into the teapot to pour into the pan that the ramekins were placed in. I needed the spout to keep from splashing water into the filled ramekins. Anyhow, it all worked out fine -- although now I need to consider whether it's worth buying a steel teapot for the once per year that I make pumpkin pudding.

The rest of the meal went fine; I cooked the turkey loaf with the convection feature, and it turned out perfectly moist. The stove claims to automatically recalculate temperatures from regular recipes to induction. Now if somebody would make a stove that automatically calculates convection bake temps for 7,000 feet, I'd be all set.

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I'll be out of pocket next weekend, so no post from me. See you around here again on December 14th.

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These moments of waggish blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay safe!