Howard Cook, Governor’s Palace, Santa Fe, 1926

A National Historic Landmark by Howard Cook

“Governor’s Palace” by Howard Norton Cook depicts the oldest occupied public buildings in the United States. The building was constructed in the early 1600s in a Spanish Pueblo style, seeing various powers overseeing it through more than two hundred years. A project to restore the building began in 1909 led by anthropologist Dr. Edgar Lee Hewitt and was completed in 1913, fourteen years before the present woodcut was printed. In his print, Cook depicts a group of men in front of the Palace under the building’s portale basking in the sun on a wintry day in Santa Fe. A horse drawn carriage stalls nearby. Even in 1927, and after its restoration, the Palace of the Governors attests to the preservation of tradition even in the modern 20th century.

Although he developed a national reputation as a painter and muralist during his lifetime, Howard Cook is perhaps even better known today as one of the premier American printmakers. His printmaking spanned five decades, but his best work, as well as the greater part of his output, was made in the 1920s and 1930s, the period to which the present print belongs. The print’s skillful execution and exquisite play of light and dark make for a fine summation of Cook’s printmaking achievements. As Janet Flint observes, Cook’s images are “delineated with strong draughtsmanship and intense, sculptural contrasts of dark and light. The dark tones, composed of many fine, sensitively etched and inked lines are not opaque, but richly luminous. Indeed, light seems to pervade the image. . ..”

Cook completed many woodcuts and etchings during his first sojourn in New Mexico from 1926 to 1929. The present print belongs to this inspired period. Cook wrote of his experience, “. . . here, long before tourism, was a living, colorful, strange, appealing Indian and Spanish culture right in an exciting, primitively beautiful part of our country.” The early New Mexico prints and some of his drawings were exhibited at the Museum of Fine Arts in Santa Fe in 1928.

Howard Cook was an adventurer, and traveled widely. During the 1920s and 1930s, Cook’s base was often New York City, where he marketed his artwork and was inspired to create images of skyscrapers, harbor scenes, and bridges. He first traveled to New Mexico in the fall of 1926, on assignment for Forum magazine to create a series of woodcut illustrations for the serialization of Willa Cather’s novel Death Comes to the Archbishop. He was immediately captivated and extended his stay, moving from Santa Fe to Taos. Cook traveled to Mexico in 1932 on a Guggenheim Fellowship, and turned his creative eye to the human figure, producing exquisite images of Mexican life. Cook returned to Taos, New Mexico for part of 1935, then to Talpa, New Mexico in 1939, finally settling there in 1944.

Howard Cook’s artworks are held in a number of important permanent collections including the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Library of Congress, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Smithsonian Institution, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Refs.: Richard Cox, “Yankee Printmakers in Mexico, 1900–1950,” in James O’Gorman, Aspects of American Printmaking (Syracuse University Press, 1988), pp. 218–222 (illus.); Janet A. Flint in Duffy, The Graphic Work of Howard Cook: Catalogue Raisonné (Bethesda Art Gallery, 1984), pp. 36–38, no. 24.