Howard Cook, Morning Smokes, 1927

Howard Cook’s mastery of printmaking is evident in “Morning Smokes, Taos Pueblo” through the precise network of lines with which the artist has successfully rendered the drama of long shadows and pueblo fires lit at the end of the day. This etching depicts the Indian pueblo at Taos in northern New Mexico, a UNESCO World Heritage site that has been occupied for some 1,000 years.

Although Howard Norton Cook developed a national reputation as a painter and muralist during his lifetime, he 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 the1920s 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 (1988), pp. 218–222; Janet A. Flint in Duffy, The Graphic Work of Howard Cook: Catalogue Raisonné (1984), pp. 36–38, no. 50.