Walter Ufer: Paintings

Walter Ufer was a colorful personality. He was a generous, outspoken man with a sensitive social conscience. Accordingly, Ufer depicted the Indian with an unblinking eye for detail, often without the romanticized trappings of lost grandeur. His bold, confident use of thickly applied paint, which he had learned abroad, was intensified by the vibrant color and sharp contrasting light of Taos. Ufer was very fond of the work of John Singer Sargent, and his work shows this influence in the portrayal of the hands, faces, and garments of the figures. Ufer, however, in his best work, went beyond the surface of things to expose the undercurrents of human feeling. Unlike so many of his Taos counterparts, he seems to have been struck by the irony of the Indian's lot in this artistic paradise, and he used the language of paint to argue more eloquently than he could have done with words.

The present work showcases a fine array of new photographic images of paintings by Walter Ufer utilizing the Kvamme process of digital enhancement.