Raymond Jonson, Summer - Santa Fe, 1922
Raymond Jonson
1891 - 1982
Summer - Santa Fe, 1922
watercolor
dated lower right: 19 (c) 22
inscribed verso: SUMMER / SANTA FE 1922 / WATERCOLOR / JONSON
10 3/8 x 14 7/8 in. (26.4 x 37.8 cm.), frame: 15 1/2 x 19 3/4 x 5/8 in. (39.4 x 50.2 x 1.6 cm.)
Private Collection, New Mexico
Raymond Jonson arrived in Santa Fe in 1924, having spent fourteen formative years in Chicago, where a chance encounter with the 1913 Armory Show — and especially the paintings of Kandinsky — convinced him that art could function as a kind of universal, symbolic language. New Mexico gave that conviction a landscape to work on. For the next quarter-century he painted the mesas, arroyos, and skies around Santa Fe in a mode that steadily distilled observed nature into rhythmic, sculptural pattern, a bridge between the regional realism of his contemporaries and the fully nonobjective painting he would pursue after co-founding the Transcendental Painting Group in 1938.
This watercolor sits squarely within that transitional vision. The composition is built from broad, faceted planes — tawny sandstone cliffs cut by deep violet shadow, a middle distance of layered blue-green mountains, and a sky of hard-edged, sculptural clouds — all handled with the same disciplined geometry Jonson brought to his studio abstractions. In the foreground, a stand of yucca rendered in crisp, bladed strokes anchors the sheet and gives scale to the canyon beyond. Nothing here is merely transcribed; every rock face and cloud bank has been simplified and re-weighted until the picture reads as much as a study in structure and color relationship as it does a view of a particular place — the "life force underlying the land," as one contemporary description of his work put it.
Jonson's paintings of this period are held by the Museum of New Mexico, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the University of New Mexico's Jonson Gallery, which he founded in 1950 to house his retrospective collection. Works on paper of this quality and immediacy — vigorous, decisive, and unmistakably his own — offer collectors an accessible entry into the career of one of the Southwest's most consequential and least compromising modernists.
Condition
A condition report for this lot is available upon request (please include the lot number in your request) and is provided by Santa Fe Art Auction as a courtesy and convenience for potential buyers.
Raymond Jonson
1891 - 1982
Summer - Santa Fe, 1922
watercolor
dated lower right: 19 (c) 22
inscribed verso: SUMMER / SANTA FE 1922 / WATERCOLOR / JONSON
10 3/8 x 14 7/8 in. (26.4 x 37.8 cm.), frame: 15 1/2 x 19 3/4 x 5/8 in. (39.4 x 50.2 x 1.6 cm.)
Private Collection, New Mexico
Raymond Jonson arrived in Santa Fe in 1924, having spent fourteen formative years in Chicago, where a chance encounter with the 1913 Armory Show — and especially the paintings of Kandinsky — convinced him that art could function as a kind of universal, symbolic language. New Mexico gave that conviction a landscape to work on. For the next quarter-century he painted the mesas, arroyos, and skies around Santa Fe in a mode that steadily distilled observed nature into rhythmic, sculptural pattern, a bridge between the regional realism of his contemporaries and the fully nonobjective painting he would pursue after co-founding the Transcendental Painting Group in 1938.
This watercolor sits squarely within that transitional vision. The composition is built from broad, faceted planes — tawny sandstone cliffs cut by deep violet shadow, a middle distance of layered blue-green mountains, and a sky of hard-edged, sculptural clouds — all handled with the same disciplined geometry Jonson brought to his studio abstractions. In the foreground, a stand of yucca rendered in crisp, bladed strokes anchors the sheet and gives scale to the canyon beyond. Nothing here is merely transcribed; every rock face and cloud bank has been simplified and re-weighted until the picture reads as much as a study in structure and color relationship as it does a view of a particular place — the "life force underlying the land," as one contemporary description of his work put it.
Jonson's paintings of this period are held by the Museum of New Mexico, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the University of New Mexico's Jonson Gallery, which he founded in 1950 to house his retrospective collection. Works on paper of this quality and immediacy — vigorous, decisive, and unmistakably his own — offer collectors an accessible entry into the career of one of the Southwest's most consequential and least compromising modernists.
Condition
A condition report for this lot is available upon request (please include the lot number in your request) and is provided by Santa Fe Art Auction as a courtesy and convenience for potential buyers.
