Cliff Dwelling (Sold)

JOHN DE PUY, 1927-2023

Born 1927, in New Brunswick, New Jersey, De Puy's original roots belong in New Mexico, with his grandfather, who owned a ranch in Mora in the late 1800's. In the early 50s De Puy studied with Hans Hoffman in New York, following service in the military as a medic during WWII and the beginning of the Korean War.

Later in 1952 he returned to Taos, New Mexico, where he originally visited in 1949, to study with Louis Ribak (1902-1979), at the Taos Valley Art School, through the GI Bill. John De Puy along with Louis Ribak, Bea Mandelman, Agnes Martin, Robert Ray, Earl Stroh, Cliff Harmon, Ted Egri and several others, would become a group of like-minded modern artists, known as the Taos Moderns, of which at 90 years old John is one of two surviving members (2018).

This group, along with the earlier modernists like Andrew Dasburg, Howard Cook, Barbara Latham, Gene Kloss, Ward Lockwood, Thomas Benrimo, Dorothy Brett and others would have several major museum exhibitions, first one being in 1954 at the Santa Fe Fine Arts Museum, followed by one at the Colorado Springs Art Center and at the Raymond Jonson Gallery in Albuquerque.

De Puy has had major solo museum exhibitions at the Roswell Museum & Art Center in 2006, titled "The Ground of Being", and most recently a retrospective at the Harwood Museum of Art, Taos, in 2016.

His work is also included in most of the permanent collections of the other New Mexico art museums, and he is written about, along with the other early modern artists, in the book titled Modernists in Taos, from Dasburg to Martin.

Good friends with the well-known American author Edward Abbey, De Puy was involved early on in protests for land conservation and the re-establishment of the Spanish Land Grants, which label him along with Abbey a political activist, but John's passion has always been towards the art of the southwestern landscape. "He paints a hallucinated, magical and sometimes fearsome world - not the one we think we see, but the one he claims, that is really there" - Edward Abbey, 1981

Source: 203 Fine Art