Wings of Prophesy

Gustave Baumann

Gala Chamberlain quotes Baumann on page 444 of her catalogue raisonné of Baumann's prints "In a Modern Rendering: The Color Woodcuts of Gustave Baumann": "In the following and last pictograph, flying birds. One of these birds with a design suggesting stars and stripes makes a prophecy transcending the arrival of the Spaniards. Like an old-time friend of mine, you may insist this design stems from the colonies; but here it is in a pre-Spanish pictograph."

Done in Frijoles Canyon in New Mexico Baumann explained his exposure to the pictographs in the caves in the late 1930s, Chamberlain, page 443: "...What with rain in the canyon it was advisable to take refuge in one of a long row of caves and wait for the rains to subside. Judging from scratches on the soot-blackened walls, animals had been in there to get out of the weather just as I had.

With nothing else to do those scratches intrigued me since some of them appeared to be man-made. Indicating that some-body had sat here at some time, taken a sliver of bone and recorded something that had meaning..."

In 1939 Baumann did a book titled "Frijoles Canyon Pictographs" which contained 25 original woodcut illustrations and printed in an edition of 480. This book won one of the "Fifty Books of the Year" awards in 1940.