El Santo

 

Gustave Baumann

  1881 - 1971 (biography)

1919  

color woodcut 

9 5/8 x 11 1/4" image 

pencil, lower right 

no 16/100 

titled in pencil, lower left 

Chamberlain 61; Baumann 37 This impression is illustrated on page 227 of In A Modern Rendering The Color Woodcuts of Gustave Baumann. 

cream Zanders Bergisch Gladbach laid 

published 

artist 

AB4092 

SOLD

El Santo is one of a handful of color woodcuts Baumann published in Spring 1919 in Santa Fe after spending part of the Summer and Fall of 1918 in Taos, New Mexico. Baumann's respect and appreciation of spiritual idols (whether Indigenous or Christian) is captured here in the depiction of a carved saint in the recessed alcove of a garden--in this case, as was noted on one impression in the edition, that of artist Eanger Irving Couse in Taos (Chamberlain, p. 226). Wrote Baumann, "...We look about us and there is the little Saint in his or her niche endowed with the power to change the course of events that trouble us. If you have not done so already a little offering of flowers will share the niche with the Saint as a sign of belief in its power."