E. Martin Hennings

Ernest Martin Hennings was born February 5, 1886, in Pennsgrove, New Jersey, the son of German immigrant parents. When he was two, the family moved to Chicago, where he would spend the formative decades of his life. His path to painting was self-determined: he recalled wandering into the Art Institute of Chicago as a twelve-year-old and coming out knowing, with absolute certainty, that he would become an artist. He began classes at the Art Institute in 1901 and graduated with honors three years later.

For six years after graduation Hennings worked as a commercial illustrator and mural painter — productive, respected work that nonetheless left him hungry for more. In 1912, he entered a piece in the prestigious Prix de Rome competition and took second place. Energized, he boarded a ship for Munich, where he enrolled in the Royal Academy and studied under two pivotal mentors: the portrait painter Walter Thor, who insisted that an artist must enter the very soul of his subjects, and the celebrated Franz von Stuck, a proponent of classical beauty and the sinuous, patterned elegance of Jugendstil — Germany's answer to Art Nouveau. Both would leave permanent traces on Hennings' vision.

In Munich he also found his closest colleagues: fellow Chicagoans Walter Ufer and Victor Higgins, who would share his destiny in New Mexico. The outbreak of World War I in 1914 forced them all back across the Atlantic. In Chicago, Hennings re-established himself, opened two studios — one for commercial work, one as a fine art showcase — and quickly attracted two of the most important art patrons in the Midwest: Carter H. Harrison, former Mayor of Chicago, and Oscar Mayer, the meatpacking magnate and devoted collector who would become one of the most dedicated supporters of the Taos Society.

In 1917, Harrison and Mayer sponsored Hennings on his first trip to Taos, New Mexico. The impact was immediate and irreversible. The intense, crystalline light of the high desert, the dramatic contrasts of shadow in the aspen and cottonwood groves, the vivid color of Indian blankets and the dignified bearing of the Taos Pueblo people — all of it detonated something new in his painting. The broad, indefinite brushwork and somber palette of the Munich School fell away. In their place emerged a meticulous, jewel-like technique: thin glazes of luminous color, applied in precise areas and left to dry for long periods before the next layer was added. He worked on multiple canvases simultaneously, methodically building up his compositions layer by layer, always painting the landscape first and only then determining where his figures would be placed within it.

In 1921, after a triumphant one-man exhibition at Marshall Field and Company in Chicago — where he also met his future wife, Helen Otte — Hennings moved to Taos permanently. Three years later, in 1924, he was elected to the Taos Society of Artists, the last artist to be admitted before the Society's dissolution in 1927. His fellow members, including Ernest Blumenschein, considered Hennings the most talented painter among them. The Society's purpose had been to generate exhibition opportunities and sales, and in this Hennings excelled: between 1916 and 1938 his compositions won twelve national prizes at the most prestigious institutions in the country.

The work that emerged from his Taos years is unlike anything else in American art. Pueblo Indians on horseback wind through forests of white-barked aspens; figures on blanket-wrapped horses are silhouetted against curtains of autumn foliage; riders are woven into the landscape so completely that the boundary between human form and natural pattern dissolves. Critics described his compositions as "glowing tapestries that celebrate the pageantry and beauty of the people and landscape of northern New Mexico." His daughter Helen reflected: "His work illustrates his calmness of spirit, his oneness with nature. The Taos Indians he painted had similar qualities, and this sameness attracted and inspired him."

During the Depression years of the 1930s and 1940s, Hennings maintained his income by spending part of each year in Houston, Texas, where his gift for portraiture brought a steady stream of commissioned work. He also produced a small but distinguished body of prints — lithographs and etchings on Southwestern subjects that are now collected in their own right. He traveled to southern Europe and Morocco in 1926–27, producing paintings outside his signature territory that reveal the breadth of his vision.

His final commission, fitting in its sweep, was a series of paintings at the Navajo Reservation in Ganado, Arizona, produced for a Santa Fe Railway calendar. He died in Taos on May 19, 1956, in the place that had made him. His paintings are held in the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Denver Art Museum, the Phoenix Art Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the Gilcrease Museum, and the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum, among many others.