Explorer in Space--and Color : The late Victor Higgins, a neglected ‘American master’ whose work blossomed in the desert of New Mexico, gets overdue recognition

At the turn of the century, painter Victor Higgins was the fair-haired boy of the Chicago art scene.

He was straight off the farm, but after just a few years in the city, he had important patrons and friends--including the mayor--and his works were on display at the Art Institute of Chicago. He had enough financial savvy to support himself solely through his art, and he even went to Europe for a couple of years of study.

But it was a 1914 trip to Taos, N. M., that forever changed his life and art.

“He lost his soul in Taos,” said Dean Porter, curator of the first major traveling exhibition of Higgins’ work. The show of oil paintings, watercolors and drawings opened recently at the Gene Autry Western Heritage Museum in Griffith Park, where it will be on display through March 14.

“He was so captured by the incredible beauty of this place, like nothing he had seen before, that he totally gave himself over to it,” said Porter, who is director of the Snite Museum of Art at the University of Notre Dame. “It completely changed the direction of his career. He became a great artist.”

Higgins left New Mexico several times during the next 35 years, but he always returned to the state, and to Taos in particular. He died there in 1949, having never reached the fame or fortune that seemed so certain in his youth.

Toward the end, Higgins supported himself by selling small landscape paintings to tourists for $250 apiece.

“After he got to New Mexico, the art establishment had a hard time figuring out where he fit in,” Porter said.

“It still does.”

Higgins tried out many styles during his career. Early on, his work tended to be romantic and muted, as when he painted interpretations of folk tales. An example in the exhibition at the Autry is “Moorland Piper,” circa 1911.

“It’s very Maxfield Parrish-y, a look that was typical for the time,” said James Wilke, assistant curator at the Autry. “It drew from myths, which was a popular subject.

“He was borrowing from here and there, getting a sense of his own art.”

Higgins first traveled to Taos through the sponsorship of a syndicate set up by Chicago Mayor Carter H. Harrison, who loved the high-desert landscape and thought it perfect for inspiring a young painter. Higgins immediately fell in with the heady artist community there and began painting landscapes and portraits of the Indians. A year after he arrived, he had a one-man show and eventually became a member of the Taos Society of Artists, which sponsored exhibits.

Although Higgins’ subject matter was similar to that of other members of the society, there was an important difference. This is evident, Porter said, in “Fiesta Day,” a 1918 painting of Indians on horseback.

“This painting won prizes in New York and Chicago,” Porter said. “It was the kind of picture the art establishment expected out of Taos. But they didn’t really understand the picture.

“It’s not the subject matter that is important in this painting or in any other painting that Higgins did. His works are really about design. They are about painting itself.

“The subject matter was secondary.”

After “Fiesta Day,” Higgins became more abstract in his explorations of space and color. He painted one of his most experimental works, “Circumferences,” circa 1919, which uses shapes and curved lines to suggest a view of Earth from above, with Europe in flames as a result of World War I.

“It was like he was looking down from a hot-air balloon, which of course he didn’t do,” Porter said. “He had that kind of imagination.

“The painting was far ahead of its time, and people just didn’t know what to make of it.”

Higgins’ experimentation made an exhibit particularly attractive to the staff of the Autry. “When you have an artist whose work ranged from the standard Taos images to ‘Circumferences,’ it stretches people’s ideas about what a Western artist is,” said museum curator James Nottage.

“Western art is not just cowboys and Indians and bucking broncos. Western art encompasses all the major art forms in this country in the last two centuries.”

The stereotypes about Western art were even more strongly held in Higgins’ time, however, and his work grew less popular. He had major shows in cities such as Chicago and Boston at which only one or two of his paintings sold. Other members of the Taos Society, who stuck to standard images, become more famous.

It isn’t surprising that some of Higgins’ major works have been lost over the years. Porter found evidence that “Circumferences” was just one of a series of paintings on the same subject: One of them was 16 feet square. Porter said he could not locate the others and fears they were destroyed.

But there is still hope. As the current exhibit moved to different cities in the Midwest and West, Porter got calls from people who said they happened to own a Higgins work.

“We have found several paintings this way,” Porter said.

In Los Angeles, just before the show opened, he got a call from a woman who has a large work that might be by the painter. “She is flying in--I am not even sure from where--to show it to me,” Porter said. “If the painting is what I think it is, it’s a very significant work, and that is really exciting.”

(Unfortunately, what the woman had was not an original Higgins but a lithographic print made from one of this paintings in the 1920s. “This happens on occasion,” said a disappointed Porter.

(He also warned that three collectors in California have come to him with alleged Higgins works that he believes are forgeries.)

In 1937, with his finances in bad shape and his health failing, Higgins married Texas heiress Marion Koogler and moved to her mansion in San Antonio. “It was a marriage that was supposed to solve all his problems,” Porter said, “but it almost ruined him as an artist. He was safe and secure, but what was he going to paint around San Antonio?”

The couple were divorced in 1940, and Higgins returned to Taos. He was never again financially secure, but apparently he was not destitute. He had numerous friends, including D. H. Lawrence and art patroness Mabel Dodge, who sold him a house at what was probably a healthy discount.

In 1947, Higgins ran for mayor of Taos, losing by 43 votes.

During this time, he painted the small series of oils in the exhibit that Porter calls “little gems.” Higgins would drive out into the country to find a landscape he liked and sit in the car trunk to paint it, with his paint box strapped to his waist. Although he usually worked slowly, Higgins could do these quickly, for sale to tourists.

It is with these “little gems” that Higgins found peace with his art, Porter believes.

“With these works, the artist painted for the sake of painting, for the need of experiencing the various sensations of moving pigment across a smooth surface,” Porter wrote in the catalogue. “At ease with his environment and himself, he no longer had anything to prove, either to the critical public or the juror.”

Higgins died in Taos of a heart attack in 1949. “I hope that someday people will not just think of him as a Western artist or anything else other than what he was,” Porter said. “He was an American master.”