This biography from the Archives of AskART:
|  Loren Mozley, painter of southwestern landscapes, was born in
Brookport, Illinois, on October 2, 1905, to Charlie Almus and Ella
(Phillips) Mozley. His father, a country physician, moved his
family to New Mexico in 1906, and Mozley grew up in lumber and mining
camps and pueblos. He was initially introduced to the materials
of oil painting by one of his father's Navajo patients and began to
paint at age eleven, after his family settled in Albuquerque.
Following his graduation from Albuquerque High School in 1923, he
entered the University of New Mexico. During the summers he
worked as a secretary for Mabel Dodge Luhan in Taos, where he came into
contact with members of the artists' colony active at that time.
In 1926 he left college to move to Taos. For the next two years
he painted, exhibited his work at the Harwood Gallery, and befriended
artists Andrew Dasburg, Dorothy Brett, John Ward Lockwood, Kenneth
Adams, and John Marin, among others.
From 1929 to 1931 Mozley studied at the Colarossi and Chaumière
academies in Paris, copied paintings at the Louvre, and traveled in
Holland, Italy, and southern France. He returned to America
penniless in 1931, and spent the next four years in New York City,
working as an engraver for part of the time and painting when he
could. During this time he befriended Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo,
and Georgia O'Keeffe.
In 1935 he returned to Taos, where he married Wilma Genevieve Meyer on
December 15; they had no children. For the next few years Mozley
worked to establish a career as a painter and teacher. He
received WPA commissions to paint murals for the Federal Building in
Albuquerque and the post office in Clinton, Oklahoma; exhibited his
work as a member of the Taos Heptagon, an artists' gallery group; and
published an article on his friend John Marin in the Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art (1936).
In 1936 he began teaching in the art department at the University of
New Mexico, and in the summers of 1937 and 1938 he served as director
of the Field School of Art at Taos. He also served as a member of
the board of the University of New Mexico Harwood Foundation from 1937
to 1938. He exhibited his work at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts
Center and the Denver Art Museum in 1938.
Mozley left New Mexico in August 1938 to help Ward Lockwood organize
the new art department at the University of Texas in Austin. The
two men put their jobs on the line by insisting on the necessity of
nude models for life-drawing classes and worked to bridge the gap
between academia and the larger arts community by hiring artists as
teachers, bringing art exhibitions to the campus, and serving on juries
throughout the state. During the next few years Mozley completed
a post office mural in Alvin, Texas, lectured in Texas museums, and
served as acting chairman of the department of art from 1942 to 1945
and as president of the Texas Fine Arts Association (1945–46).
His work was exhibited regionally and began to win recognition: he
received the Cokesbury Prize for an etching entered in the Dallas
Museum Print Show (1943) and won first prize and the San Antonio Art
League prize for paintings entered in Texas General exhibitions (1942
and 1945).
A Christmas trip to Mexico City in 1938 sparked Mozley's interest in
Latin-American art, and in 1940 he taught a course with Mexican critic
Adolfo Best-Maugard in the fledgling Institute of Latin American
Studies at the University of Texas. As a member of the University
of Texas Field School at the National University of Mexico from 1943 to
1945, Mozley taught courses on Latin-American art and earned the rank
of profesor extraordinario. During the 1950s and 1960s, he
traveled extensively in South America photographing Pre-Columbian and
Colonial sites and collections and establishing contacts with Latino
artists, art schools, and museums. In 1964 he returned to Europe,
where he made a thorough tour of Spain and briefly toured France,
Italy, England, and Belgium. He visited Spain again in 1969 and
1973.
Mozley served on the first Faculty Senate and as secretary of the
Executive Committee of the Latin American Institute at the University
of Texas (1953–55). He spent four summers teaching at the
University of Southern California in the early 1950s. In 1958–59
he served as chairman of the Department of Art at UT. He
published several articles on Latin-American artists in the 1940s and
1950s. He continued to paint and exhibited his work throughout
the state, receiving the Purchase Prize (Gouache) at the Texas Fine
Arts Annual Exhibition in 1959 and the San Antonio Art League Purchase
Prize at the Twenty-fifth Annual Texas Painting and Sculpture
Exhibition (1963). On the national level Mozley participated in
two competitive exhibitions (1948) and the Texas Contemporary Artists
exhibition (1952) at the Knoedler Galleries in New York City; exhibited
his work at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center (1948, 1949, 1951)
and at the San Francisco Museum of Art (1956); and in 1968 was one of
four Texas artists whose work was featured in "A Particular Portion of
Earth", held in Washington, D.C. A retrospective of his career
was mounted by a Dallas gallery in 1967.
Mozley painted scenes from the American Southwest, Mexico, South
America, and Spain in a methodical, geometric style, using a palette
dominated by dusky purples and maroons, brightened with accents of
gold, green, olive, and blue. Oil paints were his primary medium,
although he also experimented with watercolors, lithography, and
graphic techniques. He described himself as a "child of the
Cubist order," but the work of Andrew Dasburg, an influential Taos
painter who applied Cézannesque geometry to his southwestern
landscapes, was a more direct influence on his style.
The sensuous curves and light and dark contrasts of Adobe Buttresses
(1940) suggest the influence of Georgia O'Keeffe. In some of his
most powerful early works Mozley used objects such as roses, crowns of
thorns, and bird nests to embody evocative scenes such as Tragic Landscape (1944) and The Hunter (1946). In Winter Fields
(1948), the artist arranged two dead magpies and some milkweed pods on
a snowy plain girded by mountains; he regarded the resulting stark
study of contrasts as one of his best works.
Other notable paintings include Big Pecans (1952), a masterly study of light and shadow that verges on abstraction, and the watercolor Broken Cypress
(1956), painted on the Pedernales River from the vantage point of a
fallen tree's stump. Mozley's later works were more scenic and
descriptive and often included people and architecture. His
complex compositions filled the picture plane and were sometimes
difficult to read. In works such as Rocky Hillside (1966) and Market of San Roque at Quito (1963–64),
the geometry was used as a decorative motif rather than a structural
element. The arrangements of shells, dried plants, butterflies,
and skulls seen in such works as The Artist's Cupboard
(1963–64), which the artist called "conceits," lacked the vigor of his
earlier symbolic paintings. His scenes of Spanish villages and
marketplaces, however, were imbued with a lyric, romantic air new to
his work.
Mozley's style followed a progression untouched by passing fads; his
work stands as a testimony to his meticulous craftsmanship and
precision. In 1967 the artist noted, "I try my level best every
time I pick up my brush to be a decent and skillful craftsman, a
painter." Perhaps his greatest contribution was his insistence that
students learn the basic techniques of their craft in an age when
abstract, conceptual, and performance art techniques were in vogue.
Mozley retired from the University of Texas with the rank of professor
emeritus in 1975. Three years later his career was commemorated
by a retrospective exhibition and catalogue organized by the University
of Texas Art Gallery.
Mozley died on September 21, 1989. His work is in the collection
of the Archer M. Huntington Art Gallery in Austin, the Old Jail Art
Center in Albany, and the Witte Museum in San Antonio.
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Loren Mozley, Loren Mozley: Exhibition, February-March 1967 (Dallas:
Valley House Gallery, 1967). Loren Mozley Papers, Collections Deposit
Library, University of Texas at Austin. University Art Museum, Loren
Mozley: A Retrospective (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1977).
Vertical Files, Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, University
of Texas at Austin. Who's Who in American Art, 1953.
Source:
The Handbook of Texas Online: http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fmobr
Written by Kendall Curlee
|
Biography from David Dike Fine Art:
| | Exhibited "View from the Balcony" at A Retrospective, University Art Museum, The University of Texas at Austin, February 19 - March 26, 1978 and Valley House Gallery, Dallas, Texas, April 18 - May 7, 1978. |
| ** If you discover credit omissions or have additional information to add, please let us know at registrar@AskART.com. |
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Loren Mozley is also mentioned in these AskART essays:
Taos Pre 1940
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