Southwestern Palette

TAOS, N.M. — This tiny town has been an inhabited area for about 3,000 years, but I’ve always stayed away. Despite numerous trips to Santa Fe, just 70 miles to the south, I’ve never felt eager to spend time here. It took an unusual new hotel to change my mind.

Viewed by residents of Santa Fe as no more than a place to go when, as one woman told me, “you want to get the hell out of Dodge,” Taos seemed to offer tourists several things, none of which particularly intrigued me. There was, as always in New Mexico, the splendid outdoors, and Taos is celebrated as a center for rugged hiking and skiing--not major passions of mine.

Ditto for the town’s highly commercialized art and tourist scene, with shops selling candles shaped like chili peppers and more than 80 galleries offering a wide selection of what has charitably been called sentimental regionalism.

Finally there was the ancient Taos pueblo, located a few miles outside of town, incontestably a physical wonder, but a place whose spirit seems more inaccessible to outsiders than it did 75 years ago when people like Mabel Dodge Luhan and D. H. Lawrence fell in love with Taos and created its reputation as a center for artists and art.

Would it be possible, I wondered, to discover traces of the Taos that made Taos famous? Could you recapture what it must have felt like for those emigres from all over the world to be artists together in a remote but beautiful spot? It turns out that a great deal of that Taos is accessible, and the weekend my wife and I spent searching it out turned out to be exhilarating.

What first put the idea in my head was the opening last year of a hotel called the Fechin Inn, named after Russian painter Nicolai Fechin, who lived here between 1927 and 1933 and left behind one of the city’s most celebrated private residences, part New Mexico adobe, part Russian dacha.

The 85-room inn turned out to be a joint venture between a hotel group and the artist’s daughter Eya, who was looking for a way to secure the financial future of that museum/residence and the nonprofit educational foundation that’s attached to it, as well as to introduce her father’s work to a wider public.

Set back from the street, well behind the Fechin House and architecturally deferential to it, the comfortable and well-designed Fechin Inn not only has prints of the artist’s works on the guest room walls but features in its large public space an elaborately carved staircase that echoes his lifelong fascination with working in wood.

Staying at the Fechin Inn gives you free admission to the Fechin House, which is open Wednesday through Sunday only. Seeing it was our first order of business.

A master of charcoal portraits who also did colorful, impressionistic paintings, Fechin worked in wood for relaxation, and the house is filled with the one-of-a-kind doors he designed and carved. The artist left Taos after a divorce and, reversing the current trend, ended up in California, dying in Santa Monica in 1955.

Some of the most curious relics of artistic Taos are announced by a weathered sign outside the La Fonda Hotel on the city’s main plaza: “This is the only showing of the D. H. Lawrence controversial paintings since his exhibition was permanently banned by Scotland Yard when his show opened at the Warren Gallery, London, in 1929.”

Visible for a modest $2 per person fee, the nine paintings show satyr-like men grappling uncertainly with fleshy nude women. One depiction of a mass of naked bodies looks more like a clothing-optional rugby scrum than anything erotic. The paintings were given by Lawrence’s widow, Frieda, to the hotel’s owner, Saki Karavas, who once threatened to send the artworks to Greece unless Britain returned the Elgin Marbles. The empire did not blink.

From La Fonda it was only a short walk to the Ernest Blumenschein house. Dating back, in part, to 1797, it was purchased in 1919 by Blumenschein, one of the founders of the Taos Society of Artists, as a home and studio.

Looking inside and out very much the way it did when the family lived there, the Blumenschein house is a restorative step back in time, a chance to experience the intimate but artistic surroundings that characterized that era’s way of life. Don’t miss the life-size trout Blumenschein painted on his studio door in 1925 after he caught the largest one ever recorded in the nearby Rio Grande.

Keeping with our historical bent, we ate dinner that night at Doc Martin’s, located in the nearby Taos Inn. Named not for the shoes but a local doctor whose office it was, Doc Martin’s is a lively spot that boasts New Mexico wines, eight varieties of margaritas and a chocolate sundae featuring excellent Taos Cow-brand ice cream.

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The next morning we skipped the non-complimentary buffet at the hotel (which does not have a formal restaurant) and had a serious breakfast right across the street at Michael’s Kitchen, a local landmark for 22 years. Then we drove the short distance to the majestic, 17-room, three-story adobe that once was the house of the grande dame of artistic Taos, the celebrated Mable Dodge Luhan.

Now a bed-and-breakfast inn and conference center, which means that only a few rooms are open to the public, the Luhan house and its grounds nevertheless give off a palpable feeling of grandness and serenity. Especially noticeable are the ceramic fowl over the veranda (Luhan called the place “Los Gallos,” the roosters) and the brightly painted bathroom windows, colored when guest Lawrence insisted more privacy was needed.

From the Luhan house we drove to the city’s most impressive museum, named after the woman who started its collection, Millicent Rogers, granddaughter of the founder of Standard Oil and a serious collector of jewelry and other tribal arts. Located on the edge of town, the Rogers museum covers a wide range of Southwestern art, including the collection put together by artists Maria and Julian Martinez, whose work led to the 1930s revival of black-on-black pottery from the San Idelfonso pueblo.

One of the best ways to understand what Taos meant to its partisans is to experience the scenery along the bumpy unpaved drive out to the Lawrence ranch just outside of town. The ranch buildings, now owned by the University of New Mexico, are not open to the public, but a small shrine built by Frieda and containing Lawrence’s ashes is open. It’s a simple but effective white building with a small glass window, the initials DHL painted on the concrete repository, Frieda’s grave standing guard outside and a stone eagle, or perhaps a thunderbird, overlooking it all.

After this total immersion in Taos lore, we had our last dinner at Trading Post Cafe, a local favorite in neighboring Rancho de Taos that happens to specialize in Italian food. I felt slightly guilty about that, but as I cut into my rosemary chicken garnished with comforting garlic mashed potatoes, I told myself that even Mabel Dodge Luhan probably didn’t eat blue corn tortillas every night of the week.

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Budget for Two

Air fare, round-trip L.A.-Albuquerque, N.M.: $282.00

Car rental, gas: 114.56

Fechin Inn: 222.02

Admission, D.H. Lawrence: 4.00

Dinner, Doc Martin’s: 74.34

Breakfast, Michael’s Kitchen: 20.20

Dinner, Trading Post Cafe: 47.75

Admission, museum & pueblo: 36.00

L.A. airport parking: 37.00

FINAL TAB: $837.87

Fechin Inn, 227 Paseo del Pueblo Norte, Taos, NM 87571; tel. (800) 811-2933, fax (505) 751-7338.

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