Of Swiss ancestry, Herbert Bolivar Tschudy was originally from Ohio but made his career in New York City. After studying at the Art Students League, he became a staff artist at the Brooklyn Museum. In that role, he created murals and backdrops for a variety of ethnology and natural history galleries. His first trip to New Mexico was in 1904 as an expedition artist accompanying the Museum’s first curator of ethnology, Stewart Culin. Tschudy accompanied Culin on numerous trips to the Southwest and Pacific Coast in the early 1900s.
Tschudy would go on to become the Museum’s curator of paintings and sculpture in 1923. Then, from 1930 to 1934, he served as acting curator of the Department of Natural History. In 1934, he became the Museum’s first curator of Contemporary Art, a position he held until his retirement in 1937. In that role, he organized a “Gallery of Living Artists” and a biennial watercolor series.
As an independent artist, Tschudy made the Southwest his subject, returning to New Mexico each year for three decades or more. As one 1926 Santa Fe New Mexican report put it, “Mr. Tschudy tramps around the southwest year after year in search of subjects for his watercolors and he has caught the spirit of the desert.”1 Tschudy typically made Gallup his vacation headquarters “to enable him to study and paint Indian life.”2
