Józef Bakoś was a pioneering Santa Fe artist who was heralded in the 1930s as “America’s leading water-colorist.”1 Born and raised in Buffalo, NY, Bakoś moved to Denver, CO, to continue his artistic studies after graduating from the Albright Art School. Bakoś first visited Santa Fe, NM, in 1920. While on a break from teaching at the University of Colorado in Boulder, he visited his childhood friend Walter Mruk, a carpenter who carved furniture for the city’s La Fonda Hotel. Bakoś returned the next year to settle permanently in Santa Fe, becoming part of a movement of East Coast artists searching for new subjects and environments.
The 1920s through the 1940s was a defining period in American art, and Bakoś actively engaged in the debate between artistic tradition and progression as a breakthrough modernist who quickly achieved critical acclaim. Moreover, Bakoś served as an organizing force within an emerging Santa Fe artists’ colony, which he has been credited with helping to establish. In 1921, Bakoś co-founded Los Cinco Pintores with four other like-minded modern artists. Together, they successfully mounted an exhibition at the recently founded Museum of New Mexico Art Gallery (now the New Mexico Museum of Art). Bakoś also helped establish the New Mexico Painters in 1923. That same year he was refused admission to the Taos Society of Artists, highlighting the ideological divide between academic realism and modernist experimentation, as well as the snobbery between artists with formal European training and those without.
Influenced by Paul Cézanne, Bakoś painted the New Mexico landscape—almost always on location—with vigor and lyricism. In 1925, Donald Bear, who would become the director of the Denver Art Museum and a regional adviser for the Federal Art Project in the mid-1930s, described Bakoś’s watercolors as “reach[ing] beyond their medium and almost ceas[ing] to be in the picture class, but rather becom[ing] electrified energetic planes of force pushing against one another.”2 However “modern” it may have been for its time, Bakoś’s work was widely appreciated. A contemporary described him as “not willing to remain within the confines of painting as marked out in the past” while also not desiring “to startle the public or to achieve originality by any freak method of execution.”3
By 1935, Bakoś was represented in the permanent collections of the Denver Art Museum, the Whitney Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, and other collections across the country,4 but he often discussed the struggle to make a living as an artist. Indeed, he continued to teach after moving to Santa Fe, becoming the head of the Santa Fe Art School (affiliated with the University of Denver) in 1933,5 and teaching public school for at least one year in 1941.6 The artist fraternities he helped found—in addition to Los Cinco Pintores and the New Mexico Painters, Bakoś was involved with the Santa Fe Art Club, the Santa Fe Painters and Sculptors, and the Art League of New Mexico over the course of his career—were often as much about ideology as about creating exhibition opportunities and earning a living. “It’s very difficult to make a living out of painting,” he said. “Why the artist paints, I don’t know. It’s just like why a person preaches, you know. They just do it.”7
During the New Deal, Bakoś’s work was frequently included in Federal Art Project-sponsored exhibits at both the state and national levels.
