Born and raised in Germany in the heart of the Black Forest, Helmuth Naumer, Sr. dreamed of the American West he knew from “cowboy and Indian” novels by German author Karl May. In 1925, at the age of eighteen, he left for New York. As a naturalized citizen, he spent the next year traveling across America, stopping briefly in Santa Fe, NM before reaching Los Angeles, CA in 1926. Low on funds but still consumed by wanderlust, he joined the Merchant Marine and served at sea for six years. In 1932, he moved to Santa Fe, the town that in his view epitomized the “Old West.” Naumer said he “wanted to make a record of this country before it was overrun, still wild and beautiful because once that’s gone, we can never get it back.” Naumer built a home and studio on San Sebastian Ranch and raised horses.
Naumer quickly became known for his pastels on black paper. “Pastels are particularly suited for painting Western landscapes,” Naumer said. “Their soft tones match those of the distant mountain ranges and accentuate the delicate shades of our sunsets.”1
Between 1935 and 1936, Naumer was commissioned by the National Parks Service, through the Works Progress Administration, to create artwork for the newly built visitor center at Bandelier National Monument. Naumer said he was paid $45 per month2 to create fourteen pastel scenes depicting views of the Monument and nearby Pueblo villages (still on display at the Monument’s visitor center). For these paintings, the artist spent time living at Kewa (Santo Domingo) Pueblo.3 In 2016, the US Postal Service used Naumer’s painting Administration Building, Frijoles Canyon on a “Forever” stamp as part of a sixteen-piece set commemorating the National Parks Service’s centennial.
Of his experience as an artist in New Mexico during the New Deal, Naumer said: “It was difficult being an artist here, especially during the Depression when nobody had any money. To get along you had to trade pictures for necessities. I traded for furniture, for cars, for horses and goats.”4
Naumer continued as a prolific pastelist, though he also worked in oils and watercolors over the course of his career. In the late 1930s, he was traveling 1,500 miles each month across the state to paint en plein air (outdoors). “I can’t explain it, but paintings made at the scene sell better than those made in a studio of some imagined landscape,” he said. “Perhaps it’s some detail or shading at the actual scene that would be omitted from a studio painting.”5 He won prizes at the New Mexico State Fair each year he exhibited between 1939 and 1955, and his contemporaries excitedly noted that magazine magnate Henry Luce was one of his collectors.
In 1938, a newspaper columnist asked Naumer about Hitler’s rise to power. According to the writer, “Naumer’s merry grey eyes instantly became serious and he said: ‘It will probably be two or three years from now—perhaps sooner—but someday things are going to pop wide open in Europe and it will be the worst war this hectic world has ever experienced.’”6 Naumer went on to serve as a staff artist in the Army during WWII. After returning home, Naumer continued to paint and exhibit, and his work became increasingly abstract.
Describing his career in a 1959 pamphlet, he said that “though born in Europe and having lived in many places in the world, coming to the Southwest was like coming home. Here I found peace and beauty and these I try to paint.”7
