Dead Cottonwood is an unusual painting for Helmuth Naumer, Sr. First, it is in oil, while Naumer mostly worked in and was best known for his pastels. Second, it is relatively drab. One reason Naumer’s pastels were (and are) so popular was that he created them on black paper, which made his vibrant color palette really “pop.” There are inklings of Naumer’s proclivity for complementary colors in Dead Cottonwood: the blues of the mesas in the background complement the yellow hues of the grass in the foreground, and he defines the grain of the cottonwood’s trunk by weaving dabs of terracotta through twists of gray. Yet it is different enough from most of his work to raise questions about what he was thinking. Naumer always said that the Southwest felt instinctively like home, but he was born in Germany. Replying to a question by a journalist in 1938, he expressed concern over Adolf Hitler’s rise to power and predicted the outbreak of a large-scale war.1 Given the time period this work was made—between 1939 and 1943—and the somber subject, title, and colors, perhaps events in Europe weighed heavily on Naumer’s mind when he painted this piece.
