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Oscar E. Berninghaus Biography

Oscar E. Berninghaus, born on October 2, 1874, displayed his inclination for art at an early age. Throughout his youth he constantly sketched and experimented with watercolors. At the age of 16 “Bern” as he was called, quit school to work for a lithography company. His job provided him with the technical knowledge of printing, lithography, color separation, poster art and engraving. The exacting needs of this aspect of commercial art would serve the young artist well, for it was his masterful draftsmanship that gave strength to his later creative work.

In order to refine his skills, Bern later attended night classes at the School of Fine Arts in St. Louis. In 1899 Berninghaus received an important commission that would change the direction of his art forever. The Denver and Rio Grand Railroad hired him to come west to sketch and produce watercolors of the mountain scenery, people and villages in order to attract Easterners to their part of the country. It was during this journey that Berninghaus encountered the magic of Taos for the first time. He later recalled, “I stayed here but a week, became infected with the Taos germ and promised myself a longer stay…” Berninghaus was inspired by his brief Taos experience.

He was moved by the special light, feeling the air itself was filled with pigment. He knew he would have to master oils, for only then could he control the texture and mass of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Back in St. Louis, Oscar Berninghaus spent the last few months of the 19th century developing his craft – painting. He had decided to make a career as a painter, and especially a painter of the American Frontier – the Indians, the mountains and life in the West. In 1900, at the age of 25, Berninghaus had his first one man show at the Frank D. Healy Galleries in St. Louis. The show consisted of watercolors, two oils and several sketches and drawings, most of them from his brief visit to Taos.

That same year Berninghaus returned to Taos, this time spending the entire summer, sketching and painting the Pueblo and the Indians. He returned to St. Louis with several paintings, many of which were reproduced in the St. Louis Star Illustrated with an article on the artist. Along with other flattering commentary, the columnist noted that, “Mr. O.E. Berninghaus, although a young man, has gained the reputation as a painter of American Indians. He ranks among the foremost of Indian painters of the country.”

Berninghaus continued to return to Taos almost every summer for the next twenty-five years. As early as 1905, his work received critical acclaim in the newspapers of such far away cities as New York, Chicago and San Francisco. Some writers were already comparing him to Frederic Remington. Berninghaus was beginning to realize that for him the Indians of Taos Pueblo were great subjects. He viewed Indians as peaceful and productive people. He became a good friend to the Taos Indians and was one of the few white men allowed into the kivas of the Pueblo. He would learn their rituals and custom, but would paint only what the Indians thought proper. He felt a sense of history and wanted to preserve it accurately for future generations, and at the same time respect that which was sacred to them.

In the summer of 1915 the famous Taos Society of Artists was officially organized. Berninghaus was one of the founding members, along with Joseph Sharp, Bert Phillips, Ernest Blumenschein, Irving Couse and Herbert Dunton.

There were no galleries in Taos at the time, thus the Society was formed to promote the sale of paintings by its members through traveling exhibitions. The TSA was an instant success. The shows traveled to all the major art cities in America and received enormous publicity throughout the country. Replacements for sold pictures were being crated up and shipped out of Taos every week. Berninghaus’ method of revealing truth through his canvases remained fundamentally the same throughout his long career. His was an attitude of objectivity, both as a craftsman skilled in detailed rendering and as a thinking artist with a distinct philosophic attitude.

The artist was little affected by the trends of the outside world, much like Taos itself. He watched the different art movements come and go: the Fauves, Cubists, Futurists, Dadaists, Surrealists, etc. To Berninghaus they were all valid in their own way. He neither approved nor disapproved, nor did he change his approach because of them. He preferred to remain true to his original style and to his subjects – the Pueblo Indians and his beloved New Mexico landscape.

Author Van Deren Coke wrote of Berninghaus, “There is much to ponder and study in the technical mastery behind this man’s seemingly straightforward and easily grasped subject matter. How an artist uses his formal facility to reach various levels of meaning often is misunderstood and overlooked. The simple and clear part of Berninghaus’ art also conceals a true psychological understanding of his major subject, the Pueblo Indians.

Unlike some of his associates in Taos, Berninghaus’ sophisticated early illustrative style was used as a frame to hold his spectators’ attention, while he slowly unfolded his observations of the inner truth surrounding the life of a twentieth-century Taos Indian. In 1925, Oscar Berninghaus moved permanently to New Mexico. At the age of 51, with a great deal of success and recognition to his credit he would finally be able to experience Taos in the winter and early spring. Two years later the Taos Society of Artists was formally dissolved as it had outlived its usefulness. By that time, each of its members had already gained sufficient reputations on their own and no longer needed to exhibit in the group shows.

Berninghaus continued to paint in Taos until the time of his death. For most of the years he painted models from life and landscapes from nature. In later years, however, his repertoire of stored images was so large that he was able to paint from memory as accurately as he used to from sketching.

Oscar Berninghaus died at the age of 77 on April 27, 1952, three days after suffering a heart attack. Following the funeral, artist Rebecca James told a local Taos newspaper. “The body of his work is a magnificent document of the Southwest, painted as no one else has put down in this country. It is suffused with tenderness, is straight and tough as a pine tree, strong as a verb.”