Western & Contemporary Native American Art

Leon Gaspard studied alongside Marc Chagall at an art school in Vitebsk, Russia. He continued his education in Paris. While there, he met and married Evelyn Adell, an American woman, and joined the French Air Corps once World War I broke out. Gaspard sustained serious injuries when his plane was shot down; his wife urged him to seek treatment in the United States. In 1916, Gaspard was recuperating in New York where made friends among the many artists in the city. His work came to the attention of Reinhardt’s, one of the city’s top galleries at the time and his exhibition there, of scenes from the war in France and Russia, was a smash. The New York Times called his paintings “fresh and brilliant and infinitely the better for complete lack of sentimentality.” Gaspard’s new artist friends told him about the restorative climate in Taos; in 1919 he moved there. In the people and landscape of Taos, Gaspard noted and painted many similarities to the Tartar countryside he knew in his Russian boyhood. Russian Village Market, painted in 1917, is a painting from Gaspard’s sojourn in New York. Imagine the ravages of the war and the Russian Revolution raging in his homeland—then look at what he wants to capture and remember: all the colors and buzz of a colorful country market. Gaspard fills the panel with men, women, children, horses, goods in a post-impressionist manner, alternating the floral details of a shawl or a horse’s harness with broad strokes. What this magnificent work conveys is the artist’s desire to set down this moment of continuity, asking us to consider how long this kind of market has been going on, and then, further, to imagine, as he must have, a future in which this market may no longer exist. 

-James D. Balestrieri