Berninghaus, O. E. 1874-1952

Read Oscar Edmund Berninghaus' Biography

When Oscar Berninghaus succumbed to the effects of a crippling heart attack on April 27, 1952, a certain period of Southwestern Art effectively ended with him. One of the leading figures of the Taos Society of Artists and an artist whose success was hard-won, his passing represented the beginning of the end for the original painters of Taos and New Mexico. At 77, he was one of the elder statesmen of the New Mexico art community, whose body of work, in the words of artist Rebecca James, was "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."

Further Reading: Oscar E. Berninghaus, Granduer of the West | Oscar E. Berninghaus, Western Art and Architecture 2013