HER NAME WAS MABEL GANSON EVANS DODGE Sterne Luhan, and she was a wealthy patron of the arts with an apartment on Fifth Avenue as well as a home in Taos, an artists’ colony somewhere north of Santa Fe in New Mexico. Mabel was a gregarious woman who made a habit of surrounding herself with interesting, creative people, and when I met her in New York she immediately invited me to come out west to stay with her in Taos.
Mabel had been married four times, three of them to rich, successful men. Her third husband was an artist who had taken her to Santa Fe; she’d moved on to Taos, where she’d fallen in love with the landscape. When she also fell in love with a Taos Indian, she divorced Husband Number Three and married Tony Lujan. She changed the spelling of his last name to suit her and was now known as Mabel Dodge Luhan.
I’d often recalled the trip Claudie and I had made to New Mexico the summer of 1918, always believing that someday I would go back. Maybe the time had come to do exactly that.
I told Beck Strand about Mabel’s invitation. Beck knew Mabel, too. In spite of her flirtation with Stieglitz, Beck and I had become close friends. She had just survived another of her epic battles with Paul, and she was looking for an escape, or at least a respite.
“Let’s the two of us make a trip out there together,” Beck proposed. “Mabel is very rich, and she’s also very generous. I know she’d welcome us both.”
Predictably, Stieglitz resisted when I told him I was going, one minute shouting at me angrily, other times swearing that he adored me and only me, weeping that he would be lost if I left. He never said a word about Mrs. Norman, and neither did I, but she was the main reason I wanted to go away. He must have known that.
I ignored his pleas and tantrums, and at the end of April Beck and I boarded a train and headed for New Mexico.
For the next four months we were Mabel’s guests at Los Gallos in Taos. We shared a cottage known as Casa Rosita, and I had my own separate studio with a splendid view of the mountains. Mabel loved playing hostess and knew everybody who was anybody in Taos. Sooner or later they showed up at Mabel’s Big House for dinner, dancing, and lively conversation. When Mabel left for her hometown—Buffalo, New York—to have an operation, the merry evenings were discontinued, but we behaved like children whose mother had gone away and left them unsupervised.
One day I came back from a walk on the prairie and found Mabel’s husband, Tony, polishing her sporty Buick roadster by the shed where it was usually parked. The auto gleamed like a black diamond in the late-afternoon sun. It was a beautiful machine.
“Tony,” I said, “I want to learn to drive.”
He carefully put away the wax and polishing rag before he answered. “Get in,” he said. “I will teach you.”
I slid behind the wheel, and Tony patiently explained the throttle, the brake, the clutch, and the gears. It was more complicated than I expected, but I began to catch on and steered it slowly around Mabel’s Big House, stalling out a few times until I got the hang of it.
“Let’s take it out on the road.”
“All right,” Tony said.
I drove cautiously at first, navigating the rutted lane toward the plaza and turning on the road leading to the pueblo.
“Bridge ahead,” Tony said. “Take it slow.”
I was exhilarated when we arrived back at Los Gallos after that first triumphant lesson.
“Can we go again tomorrow?” I pleaded, and Tony nodded.
But the second lesson did not go as well—there was that business with the posts at either end—and I had to pay to have the dented fenders and sagging bumper repaired. Mabel never said a word about it. I doubt that Tony told her.
Two weeks after that unfortunate event, a former photography student of Paul Strand’s who was a regular guest at Mabel’s dinners mentioned that he was thinking of selling his Model A Ford before he went back to New York.
I didn’t hesitate. I bought it.
Beck took over the driving lessons. She wasn’t as patient as Tony, and she claimed that I didn’t pay attention. Nevertheless, I learned. I loaded up my easel and canvases, paints and brushes, and drove all over, exploring the magnificent New Mexico countryside, going wherever I wanted to go, stopping wherever I felt like stopping. I turned the back of the Ford into a studio, and painted whatever I wanted to paint—cow skulls, mesas, and an old mission church outside of Taos.
I had made up my mind when I was a young girl, a student at Chatham, that I would live my life exactly as I pleased. It had been eleven years since I stepped off the train in New York and into Stieglitz’s world, an important decision that took my life—and my art—in a new direction. Now I’d made another important choice. I had taken control. Whatever happened between Stieglitz and me, New Mexico was the place I would always come back to, where I was finally at home. I knew with absolute certainty that here was where I would do my best work.