MODERN NAVAJO WATERCOLOR PAINTING

nodern navajo WATER COLOR PAINTING

At last, we have a truly native indigenous School of American Painting, not aboriginal in the primitive sense, but modern and contemporary. The best of it would go a long way towards satisfying those of us who want to leave exact representation to the color photographers, but who are at the same time left cold by the sterile abstractions of some Modern Anglo painters. Walter Pach says these Indian painters "take their place among the great primitives in the true sense of the word;" and Dorothy Dunn, founder of the famous Santa Fe Art School in 1933, says they are returning to "primitive fundamentals and basic elements," one of the aims of the Modernist School.

On the East coast, the painting of the Pueblo Indians has reached the public but the Navajo artists are largely unknown. This may be because the Pueblo painters started to paint much earlier than did the Navajo. Alfredo Montoya, of San Ildefonso Pueblo, is considered the founder of the School of Modern Indian Painting, his works appearing as early as 1909, although there were some painters known before then. Apie Begay, a Navajo, drew ceremonial dancers with colored crayons in 1901, but it was not until the 1930's that Navajo artists awakened local interest in their painting, and many of them were interrupted in their work by long service in World War II. Rather than use transparent water color, most Southwest Indian painters prefer to use opaque tempera and casein paints, possibly because these are more like the earth colors used in their past history. Ceremonial dances are favorite themes with the Pueblo artist but are rarely depicted by the Navajo. The Navajo prefers to paint scenes from his own life on the desert and the animals he loves so well. Symbolic elements, again popular with the Pueblo, are rarely used by the Navajo painter. However, he occasionally introduces motifs from his tribal sand paintings, usually in the upper corner of the picture to balance the composition.

The Indian painter of the Southwest has a unique and distinctive style which makes his pictures stand out in any group. They evince a sophistication and innate knowledge of design and composition, difficult to explain in a race of comparatively recent primitive background.

I am going to attempt to analyze this style, and from now on my comments will be directed towards Navajo painting, though, in many cases, they would also apply to other Indian painting as well. Navajo water color painting is a subtle combination of the realistic and the decorative. It is impressionistic rather than completely representational. The figures in the paintings cast no shadows and are usually themselves flat, unmodeled, and two-dimensional. A white artist would not think of painting foreground and background as the Navajos do. A few clumps of sage and juniper suffice for the foreground, a wavy line halfway up the picture may indicate middle distance, or it may be omitted entirely, and a single mesa may suggest far distance. On this simple stage are displayed enchanting animals and figures of Indians, the latter often on horseback. Buildings are non-existent. Everything is stylized except the animals, which are naturalistically drawn. This stylization is one of the reasons why viewers often comment, "How like a Japanese (or Chinese) print," or "How like a Persian miniature." The Navajo transforms his sagebrush and juniper, as the Persian transforms his cypress and flowering trees, into some thing straight out of a fairy tale-fantastic, imaginative, and sheer design! Another similarity between the Navajo and Persian painting is that each object in a Navajo's painting is outlined with an exquisitely delicate fluid line that must have been done with a brush as fine as a Persian miniaturist's own. However, the Navajo's composition is far more free and uncluttered than is the miniaturist's, with its multitude of human, animal and plant forms. One of the points of resemblance between Japanese and Chinese prints and Navajo painting is Navajo simplicity and directness and the feeling that the placement and shape of empty spaces in the composition contribute as much to the design of the whole as do the decorated areas. Strange to say, the way most Navajo draw animals is untouched by their tendency to conventionalize. Their animals are realistically drawn, although done in outline, without modeling by shading. These painters evince an extraordinary knowledge of anatomy and foreshortening. Their horses and deer are full of vitality and action and are drawn without models, the painter depending entirely on his visual memory.

a wavy line halfway up the picture may indicate middle distance, or it may be omitted entirely, and a single mesa may suggest far distance. On this simple stage are displayed enchanting animals and figures of Indians, the latter often on horseback. Buildings are non-existent. Everything is stylized except the animals, which are naturalistically drawn. This stylization is one of the reasons why viewers often comment, "How like a Japanese (or Chinese) print," or "How like a Persian miniature." The Navajo transforms his sagebrush and juniper, as the Persian transforms his cypress and flowering trees, into some thing straight out of a fairy tale-fantastic, imaginative, and sheer design! Another similarity between the Navajo and Persian painting is that each object in a Navajo's painting is outlined with an exquisitely delicate fluid line that must have been done with a brush as fine as a Persian miniaturist's own. However, the Navajo's composition is far more free and uncluttered than is the miniaturist's, with its multitude of human, animal and plant forms. One of the points of resemblance between Japanese and Chinese prints and Navajo painting is Navajo simplicity and directness and the feeling that the placement and shape of empty spaces in the composition contribute as much to the design of the whole as do the decorated areas. Strange to say, the way most Navajo draw animals is untouched by their tendency to conventionalize. Their animals are realistically drawn, although done in outline, without modeling by shading. These painters evince an extraordinary knowledge of anatomy and foreshortening. Their horses and deer are full of vitality and action and are drawn without models, the painter depending entirely on his visual memory.

The artistic ability of the Navajo is definitely innate and not acquired from the white man or from the Oriental. Many of them, as children, started drawing on nearby rock walls while they were herding their sheep. They later showed talent when some interested trader offered them rude drawing materials in the shape of pieces of wrapping paper and pencils. The best story about this is to be found in the book "Spin a Silver Dollar" by Hanoum. This tells the story of how the Lippincotts, Indian traders, became interested in a little eight-year-old Navajo boy whom they found drawing pictures on rocks with a small sharpened rock. His name was Beatien Yazz: "Little no shirt." He collected bits of paper from their scrap baskets and, with the aid of pencils and water colors given him by the kind traders, drew and painted hour after hour. His lifelike desert animals and fascinating blue horses were done without any instruction and without models. Beatien was born on the Navajo Reservation in 1926 and was sent to the Santa Fe Indian Art School in 1943 where Indians were encouraged to paint in their own distinctive fashion and not to copy the white men's styles of painting. During World War II he served with the famous Navajo Signal Corps of the U.S. Marines. He is now married to one of his own people, has three children, and is living in the vicinity of Pine Springs, on the Reservation. At the present writing Beatien is doing a great deal of painting and his subject matter and technique are widely diversified. Some of these are delightful whimsies, suggestive of Uncle Remus' stories and the more realistic of Walt Disney's animal drawings. Others are on the sombre or dramatic side. I recall one fairly recent one that is very effective, but rather gruesome. In this picture a huge grizzly bear is tearing the body of a fallen deer. The shapes of the animals and a single dead tree are starkly silhouetted in black against a sunset sky. The color of the blood flowing from the deer is exactly repeated in the crimson of the sky. Being a young artist, Beatien's work is understandably uneven and he still seems to be groping for the style that would suit him best. He is always experimenting and demonstrates amazing fecundity of invention, with frequently very fine results. His work holds great promise for the future and he is already represented in

all current shows of Indian water color paintings, where he has won many prizes. Beatien Yazz was born under two lucky stars: the first was when he was written up in "Spin a Silver Dollar;" the second was when M. W. Woodard, Indian Trader of Gallup, became his patron. Through this trader's encouragement, wise guidance, skillful promotion and advertising, Beatien Yazz work is continually being presented to an ever-growing and admiring public. As a result, he is one of the very few Indian painters who is making a comfortable, dependable living from his pictures.

James Watson of the Santa Fe Indian School is doing the same for Quincy Tahoma, giving him friendly advice and aiding him sell his pictures. In Santa Fe, Mrs. Hall Adams was a friend and patron of the late Gerald Nailor, while Kay Locket, Lloyd Kiva, Fred Wilson, Mrs. K. Noe and others are doing much to encourage other Indian painters. No doubt there are others doing this useful work but nevertheless this field of promotion is one in which far more admirers of Indian painting should be engaged. There would then be fewer excellent artists who have given up painting because they lacked a means of getting their work before the public in order to sell it.

Another of the examples of native talent, which are continually coming to light, was told me recently by Margaret Webster of the Santa Fe Indian School. A small Navajo boy, in a pitiful condition, was brought in to the Intermountain School in Brigham City, Utah. Besides being in the typical Navajo state of malnutrition, he was badly crippled and could only drag himself about on hands and knees. His parents had died when he was tiny and, crippled from birth, the little fellow was passed about from one poor hogan to another with no one who knew how to care for a child in such a helpless condition. The school arranged for him to have hospital care and an operation, which partially restored the use of his feet. While convalescing, he got hold of pencils and paper and drew continually. Allen Houser, the Apache painter, director of the Art School at Brigham City, says that the child has considerable talent and that he is taking him under his wing as his own special protegé. Apparently there is a great deal of this latent talent on the Reservation, waiting only materials and encouragement to express itself.

The five best-known Navajo painters today are Quincy Tahoma, Harrison Begay, Andy Tsihnahjinnie, the late Gerald Nailor, and Ha So De. All five have many times exhibited in this country, winning numerous awards and have been received with great acclaim abroad. Two were recently awarded "Palms" by the French Government.

Quincy Tahoma was born on the Reservation in 1922. As a young boy he drew pictures on rock with bits of sandstone. At the age of fourteen he received art instruction under the wise guidance of Dorothy Dunn of the Santa Fe Indian Art School, who recognized his outstanding ability and let it alone to develop its own individuality. There was a long interim when, like so many other Navajo painters, his work was interrupted by service in the Army in World War II.

At first his pictures were smaller, delicately colored and quiet in mood. One of these called "Battle Cry" shows, in spite of its name, a woodland scene of quiet beauty. A little brook winds through a fairy-like forest of delicate conventionalized aspen trees. The tracery of the tiny leaves is exquisitely done and the colors are soft shades of olive green, chartreuse and apricot. In the foreground, finely outlined, are a group of deer, in the midst

of which stands a stag, sounding forth a challenge to his rival. Distance is indicated by two broad, tinted horizontal lines and the interplay of the horizontal and vertical lines in the picture is an orchestration. As with most Navajo painters, Tahoma's animals are realistic, life-like and anatomically correct. His early horses are like mounts of the Conquistadores with proudly arching necks and delicate legs. His plant forms are conventionalized and his clumps of sage brush look exactly like small, ornamental Chinese trees. In this peaceful early phase, he painted some charming Navajo mothers. One, which is in the collection of Flora Bailey, is a standing figure of a young and beautiful woman holding a smiling baby strapped to a cradleboard. She is bending slightly over the baby and is smiling down with great affection. Quincy is one of the few of his tribe who can paint emotionally expressive faces. In this picture of the mother a little lamb is stretching his neck to the utmost to peer at the baby above him. Curving his neck from behind the woman's full skirt, is another lamb also trying to get a peek at the baby. Every line of the picture is rhythmically inter-related. The color scheme of the woman's native costume is intricate and unusual but the colors are never harsh and the effect of the whole picture is one of quiet beauty. Tahoma is obviously a man of many moods and some of his later pictures show great vital force and boldness with a tremendous effect of dramatic action. Though he says he has only seen buffalo quietly browsing in a zoo, his "Buffalo Hunts" are horrendous things. It is uncomfortable to remain long in front of them, so terrific is the effect of the furious on-coming speed of those charging animals. They are plunging straight at the spectator, and demonstrate the painter's amazing master of foreshortening. He tends more and more to pictures of action and violence. He also breaks away from the flat, two-dimensional typically Indian style to indicate modelling and a hint of perspective with skill and ease. However his style is always completely Indian and would never be confused with that of a white artist. Down in the corner of each painting is a tiny thumbnail sketch in miniature of some object in the painting itself. This is his trademark. There was a long lapse in his painting but recently, under the encouragement of James Watson of the Santa Fe Indian School, he is working again at a feverish pace. His latest paintings show little of the delicacy of technique of the earliest ones but are powerfully executed, ferocious hunts and battle scenes or impetuous charges of buffalo or horses, full of verve and dash. He now uses modelling in all his figures, experiments in various colors and has a recent penchant for blue horses. He has become a master of anatomy of both man and beast, both have bulging muscles, and the horses are thick-set and heavily barrelled. His inventiveness in subject matter is a well known characteristic, his pictures always tell a story, sometimes a humorous one. He will paint a huge buffalo stopped short in his tracks by a tiny tiny bird flapping its wings to protect its nest on the ground or a big heavily muscled horse rearing wildly as a little skunk crosses its path. One recent picture, more in his early style, was of a coal black mare twisting around to lick a pure white colt-a lovely thing in design and pattern of dark and light. Though still a young man, Quincy Tahoma is in the very top rank of Navajo painters today. It is to be hoped that his versatile talent will continue to express itself with no more long and unfortunate lapses in production.

Harrison Begay was born in 1917 near White Cone Trading Post in Arizona and had little contact with white people until he was eight years old. He was educated at Santa Fe Indian Art School where Indians were taught to use white man's art materials but were encouraged to express themselves in their own native idiom. He served with the U.S. Army in the European Theatre for three years and was in the landing on the Normandy beaches and the Battle of the Bulge. Since his return he has devoted himself with signal success to painting. He has been the prime mover in organizing Tewa Enterprises in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where silk screen prints of Indian paintings are made to be sold to the public at very low cost. His charming prints are to be found in many homes all over the country. Harrison Begay exhibits great felicity in painting his own shepherd people. In one of his paintings, two Navajo girls are guarding their flock on a hill overlooking desert distance. The colors are the typical "earth colors" of Indian painting, reds, a little yellow, browns, blacks and soft jade green. The scene is imbued with the mystery and beauty of Navajo life in the desert. There are no

Shadows and no modeling, but perspective is indicated by a series of back-drops with three different sizes of sheep and one small red butte for the far distance. The composition is rhythmic and the groups of figures and animals, junipers and sage are integrated into a harmonious whole. The effect is simple, but on further study reveals great sophistication and knowledge of design. The delicately drawn sage and junipers are stylized in the Chinese manner. (Note, however, that none of the Navajo artists had ever seen a painting by an oriental until their own style of painting had been well established.) The extremely delicate finesse of line is one of the reasons Begay's work has often been compared to that of a Persian miniaturist. His brush work is sensitive, expressive and exquisitely fine. He makes his animals appear realistic and lifelike, although they depend on outline drawing alone to indicate foreshortening. He says he draws in the skeleton of the animal first and then the outline. Subject of ceremonial dances is not a favorite with him but when he does paint them it is usually on tinted paper. Like all the Big Five painters, his work is sometimes uneven, but at his best he meets with the wide public acclaim and has difficulty in keeping up with the justifiably great demand for his work. O. B. Jacobson of the University of Oklahoma, an outstanding authority on Indian painting, rates him at the top of the list of Navajo painters.Harrison Begay's personality is as pleasing as his paintings. He has warmth, friendliness and charm, and a handsome smiling face. He speaks with keen admiration of his fellow painters and many is the young artist whom he has helped and encouraged. Stanley Battese, a promis-ing nineteen year old, with a flair for imaginative delicate painting, is one of those who acknowledges his debt to Harrison Begay.

ing nineteen year old, with a flair for imaginative delicate painting, is one of those who acknowledges his debt to Harrison Begay.

Andy Tsihnahjinnie, one of the "Big Five" painters, was born near Chinle, Arizona, around 1912. His early drawings, done as a small boy, were of the sheep he was herding, drawn on nearby rocks. Later he went to boarding school at Fort Apache and then to Santa Fe Indian Art School. Like the other "Big Five," he was fortunate enough to be under the wise tutelage of Dorothy Dunn who made no attempt to mould his style, but merely to familiarize him with modern art materials. During the War he served with the Fifth Air Force in the South Pacific, and in the Navajo Signal Corps. Tsihnahjinnie is distinct in style from the other "Big Five" and the modernists would claim him for their own. He is extremely original and the follower of no tradition. His color schemes are unheard of, but fascinating, his women bizarre and very Mongolian in type, and his plant forms unrecognizable. Although he has none of the delicacy of line that charms one with a Begay, still there is a dramatic mood and distinctive individuality about his paintings that definitely put them in the highest ranks. ARIZONA HIGHWAYS (Feb. 1950) has printed some splendid reproductions of his work in color. In one of these, a gaunt emaciated boy on a turquoise colored horse is running from the approaching night. The boy rides as though he were pursued by a demon, leaning forward in the saddle, with his black hair flying. In the middle distance, indicated by a slightly lighter violet hue than the purpleblack foreground, another boy on a beige-apricot horse is urging on three small deer to safety. The far distanceis represented by tall rust-colored buttes (or “monuments”) with variegated colored horizontal bands simulating strata, and long wiggly octopus-like arms extending down from them, to indicate slopes of scree. Navajo fear the dark and there is a fearful mood about the whole picture. In another one, called the “Stick Game,” three Navajo women are grouped in a triangle against a “bois rose” background, with a ribbon of soft green conventionalized plant-form behind them. Each small area in the painting, like the women's coal black hair, is a design form in itself. Like Gerald Nailor, Tsihnahjinnie divides the women's full skirts into small rhythmic fan-like shapes, each an element in the design and each a subtly different hue of color from the next one. In this picture, these small shapes graduate in color from pure violet down through eight intermediate shades to an increasingly neutralized hue which ties in with the soft rose background. One of his loveliest color schemes depicts a race between two young women on madly-galloping ponies. In contrast to the horizontal action of the speeding horses is a motionless figure, the referee, mounted on a steed which looks more Arab than Indian pony. The only background and foreground are suggested by two irregular horizontal lines broken by some fan-shaped bunches of grass. The background is a soft chocolate and the horses and girls' garments are varying shades of greygreen, nile green, chartreuse, apricot and chestnut. The manes and tails of the ponies are variegated shades of the colors used throughout the rest of the picture. Tsihnahjinnie's favorite color scheme is, however, composed of aqua horses, violet skies and terracotta buttes. Horses are a joy to him and Dorothy Dunn describes some small watercolors of horses he recently exhibited as “consummately painted-original, virile and untamed-an expression of really great talent.

Andy has done murals in buildings in Arizona, New Mexico, and Oklahoma, and even one in Japan. He now has a studio at Scottsdale, Arizona, and his paintings are much sought after and highly prized.

The name Gerald Nailor brings to mind stunning oriental-looking Indian women riding prancing Arabian steeds, with their flowing fan shaped skirts divided into innumerable pleats, each fold of which is a graduating hue of a monochromatic color scheme. He is credited with originating this design form which has been copied by many other artists. He is considered one of the greatest Navajo painters but his notable career was cut tragically short in 1952 when a drunken man brutally murdered him when he was defending his sister. Gerald Nailor was born in Pinedale, New Mexico, on a beautiful part of the Navajo Reservation. When very young he married a Picuris Pueblo woman much older than he and thereafter made his home at Picuris Pueblo. He spent two years at the Santa Fe Indian Art School, later studying under Kenneth Chapman and Olaf Nordelmark. However, his work remained Navajo in character and his style continued distinctive and individual. Nailor is a master of design and the decorative art form. He is far more interested in design than in representation. His work is so stylized and at times even abstract that it has been termed Modernistic, but it is nevertheless characteristically Navajo. Even his animals are stylized. Where most Navajo artists are naturalistic in their drawing of horses and other animals, Nailor's fawns are painted withwhite scalloped necks and spidery legs for the decorative effect, and his Arab-type horses have exaggerated arching necks, erect waving manes, tails like plumes, and impossibly slender prancing legs. On rare occasions he has painted hunting scenes but usually his subject matter is calm in mood, not violent. His favorite color schemes are monochromatic shades of brown running the gamut from beige to carame, to chestnut, through the numbers to sepia. To these he often adds dramatic black accents and touches of red. The resemblance between his work and that of Japanese artists has often been noted and his brushwork compared to that of Hokusai. Dorothy Adlow in the Christian Science Monitor, says his paintings "are a unified composition. They evidence selectivity, great refinement of technique-economy of line, and almost calligraphic pattern." In Dorothy Dunn's private collection is a painting of his entitled "Deer and Fawn." Two graceful deer and a nursing fawn are arranged in an interlocking group of flowing rhythmic lines, the unity of which is a characteristically Nailor feat of skillful composition. The deer are drinking from a curious rock-bordered pool framed by conventionalized plant forms. It is a woodland lyric in shades of chocolate, brown and sepia and beige. Of so many Navajopaintings, one feels they should be accompanied by a poem and this is one of them. The picture is a rhythmical triumph of repetition, with each area skillfully interrelated. The composition shows sureness, authority and sensitiveness to good design. Its overall effect is of great simplicity. Nailor demonstrates his leaning toward the abstract by introducing symbols from Navajo sand paintings in nearly all his work. He even entered the esoteric field of his tribal religion and crystallized in paint his strange but moving conceptions of still stranger myths. Hester Jones in El Palacio, 1952, says: "Nailor's lor's paintings take us into a rare world-we can only surmise what the light of his tribal tradition meant to him. Some insight can be gained from the quality of perfection and mystery in his portrayal of its meanings. "He produced compositions intergrating combinations of symbols with such originality and refinement that they often equalled or surpassed the best in modern art. Although he became known especially for his horses and riders, his subjects included many phases of Navajo life encompassed in a grouping of symbolic designs suggesting the beauty of Navajo poetry." Gerald Nailor's murals decorate the Department of the Interior Building in Washington, the Mesa Verde National Park Museum and the Navajo Tribal Council House at Window Rock. One of his oldest sons had a very creditable career in the army, and the youngest, Gerald Junior, is now at Santa Fe Indian School.

Ha So De, or Narcisco Abeyta, is one of the older Navajo artists whom most people would rank with the four just mentioned although for a long period he dropped out of public view. Ha So De's paintings have a most exotic distinctive and unusual flavor. He paints dramatically effective hunting scenes with verve and elan vital. In these, unlike Quincy Tahoma, the horses are usually running away from the spectator rather than charging toward him. Ha So De uses the typical earth colors of traditional Indian painting and the same flat unmodeled figures, with only hints of background. His work, like Tsihnahjinnie's and Nailor's, is so stylized, and so far removed from traditional Anglo art forms of the past as to be sometimes termed modernistic, but in reality this type of painting is largely the result of the Indian's directness, simplicity, and originality of approach expressing itself. His strange unrealistic horses have very long necks and small heads, while his antelope and plant forms are fantastic. Ha So De paints boldly and quickly on very large sheets of paper with none of the delicate finesse of brushwork of Harrison Begay or Nailor. His chief preoccupation is with design and pattern and the depiction of force and action.

Narcisco Abeyta, born near Canyoncito in 1918, studied under Dorothy Dunn at the Santa Fe Indian Art School from 1935 to 1939. His work was acclaimed in Paris and many American cities. Then for five years he served in the Army, chiefly with the famous Rangers in the Pacific theatre. There he was wounded and so badly shell-shocked in battle that he was completely unable to paint again for a number of years. In college, at Albuquerque, he met his very charming and pretty Anglo wife. They and their five children now live in Gallup where Narcisco is in the State Employment Bureau. At long last he is painting again with much of his old fire and dash. The war strain still shows and he says he is so tired after work that he does not often feel up to painting, but he hopes that he will be able to do more as time goes on.

Three other artists of outstanding talent are Keetsie Shirley, Wade Hadley and Charlie Lee. It will be interesting to see how they develop in the future. Adrian Howard, in Desert Magazine of June, 1939, He has written an interesting article on the artist Keetsie Shirley, who was born in Canyon de Chelly, Arizona, in 1906. His mother died soon after he was born and he was so little and frail he was called "Keetsie," meaning "small one." At the age of seven, he was sent to school but was so miserably homesick that he escaped and walked thirty miles across the desert to his hogan. He ran away a number of other times but each time his father took him back. His one compensation was that he had pencil and paper at school and constantly drew pictures. After voluntarily going through high school, he earned money as a mechanic to study art in the Denver University. He could not understand why they made him study the bones of a horse's skeleton when he could so well draw horses any way, in action poses, just from having closely observed them from nature. Finally he got jobs more to his liking, painting posters for the Tribe at Window Rock, and also did some fine pictures of Indian life which are now on the walls of the club there. Of these, the dramatic "Fire Dance" is outstanding. The Denver Art Museum owns a superb painting of horses by this artist. In it he depicts an oncoming wave of chestnut and dark brown horses, surging downwards over a seagreen foreground which heaves in billows like the ocean. The water color technique is assured, and cleverly blends subtle variations of many hues in rich wet washes of color. In this specimen of his work Shirley has departed from the traditional Indian art forms of flat areas of color, and has introduced considerable modeling of light and shade to aid him in this masterful depiction of foreshortened galloping horses. Recent paintings of his are very difficult to find. Perhaps he, too, needs a patron to bring his work once more before the public.

Wade Hadley paints pictures like the crystallization of a fairy tale. In one of these, in the collection of Mrs. Charles H. Dietrich, a patron of Indian art, four delicately drawn aspen trees, evenly spaced, indicate a forest. Behind them, in a lighter value, are four equally delicate pines. It is an exquisite pattern in colored silhouette on a dark background. At the base of the trees are a number of charming little woodland animals very daintily drawn. The style is slightly suggestive of Pop Chalee's work but is at the same time individual, and his own.

Charlie Lee of Yel Ha Yah ("He that goes off in anger") belies the translation of his Navajo name and is a gentle, slender, ascetic-looking young man and an ordained minister of the Assemblies of God. He is an ardent missionary to his own people and in fact spends so much time on his church work that there is lamentably little time left for his very fine painting. He was born on the reservation near Red Rock in 1926. He has a pretty blonde Anglo wife and little girl, and both he and his wife speak beautiful English. They live at Shiprock, New Mexico.

Charlie Lee is one of the two youngest Navajo painters to attain prominence with his painting today. He is a great admirer of Harrison Begay and his style was influenced by the older artist although it has a distinctive charm all its own. His favorite subject matter is horses and prong-horned antelope, and like the Big Five (with whom he will soon deserve to be associated) he shows an excellent knowledge of animal anatomy. In a recent painting, two prong-horned antelope are gamboling. The outlines of the leaping figures are rhythmically repeated in the outline of the rose-red butte which rises immediately behind them. No middle distance is indicated. The foreground is represented by very decorative, conventionalized, green plant forms, whose graceful curving lines and extremely fine brush work, as well as the outlines of the animals, would be the envy of any Persian miniaturist. For finish, elegance and perfection of technique, it is hard to find his equal. Harrison Begay and Nailor are the only Navajo artists who can challenge the delicacy of his brush work. If Charlie Lee can spend more time on his painting, it is safe to say he will be one of the outstanding Navajo painters of future years.

Another of the very young painters is Stanley Bahe of Teesto Trading Post on the Navajo Reservation. He is now twenty-one years of age. While a patient at the Phoenix Sanitarium three years ago he won first prize for a water color he sent to the Arizona State Fair. He says he has never received any art instruction but just "happened to paint" because he felt like it and materials were available at the Sanitarium. How many potential painters are there on the reservation who only need materials to waken their creative talent?

Ed Lee Natay has had a remarkably successful life since he was born on the Navajo Reservation at Chinle. He is another Navajo who has had no formal art education whatever but has exhibited in many museums and Santa Fe Railway stations from Chicago to San Francisco. He also has his own studio for wrought iron work. He is particularly well known as a Navajo singer, interpreting the songs of his ancestors and has appeared on many radio and T.V. shows.

Other Navajo artists whom I will mention in name only are Myron Denetdale, Albert Lewis, Alfred Lorenzo, Walter Shirley, Sybil Yazzi, Stanley Mitchell, Ned Notah, Sam Hashley, Hoke Dennetsosie, Edmund Tracy, Timothy Begay, Richard Begay, Nelson Lee, Albert Stewart, Howard Gorman and Stanley Battese, promising newcomer.

There is nothing new about the fact that the Southwestern Indian loves to paint. He has been at it since time immemorial, painting his body, the walls of his cave, decorating his pottery, weapons, masks, teepees and ceremonial objects. The Pueblo Indians decorated the walls of their ceremonial kivas with abstract designs in earth colors. The Plains Indians painted hunting scenes on cured hides and made them into shields and teepees. In the past the painting of the Southwestern Indian was largely devoted to the decoration of objects in use, whereas the water colors of today have no other function than to create the beauty for its own sake. Symbolic and geometric forms of the past have generally given place among the Navajo to a preference for depicting life forms. These are partly naturalistic, partly conventionalized, but all, as we have seen, exhibit the ancient sensitivity to good design.

It is sincerely to be hoped that these Indians of today will be able to maintain their own individuality as Indian artists and not conform to white standards. This will largely depend upon public appreciation and encouragement. Considering the comparatively recent primitive background of the American Indian, their remarkable artistic achievement is aptly commented upon by C. B. Jacobsen who says (in his "Peintres Indiens d'Amerique") "Indian painting gives the impression of coming from an ancient and refined civilization-in a few years they have brought some thing of great value to American culture."