The last bohemian in Santa Fe - When Alfred Morang’s life came to a tragic end, nothing before or since has so shaken the New Mexico art colony.
If you walk Canyon Road on an evening, past the lit gallery windows and the low adobe walls, it is not hard to imagine Alfred Morang making his way home from Claude's Bar, cigarette in hand, the brim of his hat tilted just so, looking very decidedly French. He was Santa Fe's own Toulouse-Lautrec, a painter who lived among the bars and boarding houses he depicted, and who helped give the Canyon Road art colony its romantic, slightly wild, wholly unforgettable character.
Morang was born in Ellsworth, Maine, in 1901, a sickly child whose frail health kept him out of school and who turned toward music, writing, and painting. He became one of the youngest violinists ever to perform a solo recital at Boston's Jordan Hall, and at the New England Conservatory of Music he met his future wife, Dorothy Alden Clark, whom he married in 1930. He took early painting instruction from the American Impressionist Carroll Sargent Tyson, and by his twenties he was working in Boston as a painter, illustrator, and writer of short stories that found their way into national magazines, encouraged, as Morang himself acknowledged, by his friend the novelist Erskine Caldwell.
In 1937, Morang contracted tuberculosis and his doctors recommended the higher and drier air of New Mexico. The Santa Fe he arrived in was already an art colony brimming with currents of Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, and emerging abstraction, and Morang stepped into it as if he was meant for it. He taught at the Arsuna School of Fine Art, joined the orbit of Raymond Jonson's Transcendental Painting Group, wrote a weekly art column, published the 1947 instructional book "Adventure in Drawing," and hosted a radio program called "The World of Art."
His painting was rooted in the French tradition he loved. Monet and Bonnard were his stated favorites, and one can see their warmth and painterly brushwork in his thickly worked landscapes. But it was Toulouse-Lautrec who resembled the more intimate strain of his work, the portraits, the bar scenes, the dancers, the women he called the "Ladies of the Evening", all rendered with an affection and an unmistakable sense of place.
His influence as a teacher was, by all accounts, equal to his influence as a painter. From the Morang School of Fine Art came a generation of Santa Fe artists, including Janet Lippincott, who would shape the city's cultural identity well into the late twentieth century. After his death, an unnamed Santa Fe artist offered the line that has followed him ever since: that Morang taught half of them how to paint, and the other half how to see.
Morang's death, was as tragic as his life had been vivid. By the mid-1950s, Morang and Dorothy had divorced, his health was failing, and he had retreated into his small studio on Canyon Road just behind Claude's Bar. On the frigid night of January 28, 1958, after a last evening at the bar, he returned to his studio and lit a cigarette. Unfortunately, the gas had been left on and a fire broke out. Morang, then 56, died there that night. The next morning a reporter found one of his beloved cats crouched on the corner of the charred mattress where her master had slept.
He was carried to his funeral in a Spanish Colonial coffin built by Abolonio Rodriguez, custodian of the art museum, and escorted by a small group of friends that included Randall Davey and Will Shuster. The Santa Fe New Mexican, in its obituary, called him one of the city's "most colorful Bohemians," which he certainly was, though the description undersells him. He was also, as the years since have made plain, one of its most important and consequential artists. After the funeral his ashes were scattered on his beloved Canyon Road.