Walter Ufer
 Born in Germany in 1876 to parents who immigrated the next year to Louisville, Kentucky, Walter Ufer became one of the founders of the Taos Society of Artists and achieved much distinction as a painter of Pueblo Indian genre. He was a complex, enigmatic personality, claiming that he was born in the US rather than Germany and suffering chronic alcoholism. During periods of sobriety, he painted powerful canvases of New Mexico Indian genre, especially of the Toas Pueblo.
He showed early art talent and was encouraged by his father, a master gunsmith, and by his teachers. After grammar school, he apprenticed to a lithography firm where he learned basic design principles. He spent seven years in Europe and earned his formal art education at Germany's Royal Academy of Fine Arts where he became friends with American artists, Joseph Henry Sharp and Ernest Blumenschein.
In 1911, he married Mary Fredricksen, an artist, and in 1913, they painted in Paris, Italy, and North America before going to Chicago. To make a living, he worked as a commercial illustrator in Chicago, and his first patron was the mayor, Carter Harrison, who arranged in 1914 for Ufer to go to Taos, New Mexico and to return several more times at his expense. Sharp and Blumenschein were already painting there and welcomed Ufer.
However, Ufer was not comfortable in his subservient relationship with Harrison and said unkind things about him behind his back. Luckily for Ufer, he took Harrison's advice to paint the Indians as he saw them in Taos and not depict romanticized subject matter from the past as he had learned in European Academies.
Years later, Ufer described his work in a way that would have pleased Harrison: "I paint the Indian as he is. In the garden digging--doing field work--riding among the sage--meeting his woman in the dessert--angling for trout--in meditation" (American Art Review June 1999).
Between 1916 and 1926, Ufer earned several prestigious awards including membership in the National Academy of Design in New York and recognition by the Art Institute of Chicago. Also during this time his paintings were added to many permanent collections. Throughout most of the last twenty years of his career, he had a very generous patron, William Henry Klauser, a wealthy businessman from Dubuque, Iowa, who provided him with a financial safety net to continue painting.
Ufer was highly political and dedicated to eradicating social injustice. He was an active socialist, close friend of Socialist Leader Leon Trotsky, and he frequently joined picket lines of striking workers. Not surprisingly his paintings often depicted socially oppressed Pueblo Indians.
His personal life was troubled by chronic alcoholism and indebtedness. Although his paintings sold well in the 1920's, their market dropped with the Stock Market crash, and their value did not increase until long after his death in 1936.
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