Walter Ufer (1876–1936)

Born in Germany, Walter Ufer grew up in Louisville, Kentucky, where he apprenticed as a lithographer. He studied art in Hamburg, Dresden, and later Munich before returning to the United States in 1914. It was during his seven years abroad that Ufer met both J. H. Sharp and Ernest Blumenschein, whom he later joined in Taos when he became one of the founders of the Taos Society of Artists. At one point, when the offices of both secretary and president of the Society were open, Ufer dramatically volunteered for both of them.

Walter Ufer was said to be irascible and flamboyant. But he is also credited with acts of dedication and kindness. During the 1918 flu epidemic, Ufer worked, along with his wife, Mary, as a night nurse helping the only doctor in Taos, Dr. J. W. Bergman, while Doc Martin was away in Austin attending to military troops. As a dedicated socialist, Ufer also collected money at one point for miners on strike in Madrid, New Mexico.

Not known primarily as a landscape painter, Ufer devised a system to ensure he would always be painting from the same position. He attached the legs of his easel to three stakes driven into the ground. At the end of a painting session, he would detach the easel from the stakes, which he left behind to mark his exact location. As a practical joke and to shake Ufer’s confidence in this procedure, some of his friends decided to alter the artist’s point of view, not by moving the stakes he had so carefully positioned but by digging up some of the chamisa bushes that figured prominently in Ufer’s painting. From one day to the next, the subject matter had changed inexplicably.

Throughout his career, Ufer suffered from severe bouts of depression, alcoholism, gambling, financial instability, and serious debt, all made worse by his extravagant lifestyle.

To discourage unwanted visitors to his Taos studio, Walter Ufer hung a sign on the door that read: “Dangerous, KEEP OUT, High Explosives Within.”