Ira Moscovitz featured at Taos Art Museum

July 30, 2009

When renowned painter, Ira Moscowitz was revved up and ready to go, he could finish a painting in a heartbeat. His light speed marks and brushstrokes are unconcerned with interpretation, dedicated solely to transmitting the vitality of the moment.

Moscowitz’s lithographs, hand-colored etchings and oil paintings depicting Southwest American Indian ceremonies he witnessed from 1944-1947 are on display at the Taos Art Museum through August 31. They pulsate with vivid details – dancers’ mouths clamp the area just below the heads of snakes and grasp their mid-sections, as they parade through a Pueblo in “Hopi Snake Dance.” Every muscle is in motion and immersed in prayer in “Buffalo Dance.” You can almost hear the beat of the drums and the shuffling of feet.

To celebrate and bring to life the man behind the easel, the Taos Art Museum will host its first-ever panel discussion on Friday, July 31 at 5:30 p.m. Comprising the panel will be Moscowitz’s daughter, Diana Gordon; his granddaughter, Nicole Gordon; Richard Lampert, owner of Zaplin Lampert Gallery in Santa Fe and art collector Roy Coffee Jr. Museum Director Erion Simpson will moderate the discussion.

After the 1940’s and 50’s many of the ceremonies he depicted closed down to the public, according to Simpson. Prior to their restriction, Moscowitz’s documenting of them was not only accepted, but actually encouraged by elders. “One of the medicine men he was really close friends with said, ‘You have to document this, other wise we’ll lose our culture because the young people aren’t interested,” recalls Diana Gordon.

Moscowitz (1912-2001) cultivated deep friendships with his Southwest subjects, according to Diana, including members of Navajo, Apache, Zuni and Taos Pueblo tribes. “My father was interested and interesting enough … and attuned to nature and people,” she says. He would often pack a carload of his American Indian friends, who were also frequent houseguests, into his 1939 Plymouth and head off to healing ceremonies.

“He would visually document the ceremonies, then when he got home he’d made drawings recollecting them and then make them into lithographs,” says Gordon. Her father, who she describes as very demonstrative and gregarious, would often describe what went on at the healings to the family when he got home. Diana recently (two weeks ago) discovered some of his vividly descriptive writings about his experiences, which she will share at the panel.

Diana Gordon, an only child born in 1944, has first-hand accounts of various Pueblo events she accompanied her parents to as a youth. “When you are a young person of a certain age, you end up running around with kids your same size,” she recalls. “You hear the drum, see the fire, check in with your parents once in awhile… The whole village participates, everyone’s out there drumming… the intensity of the drum envelops the place and gets into you.”

Gordon now lives in New York City where she has a full time job managing her parent’s artistic legacy. Her parents are both artists – her mother, Anna Barry Moscovitz was an accomplished painter in her own right, and Gordon will share some of her images, via computer, during or after the panel discussion. The couple went out painting for their first date and by day’s end Ira asked Anna Barry to marry him.

Moscovitz chose to pursue painting rather than follow in the footsteps of his ancestors and become a rabbi. Nonetheless, celebration of the sacred was the core of his life’s work. His 10 years in the Southwest came on the heels of several years in Palestine and Europe, documenting religious ceremonies and indigenous people.
For more information, visit www.taosartmuseum.org