Ward Lockwood (1894-1963)
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Ward Lockwood became a key painter in the Taos, New Mexico art colony, but diverse modernist art styles including Expressionism, Cubism, Surrealism and Constructivism reflected his wide ranging travels in Europe and the United States. From the 1920s to the 1960s, his work embraced a series of stylistic changes characteristic of people who influenced him, including John Marin and Andrew Dasburg.
In 1926, he and his wife, artist Clyde Bonebrake, moved to Taos because of his friendship with Kenneth Adams, who was already established there. Lockwood became interested in the Taos Society of Artists, dedicated to a mutual effort of marketing their art work. Major influences there for a loosening of style were modernists Andrew Dasburg and John Marin. Watercolor became Lockwood's preferred medium because he felt that it gave him more freedom of expression.
In the 1930s, he left Taos because of his need to make more money. He did numerous murals for the Federal Arts Project and accepted teaching positions at the Broadmoor Academy in Colorado Springs and in 1938, became Chair of the Department of Art at the University of Texas in Austin.
Subsequently he taught at the University of California at Berkeley and at the University of Kansas at Lawrence. In 1940, he moved to San Francisco and experimented with Abstraction and Assemblage but was again in the Army during World War II, advancing to the rank of colonel.
After that, he returned to California to teach and was much influenced by the modernist art environment there, exhibiting with the Abstract-Expressionist painters of the controversial San Francisco Art Association. He made frequent summer trips to Taos, where he settled during his final years.
In 1962, Lockwood retired from teaching and returned to Taos where he died the following year. By the time he died, four hundred paintings were in his estate collection. (Biography from AskArt)
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