A “rooster pull” is an exhibition of horsemanship with roots in Spain that has been practiced in the southwest United States for centuries.1 Today the sport is performed as an old-school rodeo event with inanimate objects, but at the time Lloyd Moylan made this painting the event likely involved a live chicken, making it highly controversial by current standards. While in specific contexts the tradition may have carried spiritual significance, its primary purpose has historically been to show off equestrian athleticism and skill as riders are required to bend to reach the ground from their saddles while riding close to each other at fast speeds. Moylan uses dynamic diagonals to emphasize the acrobatics of the frenetic, intense, and dangerous pursuit. Through his limited color palette, fine lines, and clean background, the three competitors become graceful dancers.
Color: White
Untitled (Pueblo Indians)
Lloyd Moylan tended to depict Diné (Navajo) subjects in a straightforward, almost documentary manner. However, he approached Pueblo subjects differently. Moylan created several paintings of Pueblo women at work, each in a different style. Here, his approach is reminiscent of Pablo Picasso’s 1917–1925 neoclassical period, with statuesque figures, a subdued color palette, white-washed and simplified drapery, and an architectural composition in which the elements are arranged in a triangular formation akin to an ancient Greek temple pediment frieze. In Untitled (Pueblo Indians), Moylan prioritizes form over content, attending more to the artistry of the scene than to the tasks of the people in it.
Navajo
Despite its generic title, Navajo is a highly individualized portrait. Lloyd Moylan achieves an immediate sense of who this person is through the sitter’s lost-in-thought expression and character of his hands. Additional details such as the broken-in nature of his hat, the casual manner in which he rolls a cigarette, and the horse in the distance round out the story of a veteran horseman. While the title attempts to extrapolate from this individual a representation of an entire culture, the force of his personality is too strong.
Household Duties
Lloyd Moylan created several paintings of Pueblo women performing domestic chores—each in a different artistic style. While cultural documentation was the professed agenda of many early 20th-century Western American artists, with regard to this specific subject, Moylan appears more interested in the composition he is creating than the story he is telling. Notice the simplified and monumentalized shapes of the women in Household Duties. Here, Moylan was perhaps influenced by the famous Mexican muralist Diego Rivera (some records suggest he may have visited Mexico and seen Rivera’s murals in the 1920s).
Untitled (Dinnertime)
Lloyd Moylan’s New Deal prints were widely distributed by the Federal Art Project. Untitled (Dinnertime), for example, is now in museum collections from Tucson, AZ, to Madison, WI, and Missoula, MT. Since its invention in the late 18th century, lithography has been valued as a method of high-volume printmaking, and it certainly offered a way for New Deal art programs to produce and distribute prints in great numbers. (Untitled (The Breadwinner) is another example of a widely distributed Moylan lithograph in Gallup’s New Deal art collection.) Lithography has also been valued for the way it combines soft effects of shading with fine line work. Because the process begins with drawing, the result shows the movement of the artist’s hand. In Untitled (Dinnertime), Moylan experiments with a variety of techniques, including outlining, contouring, cross-hatching, scribbling, erasing, and rubbing. The resulting pattern of curves, lines, and textures emphasizes the image’s graphic quality.
Dance at San Felipe
Since the late 1880s, photographers from Charles Lummis to Edward Curtis, as well as painters—especially those associated with the Taos Society of Artists—frequently pictured Pueblo ceremonial dances as the appetite and market for images of the Southwest’s Native peoples grew with the expansion of the railroad and rise of the tourist economy. Dance at San Felipe is Lloyd Moylan’s rendition of this popular voyeuristic subject, but rather than providing an “eye witness” account, the painting appears contrived. The overall image is too “clean,” lacking visual information and detail, and too perfect in its orderliness and symmetry. Perhaps Moylan modeled this scene on other artworks he had seen, possibly mass-produced picture-postcards, calendars, and other souvenir items and promotional materials. (The artificiality of this piece comes into focus in comparison to Moylan’s Squaw Dance.)
Untitled (The Breadwinner)
Lloyd Moylan created several lithographs for the Federal Art Project, which were widely distributed (see Untitled (Dinnertime) for an explanation of lithography as a “high volume” method of production) and which subsequently came to be are known by different titles. The Breadwinner is not only the most documented title for the print seen here, it is also the most apt. While Moylan mostly turned his artistic attention, not without prejudice, to Native American cultures, The Breadwinner looks at social roles and hierarchy in the animal kingdom. A rooster stands with puffed chest, his gaze directed at the viewer, while a hen, gaze averted, bows to pick up a piece of feed—presumably provided by her companion—in this depiction of stereotypical gender roles.
Approaching Storm
In Approaching Storm, galloping horses race by in a blur. Details, such as the horses’ facial features, are at most merely suggested through minimal brushstrokes, and their forms are simplified into solid-colored ovals. As the hills and curves of the landscape mirror and encircle these shapes, the painting’s depth is flattened and its subject becomes a swirl of line and color. Seen this way, Lloyd Moylan’s title becomes a question: are the horses running to stay ahead of the weather, or is the thunder of their stampeding hooves a metaphorical storm?
Horses & Whiskey Don’t Mix
William Robinson Leigh was a turn-of-the-20th-century aficionado of adventure and storytelling in Western American art. In Horses and Whiskey Don’t Mix, he puts the viewer in the middle of the action, as he captures a horse mid-buck and a rider mid-fall. Details such as a cowering dog, alarmed onlooker, and tumbling cowboy hat add charge to the moment, and the finer points of scattered playing cards and a discarded beer bottle help the viewer to imagine the plot.
Untitled (Church in the Rio Grande Valley)
Notice the play of form and texture in Untitled (Church in the Rio Grande Valley). Three different cloud formations—billowing cumulus, popcorn stratus, and wispy cirrus—fill the sky. Immediately below, the horizon consists of a peaked hill of weather-worn red rocks and dirt , against which the pitched roof and steeple of a clean-lined, uniformly built church is set. The precise geometry of the church building contrasts with the undulating curves of its thick adobe courtyard wall. In the lower right corner, the bristly branches of a green bush poke through a pile of sharp-edged, glinting rocks—which look recently placed—interrupting the otherwise smooth, elongated brushstrokes of the foreground.
The painting evokes tensions between human-made and natural, new and ancient, and the lone figure seems caught in the middle. Literally, she is mid-step, her torso turned one way and her head the other. Figuratively, in the way she is moving forward while also looking backward, she may be a reflection of the artist’s creative mindset. In the 1930s, Lantz was part of a group of modernist New Mexican artists seeking “freedom from inhibitions”1 and tradition in art.