Gene Kloss

Alice Geneva Glasier Kloss (1903-1996)

When Gene Kloss and her husband, poet-composer Phillips Kloss, made a camping trip to Taos in 1925, an unusual passenger in their car was her 60-pound etching press. Gene Kloss was a westerner. She was born in Oakland, California, in 1903. She graduated with honors from the University of California in Berkeley in 1924 and did further work at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco and the College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland.

From 1925 until the ‘40's, the Kloss’s lived in Taos in the warm weather and spent winters in Berkeley. Her reputation was established on the West Coast in the ‘20's and ‘30's when she had many one-woman shows of paintings and etchings in San Francisco and elsewhere. Her reputation spread through her participation in group shows across the nation, resulting in frequent praise from critics. In Taos she responded to the landscape of mountains and plains, snow and sun, and to the architecture of the Indians and the Spanish. She witnessed the ceremonies of both groups and reacted with sensitive empathy reached after patient hours of observation. To make prints reflecting the tonal richness of these subjects, Kloss turned to aquatint. She relied on herself and E. S. Lumsden’s classic book The Art of Etching for education in technique. The distinctive Kloss style in etching, drypoint and aquatint, watercolor and oil is graceful and organized, very much like the artist was herself. Kloss created many figurative prints, often in a combination of etching techniques with deft value control. Her effort was to present her theme as an arresting formal composition of abstract elements underscored by an intuitive spiritual quality. From long association with the Taos Indians, she absorbed and shared their reverence for nature. Her prints of Indian dancers give the effect of activity. With line and value she created a rhythm that repeated the musical beat or pattern in the dance. In a real sense, Kloss’s print was her contribution to the ceremony, her way of sharing it. Every Kloss etching was printed by the artist herself and it is only in the last several years that she bought a power-driven massive press built to her specifications by Charles Brand. Her earlier press, a geared Sturgess, was still on call in case the power failed. “This press,” Kloss related “was one of the original eight made (and) was acquired in 1934, having been brought to Taos by Ralph Pearson. It traveled from one rental place to another, then rested for 20 years in the studio home we built on the mesa east of town, where there was a magnificent view in all directions. In 1965 it sojourned for a few years in southern Colorado, then returned to the studio, built seven miles north of Taos, which also had a needed vast view. I always was interested in the fact that one other of the original group of eight Sturgess presses was owned by Joseph Pennell and he raved about it in his books’...better than any European press...” Gene Kloss’ production never abated. Through all the many changes of faddish taste in art, she remained true to her own standards. In 1950 she was elected an associate member of the National Academy of Design, and to full membership in 1972. Her work is represented in top collections, many of them in the East and abroad. Kloss did not follow her prints on their journeys. She was content to stay in the West, where her career of over sixty years had its source.

Source: “The Legendary Artists of Taos,” Mary Carroll Nelson