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Campbell, Suzan. "In the Shadow of the Sun: The Life and Art of Rebecca Salsbury James," University of New Mexico, May 2002.
The life of Taos artist Rebecca Salsbury James (1891-1968) was dramatic and colorful. Closely associated with many of America’s cultural leaders and avant-garde artists, she was an artist herself from the late 1920s to the mid 1960s, successfully exhibiting her unusual, folk-art-inspired reverse oil paintings on glass and colcha embroideries throughout the United States. James spent her childhood in the exiting milieu of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, which her father owned and managed. In 1922, she married photographer Paul Strand and entered Alfred Steiglitz’s avant-garde circle of artists and writers, of which Strand was a member. Inspired and influenced by their accomplishments, she deiced to become a serious artist, spending the 1920s teaching herself to draw and paint while working as a medical secretary to support herself and Strand. A summer’s visit in 1929 with Georgia O’Keeffe to Mabel Dodge Luhan’s outre Taos compound led her to move there in 1933, after her divorce from Strand. In New Mexico, she found the personal happiness that had long eluded here, and fulfillment as an artist. To best understand and appreciate James’s art, we must not simply compare it to that of other Stieglitz circle artists (particularly O’Keeffe, her lifelong friend and mentor); her singular accomplishments are best considered within the wider context of early twentieth-century American modernist art. In her glass paintings and colcha embroideries, James fused European and American theories, traditions, and subjects into what one critic called a “union of the strange and familiar.” After her death, the art of Rebecca Salsbury James was almost entirely forgotten. Even today, it is seldom shown, and she is mentioned in texts on twentieth-century American art only peripherally, if at all. This biography sheds light on her life and work.
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