Paul Burlin: An American Modernist in the Southwest

This exhibition reintroduces Paul Burlin (1886–1969) as a foundational yet long-overlooked figure in American Modernism, centering his deep and formative relationship with New Mexico. Burlin’s career took a decisive turn in 1912, when married collectors George A. Harris (1889–1960) and Lillian D. Harris (1892–1922) acquired his painting Figure of a Woman. That initial encounter sparked decades of patronage, resulting in an extraordinary body of commissioned murals, paintings, and Southwest-inspired scenes. Preserved with care by successive generations of the Harris family, these works ultimately entered the collection of the New Mexico Museum of Art, where their significance can now be fully appreciated.

At the heart of the exhibition are Burlin’s early mural paintings—Stone Age, Rhapsody, and Awakening—created for the Harrises’ Manhattan apartment and profoundly shaped by his 1910 visit to New Mexico. Painted before the watershed Armory Show, these murals reveal Burlin’s remarkably early engagement with European modernism. Fauvist color, the structural rigor of Paul Cézanne (1839-1906), and cubist-inspired geometry converge with imagery drawn from Pueblo life along the Rio Grande, signaling an artist already forging new terrain between international avant-garde ideas and American subject matter.

Recently conserved, the murals now glow with renewed intensity, restoring the bold color and formal ambition that once defined Burlin’s vision. Together, they position him as an artist who bridged continents and cultures to help shape a distinctly American modern art, rooted in place yet conversant with the most radical ideas of his time.