Five Female Indian Dancers

One of the more colorful personalities of the Taos now lost, the Taos of the thirties, was a woman with quaint English manners, a grounding from London's Slade School of Art, and an ear trumpet. Very much the iconoclast in her art, Brett was enthralled by the Indian ceremonials of Taos Pueblo and devised a unique linear style of painting that made her subjects at once plain and naive as well as spiritual and cosmic. The first illustration in V. Deren Coke's still unsurpassed treatment of Taos and Santa Fe: The Artist's Environment: 1882-1942, is Brett's "Women's Dance," an oil from 1952. The law firm's collection's "Five Female Indian Dancers" shows a facing view of these figures with open palms raised in front of their bodies. It depicts the same ceremony as "Women's Dance" and may be a detail of that larger painting.