GENE  KLOSS  (1903-1996)
 

   Gene Kloss was born in Oakland, California and always showed an interest in art. She was educated at the University of California, Berkeley where she graduated with honors in 1924.  She studied further at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco and the College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, California. During her final semester at Berkley, she attended a seminar on etching and thus began her remarkable career as printmaker. Gene Kloss is considered one of the finest printmakers of our time and her name has become synonymous with the Taos Art Colony.

   In 1925 she married a young poet-composer, Phillips Kloss and together they went on a honeymoon that took them South through California, across Arizona, and on to Las Cruces, New Mexico, making their way to Taos where they both immediately fell in love with the area. They stayed long enough to make a few prints on the 60 lb. printing press they had brought with them in the back of the truck. The couple returned to California but continued to visit Taos every summer for twenty years until they could finally live there permanently. 

   Gene produced over 600 prints of California, New Mexico and Colorado and she hand pulled each individual print herself on a geared Sturgess press, only turning to an electric press in the later years of her life printing her last images in 1992. Her extraordinary etchings of Northern New Mexico and its people , the Pueblos and the sacred dances captured the delicate balance of light and shadows with a sensitivity of a true master artist.

    Her reputation was established on the West Coast in the 20’s and 30’s where  she had many one woman shows of her oil paintings, watercolors and etchings. She also participated in group shows across the nation. She was chosen as one of three artists to represent New Mexico at a Paris exhibition in 1935. She contributed a series of prints for the WPA that are highly valued today. In 1950 she was elected an Associate Member of the National Academy of Design and named a National Academician in 1972.