page_title: Margaret Lefranc
section_title: Nambe, New Mexico, 1945-55
hierarchical_section_title: Margaret Lefranc / Nambe, New Mexico, 1945-55
caption_attribution_description: English: Corral Nambe
context_page_description: Margaret Lefranc was an American painter, illustrator and editor, an American Modernist with early training as a color expressionist. According to the art historian Sharyn Udall, Lefranc was a woman "on the edge of the avant-garde". Lefranc produced portraits, figures, florals, still lifes and landscapes in a variety of compositions. Her media included oil, watercolor, gouache, pastel, drawing, etching and monotypes. At age eighteen, she received accolades from Alfred Stieglitz and, in November 1928, aged twenty-two, received rave reviews in La Revue Moderne, when her works Dancer and Mme M. en Pyjama were shown in Paris.
context_section_description: Lefranc arrived in Santa Fe in her old 1935 Dodge to disruptive events. Plans had changed due to Marriott's explosive temper directed toward the owner of two casitas. Lefranc and Marriott were suddenly homeless as it was the end of World War II, and the Los Alamos National Laboratory had swallowed all rental property in and around the area. They did find an empty house in Nambe consisting of three small rooms in a row, each with a door to the outside. It looked exactly like a railroad car with a discreet privy fifty feet away. It had no heating, no water, no electricity and no furniture either. It was a life experience which Lefranc illustrated for Marriott in The Valley Below and a story detailed for Lois Katz, author, and for Sandra D'Emilio. 
  In Nambe, Lefranc saw the spectacular distant sierras which she painted regularly along with other scenery. The lives of these two independent women were complicated with adventures and misadventures while attempting to produce art and books. It was full of Indian dances and socializing with neighbors of different languages and cultures. 
   Lefranc completed Indian illustrations of pottery in the round (instead of the usual flat panel), portraits of Maria Martinez and her home life, illustrated and painted in oils Indian dances at the Pueblos as well as her Spanish neighbors and their environs. Also part of the time included trips to Oklahoma to meet with the University of Oklahoma Press in Norman regarding her illustrations for Maria: The Potter of San Ildefonso (still in print) and five other books. She also illustrated Alma Big Tree, a Kiowa Medicine Woman and traveled to Southern Cheyenne Reservation to paint an elder, Mary Inkanish, who was an expert on beadwork, which gouache was used as a frontispiece for one of Marriott's book.
  Additional trips included Iowa, Wyoming, Montana and other states intermixed with her own exhibitions at the Museum of New Mexico, Santa Fe; the Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa Oklahoma; the Oklahoma Civic Center, Oklahoma City; and others. She collected pottery, assisted Marriott in establishing small historical museums set up in store fronts, and traveled for research and artifact gathering. A noted painter, illustrator, and editor, in 1948 Lefranc received a "Fifty Best Books of the Year" award from the Library of Congress in conjunction with the American Institute of Graphic Arts for her synoptic illustrations of pottery in Maria: The Potter of San Ildefonso; and in 1952 for Indians of the Four Corners, she was honored by the same organizations with a "One Hundred Best Books of the Year".
  Eventually she was adopted by a Nambe Pueblo Indian medicine woman, Leonidas Romero y Vigil, and also later became trusted friends of Maria Martinez, Laura Gilpin, Georgia O’Keeffe, and many others which included her Spanish and Indian neighbors. As Lefranc explained to Diane Armitage, "When the Indians had a fight at the Pueblo, the elders came over one evening with a package and they handed it to me. Keep it for us.  We’re having a fight. This is our sacred fettish. We're afraid someone might try to steal it. I never opened it. I kept it for two years." 
  Lefranc illustrated several books written by Marriott:
  Dance Around the Sun, T.Y. Crowell, 1977
  Hell on Horses and Women, University of Oklahoma Press, 1953
  Indians of the Four Corners, T.Y. Crowell, 1952
  Maria: The Potter of San Ildefonso, University of Oklahoma Press, 1948
  The Valley Below, University of Oklahoma Press, 1948
  Indians on Horseback, T.Y. Crowell, 1948
  In 1945 Lefranc bought property in Santa Fe, New Mexico. In 1954 she built a house at the same time when Marriott became indisposed and their thriving partnership broke apart. Lefranc eventually sold the Nambe house, and they went their separate ways, for which Marriott later expressed deep regret. Lefranc rented her house in Santa Fe until 1969 and moved to Florida to care for her ailing parents.
  In 1956 Lefranc donated ninety-two pieces of pottery to what is now the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History, University of Oklahoma. Before the
caption: The Corral, Nambe New Mexico, 1948. Oil on canvas by Margaret Lefranc.
exif: {}