(1898-1994)
Alexndre Hogue was born February 22, 1898 in Memphis, Missouri. He spent his childhood in Denton, Texas and began his formal art education at the College of Art and Design in Minneapolis. In 1921 he moved to New York, where he lived and worked for years, returning to Texas during the summers to paint. Beginning in 1926, Hogue began making long trips to Taos, New Mexico that continued into 1942. Here he formed close friendships with Ernest Blumenschein, W. Herbert Dunton, Joseph Imhof, Victor Higgins, and Emil Bisttram, who became Hogue's mentors and advisors.
His explorations of the landscape along with his interest in Native cultures and their attitudes toward nature formed an artistic style that emphasized not only the beauty of the land but also the effects upon it of human activities. In contrast to other painters of the period such as Grant Wood and Thomas Hart Benton, who generally treated their region as a place of hope and productivity, Hogue presents a sovereign view of land exhausted and ruined by the failure to acknowledge and respect nature. During his Taos visits, Hogue became deeply interested in the Pueblos, their spiritual concerns and the land ethic. The latter reinforced his own investigation of the southwestern environment, which continued in more abstract and metaphysical terms through the next four decades.