A native New Yorker, Andrew Dasburg made his first visit to the Southwest in early 1918. He described his first impressions of the New Mexico landscape: “In the hard transparency of sky were fractured stretches of clouds, their shape vanishing into the blue, while over the distant ranges was a turbulence of clouds in storm tearing against the peaks.”

Dasburg soon made New Mexico his home, and "Taos Landscape" dramatically captures the vivid panoramas he admired so ardently. Beams of light pour from the sky while a distant mountain crests at the center of the horizon line. For Dasburg, these complementary forces of nature were inevitably locked together, becoming “the two considerations fundamental to the understanding of rhythm. One is the force of gravity, the other, the upward impulse of living things.”