D.H. Lawrence Forbidden Art

For years, nine banned oil paintings by D.H. Lawrence hung in a back office of the Hotel La Fonda de Taos. Reproductions of those forbidden paintings now hang behind a curtain in the hotel’s conference room.

Painted during the height of Lawrence’s infamy following the publication of his erotic novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, the nine works were among the twelve originally exhibited at the Dorothy Warren Gallery of London in 1929. Not surprisingly, given his reputation, local authorities soon confiscated the paintings and labeled them obscene.

Lawrence was offered two choices: remove the paintings from England forever or have them destroyed. He chose the former, and thus began their unlikely journey to the American Southwest.

Lawrence sent the paintings to his home of Vence, France, where they remained until his death in 1930. Frieda, his widow, subsequently moved to New Mexico with the banned paintings in tow. A decade earlier the American patroness Mabel Dodge Sterne Luhan had invited Lawrence and Frieda to Taos with the goal of convincing the author to write about the area. While that book never happened, she did convince him to stay awhile with a sweet deal—swapping a 160-acre ranch for the manuscript of Sons and Lovers.

It was to this ranch that Frieda returned, and when she died in 1956, her third husband sold the paintings to the local owner of the Hotel La Fonda de Taos, Saki Karavas. Karavas, in turn, kept the paintings in his hotel office until his death in 1996.