Born in Paris, France, Andrew Dasburg became a pioneer of American modernism. He was a master teacher at Woodstock, New York where, with Konrad Cramer, he rebelled against the traditional and sensitive approach to landscape of John Fabian Carlson and Birge Harrison. He married Grace Mott Johnson, an artist, in 1909, and in 1918, he began summer trips to Taos, New Mexico at the invitation of Mabel Dodge Luhan. He settled there in 1930.