At the age of fifteen, Victor Higgins left his family’s farm in Shelbyville, Indiana, to further his studies at the Chicago Art Institute, Illinois (now the School of the Art Institute of Chicago). From Chicago, Higgins traveled to Paris and Munich, where he immersed himself in the collections of major museums in Europe. After returning to Chicago, he traveled to Taos, New Mexico, where he developed the light-filled landscape style for which he became known. The region’s strong light and vivid color, along with the presence of Indigenous communities in northern New Mexico, strongly influenced his work. Higgins and other artists founded the Taos Society of Artists in the then-isolated village.
Drawing on his study of realism in Europe, Higgins developed a distinctive approach that introduced elements of modernism into his work. Although most recognized for his landscape paintings of the American Southwest, he also contributed to mural projects and experimented with cubism, abstraction, still lifes, and portraiture. Higgins remained active in the Chicago art scene for much of his life and received recognition for his work both in the United States and abroad, most notably at the Venice Biennale.
