A tastemaker and her rediscovered treasures

Laura Beach Living with Antiques

For the insatiable salonniere Mabel Dodge Luhan, life’s must-haves were animate. The doyenne of modernism and social rival to Gertrude Stein called herself “a collector of people who made a difference.” Photographer Ansel Adams—one of dozens of painters, photographers, writers, scholars, and assorted intellectuals drawn into her orbit in Florence, New York, and Taos in the first half of the …