Frederick Shane

Twilight of History, 1940s Original Figurative American Modernist Oil Painting

1947

Painter and printmaker, Missouri regionalist Frederick E. Shane specialized in genre scenes, landscapes, seascapes and portraits executed in a variety of media: oil, watercolor, mixed media, gouache, tempera and lithography. Fundamentally a realist, his work also contains some abstraction, expressionism and surrealism used in treating his subject matter. In the summers of 1925-26 Shane studied with Randall Davey at the recently-founded Broadmoor Academy in Colorado Springs. The Academy was established in 1919 by Spencer and Julie Penrose, prominent philanthropists and art patrons, who donated their family residence for the creation of a local art institution. In the 1940s and early 1950s Shane maintained his contact with Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center (the successor institution to the Broadmoor Academy in 1936). He participated in a number of its annual Artists West of the Mississippi exhibitions and also became a close friend of Boardman Robinson, the Center’s director, and visiting artist Adolph Dehn whose graphic work and warm-hearted satire he admired. His Colorado sketching trips with Dehn and Yasuo Kuniyoshi resulted in drawings whose imagery appeared in some of Shane’s prints and paintings, such as his lithograph, Farm in the Rockies (1945/46, aka Hayfield in the Rockies), and his oil on canvas, Owen’s Bookstore, Victor, Colorado (1942). Some of his most notable paintings of the 1940s depict Colorado subjects in his consummate regionalist style. One of them in tempera, Chalk Cliffs, Mt. Princeton, Colorado, View from Old Hotel Antero (1944) presents a commanding panoramic view of a small cabin and grazing horses dominated by tall, craggy peaks. After the death of his first wife in 1967, he married Dorothy March Henley, a widow, three years later. He had known her since they both were sixteen and she also had studied with Randall Davey at the Broadmoor Art Academy. He moved out to her home in Beverly Hills, California, where he installed a painting for himself and where he spent the balance of his life after retiring from the University of Missouri in 1971. ©David Cook Galleries, LLC