By Arnold Rönnebeck
Located in Denver, CO
Watercolor on paper. Image size is 7 ¾ x 10 ¼ inches, dimensions with mat measure 16 ¼ x 18 ¼ inches. This piece is unframed, housed in an archival mat. Framed pictures are mock-ups and custom framing options are available.
Painting is clean and in very good vintage condition - please contact us for a complete condition report.
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Provenance: Estate of Arnold Ronnebeck
About the artist:
Modernist sculptor, lithographer and museum administrator, Rönnebeck was a noted member of European and American avant-garde circles in the early twentieth century before settling in Denver, Colorado, in 1926.
After studying architecture at the Royal Art School in Berlin for two years beginning in 1905, he moved to Paris in 1908 to study sculpture with Aristide Maillol and Émile-Antoine Bourdelle. While there he met and befriended American modernist painter, Marsden Hartley, of whom he sculpted a bronze head that was exhibited at the Salon d’Automne in Paris in 1912 and the following year at Hartley’s solo show of paintings at Alfred Stieglitz’s Gallery 291 in New York. A frequent guest of Gertrude Stein’s Saturday "evenings" in Paris, she described Rönnebeck as "charming and always invited to dinner," along with Pablo Picasso, Mabel Dodge (Luhan) and Charles Demuth.
After the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Rönnebeck returned to Germany where he served as an officer in the German Imperial Army on the front lines. Twice wounded, including in the Battle of Marne in France, Kaiser Wilhelm II awarded him the Iron Cross. During the war Hartley fell in love with Rönnebeck’s cousin, Lieutenant Karl von Freyburg, who was killed in combat. As a tribute to Freyburg, Hartley created Portrait of a German Officer (1914) now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
After the war Rönnebeck traveled in Italy with German writer, Max Sidow, and German poet, Theodor Daubler, doing a series of drawings of Positano and the Amalfi Coast that formed the basis for his lithographs on the subject. The death of his finacée, the young American opera singer Alice Miriam in 1922 and his own family’s increasing financial problems in post-World War I Germany led him to immigrate to the United States in 1923. After living briefly with Miriam’s family in Washington, DC, he moved to New York where he became part of the avant-garde circle around Alfred Stieglitz. His essay, "Through the Eyes of a European Sculptor," appeared in the catalog for the Anderson Gallery exhibition, "Alfred Stieglitz Presents Seven Americans: 159 Paintings, Photographs & Things, Recent & Never Publicly Shown, by Arthur G. Dove, Marsden Hartley, John Marin, Charles Demuth, Paul Strand, Georgia O’Keeffe, Alfred Stieglitz."
In New York Rönnebeck began producing Precisionist-style lithographs of the city’s urban landscapes which he termed "living cubism." Some of them were reproduced in Vanity Fair magazine. Through Stieglitz he met Erhard Weyhe head of the Weyhe Gallery who, with its director Carl Zigrosser, arranged Rönnebeck’s first solo American exhibition in May 1925 at the gallery in New York. Comprising some sixty works – prints, drawings and sculpture – the show subsequently traveled on a thirteen-month tour of major American cities. Until the end of his life, the gallery represented him, along with other American artists Adolf Dehn, Wanda Gag, Rockwell Kent, J.J. Lankes, Louis Lozowick, Reginald Marsh and John Sloan.
In the summer of 1925, as the guest of Mabel Dodge Luhan, Rönnebeck first saw Taos, New Mexico, which Marsden Hartley had encouraged him to visit. It was there that he met his future wife, Louise Emerson, an easel painter and muralist. A year later they were married in New York before relocating to Denver. He served as director of the Denver Art Museum from 1926 to 1930 where he invited Marsden Hartley to lecture on Cézanne’s art in 1928. Rönnebeck fostered the development of the museum’s collection of American Indian art and the curation of modernist art exhibitions. In addition to his work at the museum, he was professor of sculpture at the University of Denver’s College of Fine and Applied Arts from 1929 to 1935, and wrote a weekly art column in the Rocky Mountain News.
His best known Denver sculptures from the late 1920s in bronze, copper, stone, wood and terra cotta include a reredos, The Epiphany, at St. Martin’s Chapel; The History of Money (six panels) at the Denver National Bank; The Ascension at the Church of Ascension; and the William V. Hodges Family Memorial at Fairmount Cemetery. At the same time he did a series of terra cotta relief panels for La Fonda Hotel in Santa Fe, New Mexico. In the 1930s his bas-relief aluminum friezes of stylized Pueblo and Hopi Indian Kachina masks...
Category
1920s American Modern Arnold Ronnebeck Paintings
