Louis Bunce Paintings

A good & large abstract oil painting by Louis Demott Bunce (1907-1983), the painting signed & dated 1957. One of the most famous celebrated artists of the Pacific Northwest and a member of the Modernist scene in New York from the 1920s to the 1950s. This painting on an orange ground with various tones of orange & gold punctuated with brown & ivory highlights. The painting is made up of large swathes of smaller geometric shapes, tipping a nod to Gustav Klimpt, the painting signed lower right. Housed in the original frame the painting is in excellent condition and ready to hang on your wall. Provenance; From a major private collection of PNW & WPA art Louis Bunce attended high school and the Museum Art School before leaving for the Art Students League in New York. He established a New York connection that began when he first attended classes there in 1927 and continued over the years with frequent visits. He became friends with many promising artists, including Jackson Pollock and David Smith. In 1946 Pollock wrote to his good friend Bunce stating, "Would like to hear from you Lou wish you hadn't left New York,". In 1939 he worked for the WPA Easel Project in New York and by the time he returned to Portland he was an established artist on the East Coast. He worked at the WPA art center in Salem as an Instructor and Assistant Director. His work included murals, two of which are in the Post Offices in Grants Pass and St. Johns. Their subjects, mining and orchard farming, are activities of each region. "I have always been visually drawn to the landscape, at first the desert and mountain regions of Wyoming; then the lush and gentle color of the Pacific Northwest and the urban landscape of New York." From 1942-1945 he worked as an illustrator, a tool designer, and in assembly for the Oregon Shipbuilding Corporation. After WWII, Bunce joined the faculty of the Museum Art School in Portland, where he had been a student in 1925-1926. He taught there until his retirement in 1972. He excelled at producing screen-prints and introduced this technique to Oregon. While maintaining a national reputation throughout the 1950s and 1960s, some of New York's most prestigious galleries represented him. Theater buffs will remember his murals and portraits for Portland Civic Theater's 1938 production of Pride and Prejudice. In a career that made him one of the most recognized names in Oregon's art history, Bunce had many styles: cubism, expressionism, surrealism and abstractionism. His 1958 mural in the Portland International Airport presents this abstract style: "whirling propellers and shadows of the concourse as seen from above." It was controversial at the time as being too abstract for a public art project. Louis and wife Eda opened a full-time art gallery in Portland in 1949, called the Kharouba. Located first at 1016 SE Morrison, then at SW 11th and Alder, the gallery represented many of the leading artists of the day: Josephine Cameron, William Givler, Clifford Gleason, Jack Hammack, Charles Heaney...

An large abstract mixed media painting by Louis De Mot Bunce (1907-1983). The painting is signed and dated 1969 lower right, with the title "Tablet". Condition is very good indeed, a rare and compelling artwork by one of Oregon's most acclaimed artists. Louis Bunce, a major painter and printmaker beginning in the 1930s, is considered a legend in Oregon modernism. Known for variations of Surrealism and Cubism in the 1930s and 1940s, nature-based adaptations of Abstract Expressionism in the 1950s and 1960s, and geometric compositions related to Minimalism in the 1970s, he created a body of work that resonates with international modern art. He influenced many artists in the Pacific Northwest, including those who studied with him at the Museum Art School (now Pacific Northwest College of Art), where he taught from 1946 until 1972. Louis Demott Bunce was born in Lander, Wyoming, and moved with his family to Portland in 1920. He studied at the Museum Art School in 1925-1926, befriending fellow student William Givler. Both enrolled at the Art Students League in New York, Bunce studying there during 1927-1931. In Oregon, Bunce participated in the Public Works of Art Project in Portland in 1934, and in 1936 assisted John Ballator in painting murals for the St. Johns Post Office. These were funded by the U.S. Treasury Department, which also commissioned Bunce to paint the mural of Native American life for the Grants Pass Post Office. During the period 1937-1939, he was a teacher and then associate director for the WPA Federal Art Center in Salem, where he collaborated with his students, including Clifford Gleason, in painting murals for Bush Elementary School. He met and married Eda Hult in Salem. In 1940, Bunce returned to New York and worked as a WPA muralist and easel painter until 1942. Living in New York for two extended periods and visiting almost annually for many years thereafter helped him establish links between the art communities in Portland and New York, where he knew Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, Franz Kline, and other key figures in American modernism. During World War II, Bunce worked as illustrator and tool designer for the Oregon Shipbuilding Corporation, and in 1946 William Givler, by then dean of the Museum Art School, hired him as a faculty member. In 1949, Bunce and his wife established the Kharouba Gallery, the first in Portland devoted to showcasing experimental avant-garde art by artists working in Portland and further afield. Bunce’s abstract mural for Portland International Airport created controversy in 1958, when the debate between “modern” and “traditional” artists was at its height in Oregon. Bunce’s figurative Surrealism and Cubism of the 1930s and 1940s gave way to more complete abstraction in his paintings, drawings, serigraphs, and lithographs of the 1950s and on, but references to landscape, human figures, or still life are nearly always present in understated ways. The Oregon coast, Columbia Gorge...