David Cook Galleries

Original vintage abstract metalwork sculpture by artist Angelo Di Benedetto (1913-1992). Measures 13 ¼ x 11 ¼ x 7 ½ inches. About the Artist: Born New Jersey 1913 Died Central City, CO 1992 The son of Italian immigrants from the Salerno province in southern Italy, as a teenager Di Benedetto worked to study at the Cooper Union Art School in New York City (1930-34) from which he graduated with a certificate in freehand drawing. He won a scholarship to the Boston Museum Art School where he studied for three years, beginning in 1934. In 1937, he entered his first juried exhibition at the Montclair Museum in New Jersey, winning first prize and first honorable mention. In December 1938, the Royal Netherlands Steamship Line sent him on a two-month ethnological study trip to Haiti, his first exposure to a different environment outside the United States. In 1940, his Haitian paintings were exhibited at the Montross Gallery in New York – his first solo show. Before World War II, Di Benedetto traveled extensively around the United States doing regional paintings. During the war in 1941, Di Benedetto volunteered for a secret mission based in Eritrea, Africa before the Allied invasion. Following Africa, he served as an orientation officer and aerial photographic officer in the District of Columbia. In 1945 he was assigned to a mapping unit at Buckley Airfield in Denver where he served until his discharge in 1946. Like many other servicemen stationed at the time in Colorado, Di Benedetto chose to remain in Colorado, impressed by the state’s physical grandeur and healthful climate. He settled in the old mining town of Central City in 1947. In 1949 Di Benedetto and his wife, ceramist Lee Porzio, opened the Benpro Art School in his studio where he conducted summer art classes. In 1950, Di Benedetto teamed up with Frank Vavra...

Acrylic, crayon, and paper mixed media collage on stretched canvas titled 'Skater' from the 'Action Series' signed by Margo Hoff (1910-2008). Featuring 12 figures in shades of yellow...

1950s gouache on paper painting signed by artist Mildred Welsh Hammond (1900-1980) portraying a modernist view of Cripple Creek, Colorado with the town ...

Lithograph on paper titled 'Mine Near Continental Divide' by Arnold Ronnebeck (1885-1947) from 1933. Depicts a black and white winter scene of a mine in the mountains with snow on the rooftops and hillsides. Presented in a custom frame measuring 18 ¼ x 22 ¼ inches. Image size measures 10 ¼ x 14 ½ inches. Provenance: Estate of the Artist, Arnold Ronnebeck Expedited and international shipping is available - please contact us for a quote. 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...

Original signed lithograph print signed by George Elbert Burr (1859-1939) of a winter landscape with snow and trees. Presented in a custom frame with archival materials measuring 15 x 17 ¾ inches. Image size measures 7 ¼ x 10 ¼ inches. About the Artist: Born Ohio 1859 Died Arizona 1939 Ten years after his birth in Monroe Falls, Ohio, George Elbert Burr moved with his parents to Cameron, Missouri, where his father opened a hardware store. Burr was interested in art from an early age and his first etchings were created with the use of zinc scraps found in the spark pan under the kitchen stove. He then printed the plates on a press located in the tin shop of his father’s store. In December of 1878, Burr left for Illinois to attend the Art Institute of Chicago (then called the Chicago Academy of Design). By April of the following year, Burr had moved back to Missouri. The few months of study in Chicago constituted the only formal training the artist was to have. Back in Missouri, Burr heeded his family’s wishes by working in his father’s store. However, he did not abandon his art, often using his father’s railway pass to travel around the countryside on sketching trips. In 1894, Burr married Elizabeth Rogers and the following year he became an instructor for a local drawing class. By 1888, the artist was employed as an illustrator for Scribner’s, Harper’s, and The Observer. In 1892, Burr began a four-year project to illustrate a catalog for the Metropolitan Museum of Art of Heber R. Bishop’s jade collection. After completing approximately 1,000 etchings of the collection, Burr used the money he earned on the project to fund a trip abroad. The artist and his wife spent the years between 1896 and 1901 sketching and traveling on a tour of Europe that spanned from Sicily to North Wales. In 1906 the couple moved to Denver, Colorado, in an effort to improve George’s poor health. While in Colorado, Burr completed Mountain Moods, a series of 16 etchings. His years in Denver were highly productive despite his poor health. Burr’s winters were spent traveling through the deserts of Southern California, Arizona, and New Mexico. In 1921, Burr obtained copyrights on the last of 35 etchings included in his well-known Desert Set...

Oil on board landscape painting of a Pueblo near Santa Fe, New Mexico signed by artist Eliot Candee Clark (1883-1980), painted in 1932. Signed by the artist in the lower left corner. Composed of shades of brown, tan, and blue. Presented in a custom frame, outer dimensions measure 23 ½ x 25 x 1 3⁄4 inches. Image size is 17 1⁄4 x 19 1⁄2 inches. About the Artist: Son of landscape painter Walter Clark and Jennifer Woodruff Clark, a student of psychic phenomena, Eliot Clark was a precocious artist who became a landscape painter in the late American Impressionist style. Moving to Albemarle, Virginia in 1932, he was one of the few Impressionist artists of the Southern states. Likely this was a result of his association with James Whistler and his painting in 1900 at Gloucester, Massachusetts with John Twachtman, a family friend. Showing his obvious interest in Impressionism, he wrote a book about its exponents including Twachtman, Theodore Robinson, Childe Hassam, Julian Weir, and Robert Vonnoh. Clark was a teacher including at the National Art Club from 1943, the Art Students League, and New York City College. Early in his youth, Clark traveled with his father and other prominent artists to paint in the summer art colonies at Annisquam, Gloucester, Chadd's Ford and Ogunquit where he met artists of stature such as Edward Potthast and John Henry Twachtman. Clark's only formal instruction was a short two months at the Art Students League in New York. His landscapes evoked a "spiritualized rendition of nature" that was to stay with him for the rest of his life. Clark (perhaps related to his mother's interest in physic phenomena) developed an early interest in oriental philosophy that ended up having a major effect on his artistic development, the sense of spirituality in his landscape paintings slowly grew in importance. Clark was educated in the New York public schools, and at age 13 exhibited with the National Academy and the New York Water Color Club. By 1912, he had won national painting awards, and by 1916 was writing books on American artists as well as the history of the National Academy. In his early years Clark was privately tutored, and then later graduated from Washington Irving High School at the early age of fifteen. Although he later was quoted as saying "he had no formal training from his father", his early work was notable influenced by Walter Clark's tonalist style. Between 1904 and 1906, Clark studied in France in Paris and Giverny, and in London he saw the impressionist work of James Whistler. He wrote to his father about the Whistler Exhibit stating that some of Whistler's work impressed him, "not so much in the handling, but in the use of color, and subtle arrangement of line and balance of masses." He engaged in a "walking tour" of Europe with a fellow artist whom he met in earlier in Paris. They visited many of the major galleries in Holland and then traveled through the Alps, finally reaching Venice on August 10, 1906. I n Venice, he produced some Whistlerian style pastels similar to the ones he had seen in the Whistler Exhibition. He returned to New York in 1906, and a year later took a studio in the Van Dyke Studio Building on Eighth Avenue...

Colorado mountain landscape watercolor painting signed by artist Rita Derjue (1934-2020) depicts Cabins in the Snow in bright tones of blue, yellow, green and red/brown. Signed by the artist in the lower right corner. Presented in a custom frame with archival materials, outer dimensions measure 24 ⅛ x 31 ½ x 1 ¼ inches. Image sight size is 14 ½ x 21 ½ inches. About the Artist: Born Rhode Island, 1934 Artist, educator, mentor and community activist, Derjue is the daughter of European parents whose family members had previous connections with New York and New England. Her drawing talent as a youngster in Rhode Island caught the attention of family friend Johann Groen, a Dutch-born painter and photographer, who encouraged her to spend time touring and studying in Europe to further her art education. In 1956 she earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at the Rhode Island School of Design that emphasized the fundamentals of drawing and design. Her most memorable teacher was Richard Hamilton, whose work was influenced by German Expressionist Max Beckmann and the jazz greats. Her studies from nature and Cubist compositions done at that time reflect her interest in early twentieth-century European modernist painting. She had the opportunity to experience it firsthand during a year of post-graduate work at the renowned Akademie den Bildenden Kunste in Munich, Germany, in 1956-57. She studied with Ernest Geitlinger (1895-1972) whom the Nazi government classified as a “degenerate” artist in the 1930s, preventing him from exhibiting in Germany. After World War II he was one of the co-founders of the Munich artists’ association, Neue Gruppe, in 1946 and played an important role in abstract painting. While studying with him in Munich she produced a number of canvases in a referential abstract style. She also became acquainted with the Blaue Reiter group that flourished in the early twentieth century and whose expressionism strongly influenced her color palette and painting style. She particularly admired the work of Blaue Reiter co-founder and Wassily Kandinsky’s long-time partner, Gabriele Münter, whose work she studied at the Lenbachhaus in Munich and at the Gabriele Münter Haus and the Schlossmuseum in Murnau south of Munich. Derjue’s immersion in German Expressionism imparted a bold, simplified style to her work. In 1958 with a friend from Munich she went to Mexico for a year, studying with artist Frank Gonzalez in his studio in San Angel, Mexico City, and with Canadian artist, Toni Onley, in San Miguel de Allende. Onley had recently won a scholarship to the Instituto Allende to study mural and fresco painting with David Siqueiros, one of the three greats of Mexican muralism. At the Instituto Onley began painting large black-and-white canvases in an abstract impressionistic style which he imparted to Derjue, who thereafter began exploring color and space in the dimensions of her own large compositions. With writer Gregory Strong, he subsequently published Onley’s Arctic and his autobiography, The Tony Onley Story. After returning to the United States, she worked as a graphic designer for Little, Brown and Company, publishers in Boston. She began dating her future husband, Carle Zimmerman, whom she met earlier in Europe and whom she married in 1960. Joining him at Cornell University where he was completing his Ph.D degree, she earned her Master of Arts degree at the same institution and participated in group shows at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum and the Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute in upstate New York. In 1963 Derjue and her husband relocated to Littleton, Colorado, where he spent his entire career, first as a research engineer and later as a departmental manager for the Marathon Oil...

"Signals, Orange/Black" is an oil on masonite painting by Bernard Arnest (1917-1986) from 1962. Signed by the artist in the lower center of the piece and titled verso. Presented in the original artist frame measuring 36 ½ x 27 ½ inches, image size is 36 x 27 inches. Featuring an abstract geometric design made up of orange, black, red, yellow, and green. Orange/Black is from Arnest's Signals Series and was part of the artists solo exhibition at Kraushaar Galleries in October 1962. About the Arist: A Denver native, Arnest studied with Helen Perry at East High School who is accredited to having identified many of Colorado’s talented artists. At Perry’s recommendation Arnest benefited from supplemental instruction at the newly founded Kirkland School of Art and at the School of Fine Art and Design operated by Colorado artist Frank Mechau. Following graduation from East, Arnest enrolled at the Broadmoor Art Academy in Colorado Springs, where he studied with Boardman Robinson and Henry Varnum Poor. In 1940 Arnest was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship in painting which he spent in San Francisco. That same year San Francisco Museum of Art had a one-man show for Arnest, the first of many in his professional career. Other exhibitions included the Whitney Museum, Corcoran Gallery of Art, National Academy of Design, Carnegie Museum of Art and the Minneapolis Institute of Art. After the war he worked for two years in New York City and began a thirty-nine-year affiliation with Kraushaar Galleries who also showed the likes of George Luks, John Sloan, Maurice Prendergast...

Spring Storm, original vintage painting by New Mexico & Oklahoma modernist, Doel Reed (1894-1985). Evening scene with hint of a moon, clouds and rain over a rocky western landscape with low mountains/buttes, dated, June 1980 and signed by the artist lower right. Presented in a custom frame, outer dimensions measure 24 ½ x 37 ½ x 1 ¼ inches. Image size is 14 ¾ x 27 ¾ inches. Provenance: Private Collection, Denver, Colorado Expedited and international shipping is available - please contact us for a quote. About the Artist: Early in his artistic career, Doel Reed knew he wanted to be a printmaker. Influenced by Goya's aquatints, he extended himself beyond his formal art training to learn this technique, and he established himself as one of its masters. For decades, he devoted himself to the art program at the University of Oklahoma, taking it from a faculty of one to a major mid-Western department. Upon retirement, Reed focused totally on his work, moving with his family to Taos, New Mexico, where they had previously summered. Marked by strong tonal contrasts, his landscapes of this region are deeply emotional renderings with a sense of mystery -- modernist forms combined with romantic moodiness. Born and raised in Indiana, Reed originally studied architecture, which he credits with a lifelong attention to "how something is constructed." His mature style can be characterized as architectonic in his concern with assembling volumes and planes. Even the intense northern New Mexico light becomes the means to articulate three-dimensional patterns into cubistic interplay. When painting, Reed used thick strokes of oil and casein as another structural element. Transferring to fine art, his studies at the Cincinnati Art Academy were then interrupted by military service in World War I. Suffering a gas attack in the trenches of France, Reed spent months in a hospital temporarily blinded. The effects of the gas also damaged his lungs, which later prompted him to live in the dry climates of Oklahoma and New Mexico. After the war, he returned to his studies, but it was discovery of Goya's aquatints rather than his art classes that inspired. Considered the master, Goya drew on the tonal range available with this medium to create powerfully haunting imagery. Perhaps Reed responded personally to the eloquent series "The Disasters of War." Now his course was set, and he built his own etching press, which he continued to use for the rest of his life. In 1924, he accepted a teaching position at Oklahoma State University, where he remained for thirty-five years. Emphasizing drawing, Reed encouraged students to go to nature and translate the scene through their own sensibilities. Beginning as the sole art professor, he developed the program when it became an independent department in 1930. Through his stewardship, the university gained a reputation as one of the best for printmaking in the country. During the forties, Reed also prepared a series of lectures and demonstrations on aquatint for the Association of American Colleges. His most public offering in art education is the book "Doel Reed Makes An Aquatint" (1965). Sabbaticals allowed him to visit Paris in 1926 and 1930-31. Summer travel took him to Nova Scotia and Mexico, but gas rationing during World War II necessitated a closer destination. Thus the Reed connection with Taos was established. Finally in 1959, he, his wife, and daughter moved there to Talpa Ridge, the same outlying area in which artists like Andrew Dasburg, Howard Cook, and Barbara Latham resided. Settling into a complex of three adobe buildings, Reed was welcomed by these artists, who referred to their community as Neurosis Ridge. Rena Rosenquist of Mission Gallery remembers that Reed was "the most affable man" who liked cold martinis. For Reed, the surrounding Sangre de Cristo Mountains offered "end of abstract pattern." His inventive mind came up with techniques to transform a natural scene into a richly dimensional object. He fashioned a rosin box and concocted his own formula of etching ground to achieve a velvety texture with his prints. Described as "not for the faint-hearted,”" casein became a medium with which built up paint surfaces that almost seem sculpted. Both the prints and drawings are characterized by a tension between the two-dimensional surface pattern and the articulated space it conveys. In addition to landscapes, Reed produced a number of works of voluptuous women with the figures echoing landscape elements. As a boy, his first art experience was a grade-school field trip to the John Herron Art Museum (now the Indianapolis Art Museum), where he expressed his admiration for a painting of a nude mermaid -- an image that made a lasting impression. Reed was proudest of his recognition by the National Academy of Design (now just the National Academy). In 1942, he was named associate member; in 1952, he was named full academician. ©David Cook Galleries, LLC Exhibited: Society of Independent Artists, 1927 & 1929; Society of American Etchers, 1930-1946; Kansas City Art Institute, 1932; “100 Etchings of Year,” 1932-44; Art Institute of Chicago, 1934, 1937, 1939; National Academy of Design, 1934-46, 1965 (Samuel Morse Medal); Tulsa Art Association, 1935 (prize); Paris Salon, 1937; Rome, Italy, 1937; Sweden, 1938; Chicago Society of Etchers, 1938 (prize); Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1940; Philadelphia Print Club, 1940 (prize); Venice, Italy, 1940; Carnegie Institute, 1941; Currier Gallery of Art, Manchester, NH,1942, (prize); Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1942; Whitney Museum of American Art, 1942; Northwest Printmakers, 1942 (prize), 1944 (prize); Herron Art Institute, 1943; Library of Congress, 1944-46; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 1944-45; Philbrook Art Club, 1944 (prize); Laguna Beach Art Association, 1944 (prize); Southern States Art League, 1944 (prize); “50 American Prints,” 1944; Oakland Art Gallery, 1945 (prize); Audubon Artists, 1945, 1951 (Gold Medal of Honor), 1954 (John Taylor Arms Memorial Medal); Albany Institute of History and Art, 1945; Pasadena Art Institute, 1946; London; Allied Art Association; National Society of Painters Casein; Mission Gallery, Taos, NM, and Blair Galleries, Ltd. Santa Fe, NM. Works Held: Carnegie Institute; Honolulu Academy of Art; Grinnell College; Library of Congress; Metropolitan Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Art, Houston; New York Public Library; Oklahoma Art Club; Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Philbrook Art Club; Seattle Art Museum; Southern Methodist University; University of Montana; University of Tulsa; Bibliotéque Nationale, Paris; Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Further Reading: Harmsen's Western Americana: A Collection of One-Hundred Western Paintings with Biographical Profiles of the Artists, Dorothy Harmsen, Northland Press, Flagstaff, Arizona, 1971.; The Illustrated Biographical Encyclopedia of Artists of the American West, Peggy and Harold Samuels, Doubleday & Company, Inc., Garden City, New York, 1976.; Taos Artists...

Original signed abstract painting by artist Margo Hoff (1910-2008) titled 'Sea Snow'. Signed by the artist in the lower right corner, titled verso. Acrylic painting with oil stick an...

'Parcheesi', vintage 1990 semi abstract oil painting on canvas by 20th century Denver artist, Edward Marecak (1919-1993) of a stylized Parcheesi board ...

Original acrylic on canvas painting signed by artist Angelo Di Benedetto (1913-1992) from 1964. Painting features an abstract composition depicting a large circle encompassing smaller circles in blue, green, white, and black. Signed and dated by the artist in the lower right corner of the canvas. Image size measures 50 x 49 3⁄4 inches. Framed image size measures 50 3⁄4 x 50 1⁄2 x 1 1⁄4 inches. About the Artist: Born New Jersey 1913 Died Central City, CO 1992 The son of Italian immigrants from the Salerno province in southern Italy, as a teenager Di Benedetto worked to study at the Cooper Union Art School in New York City (1930-34) from which he graduated with a certificate in freehand drawing. He won a scholarship to the Boston Museum Art School where he studied for three years, beginning in 1934. In 1937, he entered his first juried exhibition at the Montclair Museum in New Jersey, winning first prize and first honorable mention. In December 1938, the Royal Netherlands Steamship Line sent him on a two-month ethnological study trip to Haiti, his first exposure to a different environment outside the United States. In 1940, his Haitian paintings were exhibited at the Montross Gallery in New York – his first solo show. Before World War II, Di Benedetto traveled extensively around the United States doing regional paintings. During the war in 1941, Di Benedetto volunteered for a secret mission based in Eritrea, Africa before the Allied invasion. Following Africa, he served as an orientation officer and aerial photographic officer in the District of Columbia. In 1945 he was assigned to a mapping unit at Buckley Airfield in Denver where he served until his discharge in 1946. Like many other servicemen stationed at the time in Colorado, Di Benedetto chose to remain in Colorado, impressed by the state’s physical grandeur and healthful climate. He settled in the old mining town of Central City in 1947. In 1949 Di Benedetto and his wife, ceramist Lee Porzio, opened the Benpro Art School in his studio where he conducted summer art classes. In 1950, Di Benedetto teamed up with Frank Vavra...

Original abstract painting titled "Celebration" dated 1984 by abstract expressionist Chicago artist Margo Hoff (1910-2008). Signed by the artist in the lower right corner. Painted in...

'Indian with Bow in Fox Costume' is a vintage 1934 WPA era modernist color serigraph/silkscreen print by New Mexico artist, Hilaire Hiler (1898-1966) depicting a Native American figure with stylized feather headdress and Bow in black and red with white. Pencil signed by the artist in the lower right margin. Presented in a custom frame with all archival materials and UV protectant glass, outer dimensions measure 17 ½ x 15 x 1 ½ inches. Image size is 10 x 7 inches (sight). Expedited and International shipping is available - please contact us for a quote. About the Artist: Hilaire Hiler was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, and was raised in Providence, Rhode Island. Hiler took art classes as a child at the Rhode Island School of Design. When he was older, Hiler studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Pennsylvania School of Industrial Art, Wharton School of Finance and Commerce, and William Server's studio. He also studied at the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Denver, Golden State University, and National College in Ontario, Canada. He continued on to France, studying at the University of Paris in 1919. Hiler lived in Paris from 1919-1934, supporting himself as a jazz musician and a piano player for The Jockey Club. Hiler moved back to America in 1934, settling in San Francisco. He was commissioned by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) to paint murals in the Aquatic Park...

'Ghost Town' is a vintage painting with a lone Prospector with his pack mule standing in the ruins of an abandoned mining town, probably set in Colorado, set within a Mountain landscape with late summer, early autumn foliage by Harold Skene (1883-1978). Signed by the artist in the lower right corner, titled and dated by the artist verso. Colors include blue, green, golden yellow, pink, red, brown and white. Oil on board. Presented in a gold tone frame with antique finish, outer dimensions measure 29 x 35 x ⅞ inches. Image size is 24 ¼ x 30 inches. Expedited and International shipping is available - please contact us for a quote. A native of Massachusetts, Harold Vincent Skene graduated from Harvard University School of Architecture in 1906. After relocating to Colorado, he studied at the Denver Art Academy, the Broadmoor Art Academy and served as an assistant to artist, Allen Tupper True.

'Two Ladies Trying to Out-Mystify Each Other', Original 1969 semi-abstract cubist style oil painting portraying two female figures with still life. Figural abstraction, oil paint on ...

Vintage view of storefronts in Estes Park, Colorado, near Rocky Mountain National Park by James Russell Sherman (1906-1989). Watercolor and ink on paper, signed by the artist in the ...

Grand Lake, Colorado, Yacht Races, vintage 1930s modernist, WPA era black and white lithograph by Colorado artist, Arnold Ronnebeck (1885-1947). Lake with ...

Oil on canvas painting depicting a sunset along the front range of Colorado by Charles Partridge Adams (1858-1942). Unsigned, has a letter of authenticity from the estate included. Tonalist style landscape painting with large trees painted in hues of green, gold, orange, and brown. Presented in a vintage gold frame, outer dimensions measure 18 ½ x 26 ¼ inches. Image size is 16 x 24 inches. Expedited and International shipping is available - please contact us for a quote. About the Artist: Born Massachusetts, 1858 Died 1942 Born in Franklin, Massachusetts, Charles Partridge Adams moved with his mother and two sisters to Denver, Colorado, in 1876 in an effort to cure the two girls who suffered from tuberculosis. In Denver, Adams found work at the Chain and Hardy Bookstore. He received his first, and only, art training from the owner's wife, Helen Chain. Mrs. Chain, a former pupil of George Inness, provided instruction and encouragement to the young artist and introduced him to other artists in the area including Alexander Phimister Proctor...

American modern 1945 winter landscape painting by Edgar Britton (1901-1982) with a tree driving among snowy mountains and trees (likely Colorado). Signed and dated by the artist in t...

Mid-century modern abstract acrylic on paper painting by Taos artist Beatrice Mandelman (1912-1998). Features red, yellow and blue in bright hues surrounded with black lines. Image size measures 9 1⁄2 x 12 3⁄4 inches. Framed image size measures 16 1⁄2 x 19 1⁄4 x 1 1⁄4 inches. Includes a letter of authenticity from the artist estate. Expedited and International shipping is available - please contact us for a quote. About the Artist: Born New Jersey, 1912 Died Taos, NM, 1998 The daughter of Austrian and German Jews, Beatrice Mandelman was introduced to abstract art as a young girl. At age twelve, she began her art studies by taking evening classes at the Newark School of Fine and Industrial Art. After college at Rutgers University, she continued her formal training at the Art Student’s League in New York, working with the lithographer George Pickens...

European village, city scene depicting rooftops, houses, and apartments with a grey sky. Vintage 1965 oil painting in colors of cream, pale yellow, gold, brown, gray, blue, green and...

Oil on mounted paper, Colorado modern mountain landscape painting by early 20th Century female artist, Eldora Pauline Lorenzini (1910- 1993) from 1937....

Original oil on board painting by artist Randall Vernon Davey (1887-1964) painted circa 1927. Painting depicts a wood cabin near Estes Park, Colorado. Mt. Meeker, Long's Peak, and La...

"Mill Near Plainfield, New Hampshire" is an original, signed watercolor painting by artist Charles Partridge Adams (1858-1942), circa 1900. Singed by the artist in the lower left corner. Portrays a mill along a river with trees and clouds, painted in shades of brown, green, gray, and blue. Presented in a custom frame, outer dimensions measure 13 ¾ x 12 ¼ x 1 ¼ inches. Image size is 7 x 5 inches. Expedited and international shipping is available - please contact us for a quote. About the Artist: Born Massachusetts, 1858 Died 1942 Born in Franklin, Massachusetts, Charles Partridge Adams moved with his mother and two sisters to Denver, Colorado, in 1876 in an effort to cure the two girls who suffered from tuberculosis. In Denver, Adams found work at the Chain and Hardy Bookstore. He received his first, and only, art training from the owner's wife, Helen Chain. Mrs. Chain, a former pupil of George Inness, provided instruction and encouragement to the young artist and introduced him to other artists in the area including Alexander Phimister Proctor...

Colorado Mountain Town, original, vintage signed painting by early Colorado woman artist Adma Green Kerr (1878-1949). Painted in the 1920s-1940s, the sc...

Lithograph titled "Mining Town" by Otis Dozier (1904-1987) from 1940. Modernist scene of a mountain mining town with several buildings at the base of the mountain. Presented in a custom black frame, outer dimensions measure 25 ½ x 18 ⅜ x ¼ inches. Image sight size is 16 ¼ x 9 ½ inches. Print is clean and in very good condition - please contact us for a detailed condition report. Provenance: Private Collection, Denver, Colorado Expedited and international shipping is available - please contact us for a quote. About the Artist: Born in Forney, Texas, Otis Marion Dozier was raised on a farm in Mesquite, Texas. Dozier was a muralist, potter, lithographer, sculptor, and painter. Dozier was a member of a group of Texas regionalist artists known as the "Dallas Nine." His surroundings in Texas became the focus of much of his art. Dozier’s first artistic training took place in the early 1920’s when his family moved to Dallas. He studied under Vivian Aunspaugh, Cora Edge, and Frank Reaugh...

1950s modernist linoleum cut print titled 'Saturday Morning (Market, Taos Plaza, New Mexico) by New Mexican artist Barbara Latham. Depicting a busy Saturday morning at the market in Taos Pueblo with horse and cart, Native American figures, adobe buildings and mountains in the background. Presented in a custom frame with all archival materials, outer dimensions measure 16 x 17 ¾ inches. Image size is 8 ½ x 10 ½ inches. About the Artist: Beginning her career as a commercial artist, Barbara Latham travelled to Taos in 1925 seeking material for a greeting card. Serendipitously, she also found her life partner, Howard Cook, who was similarly looking for ideas for illustrations. Perhaps both were fueled in their quest by the tales of their mutual teacher, Andrew Dasburg, who knew of the energy and stimulation of this artist community. Observing local people and customs, Latham created genre scenes that offer a window into this now-vanished time and place. Her lively illustrations for numerous children's books are a significant contribution to that graphic art in the mid-20th century. Born in Walpole, Massachusetts, Latham's student days included Norwich Art School and Pratt Institute in Brooklyn; but it was contact with the charismatic Dasburg at the Art Students League in Woodstock that opened her world and her view of art. Getting work with companies like Norcross Publishing and Forum magazine, she eventually made her way to Taos. Among all the spirited young artists gathered there, she met Howard Cook, who was designing illustrations for Willa Cather's Death Comes to the Archbishop. The two married in Santa Fe and began a nomadic life together. The young couple made their way to Paris, a likely destination for modernist artists. Upon receiving a Guggenheim to study fresco painting in 1932, Cook, along with Latham, took an alternative direction and headed to Taxco, Mexico. At this time, Mexican muralists, such as Diego Rivera, were capturing the attention of progressive artists. During the Depression, both Cook and Latham aligned themselves with a populist ideal. Latham contributed work, such as "Fording the Stream" and "Bear Family," to the American Artists Group, which was founded to produce original prints at affordable prices. The couple also travelled in the Deep South to the Ozarks and to "Alabama's Black Belt." When Latham settled in Taos, she was committed to an art of and for the people. Rather than a romanticized re-creation, her choice of subjects was based in common everyday activities, favoring those which brought people together. Taos Pueblo was an ancient, indigenous community, and Latham's view extended that tradition into a contemporary, multi-ethnic village. Sharing some of the spirit of WPA photographs...

'Second Mesa (Hopi Pueblo, Arizona)' is a watercolor, ink, and charcoal on paper by Bert Van Bork (1928-2014). Signed by the artist in the lower right co...

1950s abstract oil on canvas painting by Henriette "Yetti" Stolz from 1956. Completed in shades of brown, white, black, and gray. Signed by the artist in the lower right corner. Presented in a vintage frame measuring 42 ¾ x 16 ¾ inches. Image size measures 42 ¼ x 16 ¼ inches. Provenance: Estate of the Artist, Henriette "Yetti" Stolz Painting is in good condition - please contact us for a detailed condition report. About the Artist: Henriette “Yetti” Stolz was born in Serbia in 1935 ( and is still living ). Her family emigrated to Denver, Colorado, in the early 1950s after WWII and she attended East High School before studying art at Colorado College, in Colorado Springs in the mid to late 50s. While there studying she would have been exposed to modernist artists working both at the college ( ie. Mary...

20th Century abstract seascape, mixed media painting in blue, yellow, and white by Denver Modernist Richard Sorby (1911-2001). Composed of oil paint, mika, and sand on board. Present...

Original oil painting of Antelope in a spring/summer mountain and valley landscape by Harold Skene (1883-1978). Traditional landscape painted in colors of green, blue, and brown. Signed by the artist in the lower left corner and titled verso. Presented in a silver tone frame, outer dimensions measure 29 ¾ x 35 ¾ x 1 ½ inches. Image size is 24 ¼ x 30 inches. Painting is clean and in very good vintage condition - please contact us for a detailed condition report. Expedited and international shipping is available - please contact us for a quote. About the Artist: Harold Vincent Skene was born in Pittsfield, Massachusetts on June 19, 1883. He attended schools in eastern Massachusetts and graduated Harvard University School of Architecture in 1906. Skene attended Denver Art Academy where he studied with Robert Alexander Graham. He also studied at the Broadmoor Art Academy, Colorado Springs where he worked as an assistant to Allen Tupper True...

Original American Modernist watercolor on paper mounted on cardboard by William Bertrum Sharp (1924-1984). An abstract composition of blue, grey, yellow, pink, and orange. Presented ...

Mid 20th Century abstracted landscape pen and oil painting with trees by American Modernist Henriette "Yetti" Stolz, signed on the back of the painting. Portrays a modernist landscape of a forest with trees, painted in shades of gold, brown, orange, and blue. Presented in a vintage frame measuring 30 ¾ x 36 ¼ inches. Image measures 30 ¼ x 35 ¾ inches. Provenance: Estate of the Artist, Henriette "Yetti" Stolz Painting is in good condition - please contact us for a detailed condition report. About the Artist: Henriette “Yetti” Stolz was born in Serbia in 1935 ( and is still living ). Her family emigrated to Denver, Colorado, in the early 1950s after WWII and she attended East High School before studying art at Colorado College, in Colorado Springs in the mid to late 50s. While there studying she would have been exposed to modernist artists working both at the college ( ie. Mary Chenoweth...

Original American Modernist tempera painting on masonite by Archie Musick (1902-1978). Signed by the artist in the lower right corner. Depicted is a landscape with penguins marching ...

Mid 20th century oil and spackle painting featuring an abstracted cityscape with a bridge and buildings by Henriette "Yetti" Stolz. Signed by the artist in the lower right margin. Pa...

Original vintage 1941 Colorado landscape painting with autumn leaves and Pikes Peak blanketed in snow by Charles Bunnell (1897-1968). Inscribed verso, "To Laura, November 22, 1941", egg tempera on board. Signed by the artist in the lower left corner and titled verso. Presented in a custom frame, outer dimensions measure 15 ½ x 19 ¼ x 1 ¼ inches. Image size is 7 ¾ x 11 inches About the Artist: Artist and teacher, Charles ("Charlie") Bunnell worked in a variety of styles throughout his career because as an artist he believed, "I’ve got to paint a thousand different ways. I don’t paint any one way." At different times he did representational landscapes while concurrently involved with semi- or completely abstract imagery. He was one of a relatively small number of artists in Colorado successfully incorporating into their work the new trends emanating from New York and Europe after World War II. During his lifetime he generally did not attract a great deal of critical attention from museums, critics and academia. However, he personally experienced a highpoint in his career when Katherine Kuh, curator at the Art Institute of Chicago, personally chose one of his paintings - Why? - for its large exhibition of several hundred examples of abstract and surrealist art held in 1947-48, subsequently including it among the fifty pieces selected for a traveling show to ten other American museums. An only child, Bunnell developed his love of art at a young age through frequent drawing and political cartooning. In high school he was interested in baseball and golf and also was the tennis champion for Westport High School in Kansas City. Following graduation, his father moved the family to Denver, Colorado, in 1916 for a better-paying bookkeeping job, before relocating the following year to Colorado Springs to work for local businessman, Edmond C. van Diest, President of the Western Public Service Company and the Colorado Concrete Company. Bunnell would spend almost all of his adult life in Colorado Springs. In 1918 he enlisted in the United States Army, serving in the 62nd Infantry Regiment through the end of World War I. Returning home with a 10% disability, he joined the Zebulon Pike Post No. 1 of the Disabled American Veterans Association and in 1921 used the benefits from his disability to attend a class in commercial art design conducted under a government program in Colorado Springs. The following year he transferred to the Broadmoor Art Academy (founded in 1919) where he studied with William Potter and in 1923 with Birger Sandzén. Sandzén’s influence is reflected in Bunnell’s untitled Colorado landscape (1925) with a bright blue-rose palette. For several years thereafter Bunnell worked independently until returning to the Broadmoor Art Academy to study in 1927-28 with Ernest Lawson, who previously taught at the Kansas City Art Institute where Bunnell himself later taught in the summers of 1929-1930 and in 1940-41. Lawson, a landscapist and colorist, was known for his early twentieth-century connection with "The Eight" in New York, a group of forward-looking painters including Robert Henri and John Sloan whose subject matter combined a modernist style with urban-based realism. Bunnell, who won first-place awards in Lawson’s landscapes classes at the Academy, was promoted to his assistant instructor for the figure classes in the 1928-29 winter term. Lawson, who painted in what New York critic James Huneker termed a "crushed jewel" technique, enjoyed additional recognition as a member of the Committee on Foreign Exhibits that helped organize the landmark New York Armory Exhibition in 1913 in which Lawson showed and which introduced European avant-garde art to the American public. As noted in his 1964 interview for the Archives of American Art in Washington, DC, Bunnell learned the most about his teacher’s use of color by talking with him about it over Scotch as his assistant instructor. "Believe me," Bunnell later said, "[Ernie] knew color, one of the few Americans that did." His association with Lawson resulted in local scenes of Pikes Peak, Eleven Mile Canyon, the Gold Cycle Mine near Colorado City and other similar sites, employing built up pigments that allowed the surfaces of his canvases to shimmer with color and light. (Eleven Mile Canyon was shown in the annual juried show at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh in 1928, an early recognition of his talent outside of Colorado.) At the same time, he animated his scenes of Colorado Springs locales by defining the image shapes with color and line as demonstrated in Contrasts (1929). Included in the Midwestern Artists’ Exhibition in Kansas City in 1929, it earned him the gold medal of the Kansas City Art Institute, auguring his career as a professional artist. In the 1930s Bunnell used the oil, watercolor and lithography media to create a mini-genre of Colorado’s old mining towns and mills, subject matter spurned by many local artists at the time in favor of grand mountain scenery. In contrast to his earlier images, these newer ones - both daytime and nocturnal -- such as Blue Bird Mine essentially are form studies. The conical, square and rectangular shapes of the buildings and other structures are placed in the stark, undulating terrain of the mountains and valleys devoid of any vegetation or human presence. In the mid-1930s he also used the same approach in his monochromatic lithographs titled Evolution, Late Evening, K.C. (Kansas City) and The Mill, continuing it into the next decade with his oil painting, Pikes Peak (1942). During the early 1930s he studied for a time with Boardman Robinson, director of the Broadmoor Art Academy and its successor institution, the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center from 1930 to 1947. In 1934 Robinson gave him the mural commission under the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP) for West Junior High School in Colorado Springs, his first involvement in one of several New Deal art...

Vintage 1950s landscape painting of mountains near Colorado Springs, Colorado by woman artist, Zola Zaugg (1890-1983). Oil painting on masonite in fall colors of yellow, orange, gree...

Original signed framed vintage landscape painting by Charles Partridge Adams (1858-1942) of a Sunset along the Front Range of Colorado (near D...

Mt Lassen, original vintage signed lithograph by Richard Walter Dubois (1907-2006) of a Northern California landscape with pine trees, snow-capped mountains and dramatic storm clouds...

Original framed oil painting on burlap by Edward Marecak (1919-1993) titled "Autumn Harvest" from 1987. Signed and dated by the artist in the lower right corner. Presented in a custom framed, outer dimensions measure 20 x 29 x 1 ⅜ inches. Image size is 19 x 28 inches. Provenance: Estate of the Artist, Edward Marecak Painting is clean and in good condition - please contact us for a detailed condition report. Expedited and international shipping is available - please contact us for a quote. About the artist: Born to immigrant parents from the Carpathian region in Slovakia, Marecak grew up with his family in the farming community of Bennett’s Corners, now part of the town of Brunswick, near Cleveland, Ohio. When he turned twelve, his family moved to a multi-ethnic neighborhood of Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, and Slovenians in Cleveland. His childhood household cherished the customs and Slavic folk tales from the Old Country that later strongly influenced his work as a professional artist. During junior high he painted scenery for puppet shows of “Peter and the Wolf,” awakening his interest in art. In his senior year in high school he did Cézanne-inspired watercolors of Ohio barns at seventy-five cents apiece for the National Youth Administration. They earned him a full scholarship to the Cleveland Institute of Art (1938-1942) where he studied with Henry George Keller whose work was included in the 1913 New York Armory Show. In 1940 Marecak also taught at the Museum School of the Cleveland Institute. Before being drafted into the military in 1942, he briefly attended the Cranbrook Academy of Art near Detroit, one of the nation’s leading graduate schools of art, architecture, and design. A center of innovative work in architecture, art and design with an educational approach built on a mentorship model, it has been home to some of the world’s most renowned designers and artists, including Eero Saarinen, Charles Eames, Daniel Libeskind and Harry Bertoia. Marecak’s studies at Cranbrook with painter Zoltan Sepeshy and sculptor Carl Milles were interrupted by U.S. army service in the Aleutian Islands during World War II. Following his military discharge, Marecak studied on the G.I. Bill at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center from 1946 to 1950, having previously met its director, Boardman Robinson, conducting a seminar in mural painting at the Cleveland Institute of Art. Although he did not work with Robinson at the Fine Arts Center, who had become quite ill - retiring in 1947 - he studied Robinson’s specialty of mural painting before leaving to briefly attend the Cranbrook Academy in 1947. That same year he returned to the Fine Arts Center, studying painting with Jean Charlot and Mary Chenoweth, and lithography with Lawrence Barrett with whom he produced some 132 images during 1948-49. At the Fine Arts Center he met his future wife, Donna Fortin, whom he married in 1947. Also a Midwesterner, she had taken night art courses at Hull House in Chicago, later studying at the Art Institute of Chicago with the encouragement of artist Edgar Britton. After World War II she studied with him from 1946 to 1949 at the Fine Arts Center. (He had moved to Colorado Springs to treat his tuberculosis.) Ed Marecak also became good friends with Britton, later collaborating with him on the design of large stained glass windows for a local church. In 1950-51 Marecak returned to the Cleveland Institute of Art to complete his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. A year later he was invited to conduct a summer class at the University of Colorado in Boulder, confirming his interest in the teaching profession. In 1955 he received his teaching certificate from the University of Denver. Vance Kirkland, the head of its art department, helped him get a teaching job with the Denver Public Schools so that he and his family could remain in the Mile High City. For the next twenty-five years he taught art at Skinner, Grove, East, George Washington and Morey Junior High Schools. Prior to coming to Colorado, Marecak did watercolors resembling those of Winslow Homer, John Singer Sargent and Charles Burchfield. However, once in Colorado Springs he decided to destroy much of his earlier oeuvre, embarking on a totally new direction unlike anything he had previously done. Initially, in the 1940s, he was influenced by surrealist imagery and Paul Klee and in the West by Indian petroglyphs and Kachinas. His first one-person show at the Garrett Gallery in Colorado Springs in 1949 featured paintings and lithographs rendered in the style of Magic Realism and referential abstraction. The pieces, including an oil Witch with Pink Dish...

Untitled graphite on paper drawing by Verona Burkhard (1910-2004) of a figure on horseback. Preliminary sketch for a later completed mural. Presented in a custom frame with all archival materials, outer dimensions measure 29 ¾ x 22 ¾ inches. Image size is 23 ½ x 16 ¼ inches. Expedited and international shipping is available - please contact us for a quote. About the Artist: Verona Lorriane Burkhard was born on June 8, 1910 to of Henri and Verona P. (Turini) Burkhard, both of whom where artists. She was raised in New Jersey and New York where she studied at the Art Students League under Boardman Robinson and Columbia University under Frank Mechau...

Vintage mountain landscape painting, oil on canvas of horses pulling a Stage Coach along the Front Range of Colorado by Alfred Wands (1904-1998). Autumn trees, golden grass, river and snowy mountains. Presented in a vintage frame, outer dimensions measure 29 ½ x 35 ½ x 1 inches. Image size is 24 x 30 inches. Painting is in very good condition - please contact us for a detailed condition report. Expedited and international shipping is available - please contact us for a quote. About the Artist: Born in Cleveland, Ohio, Alfred Wands graduated from the Cleveland School of Art with honors. Following that, he spent six months in Paris studying at the Academie Julian. In the late 1920's, Wands returned to Ohio to teach painting at the Cleveland School of Art and the Cleveland Museum of Art. In 1930, Wands moved to Denver to direct the art program at Colorado Women's College. He remained at the Women's College for the next 17 years. During his time in Denver, Wands frequently traveled to Taos, New Mexico. He and his family spent eleven summers there between 1930 and 1940. By 1943, he had become the Camp Artist at the YMCA of the Rockies, where he taught summer art classes. He later became the Chairman of their Religious Programs and Adult Advisory Committees. By 1947, he quit his teaching position at the Colorado Woman's College to devote full time to his painting. By 1955, Wands opened his own studio and gallery in Estes Park, Colorado. Known as the "Dean of Colorado Landscape Painters", he served three times as the President of the Denver Artists Guild. He was the Chairman of the Denver Art Commission for 16 years. Wands was a long-time member of the Denver Artists Guild and the Denver Art Commission. He was also a member of the Cleveland Society of Artists, Ohio Watercolor Society, and Chicago Galleries Association. ©David Cook Galleries...

"Untitled (Sueno del Caballo/Cranium or Expressive Cranium)", is a oil on board by Jose Garcia Narezo (1922-1994) of a horse skull and cloth in a wi...

'Windmill on the Plains' is watercolor and ink on paper painting by Jenne Magafan. Depicting a large windmill on a 1940s Colorado farm scene with sheds and a fencing in the backgroun...

"High Rolls, New Mexico", is a oil on canvas by Andreas Storrs Andersen (1908-1974) of a wooden church along a dirt road in the mountains with clouds in the background. Painted in a ...

Watercolor, ink, and charcoal on paper titled 'Walpi #9 (Hopi Village on First Mesa, Arizona)' by Bert Van Bork (1928-2014). Painted in saturated shades ...

Original vintage painting of a Lightning Storm, Southwestern Mountain Landcape. Oil painting on textured board by Morton Lawrence Schneider (1919-2000). This large scale semi abstrac...

Original graphite on paper drawing by Boardman Robinson depicting a Colorado mountain landscape. Signed by the artist lower right with an ...

Untitled (Portrait of Bessy Lyon, Artist Wife) is an oil on canvas painting by Hayes Lyon (1901-1987) from 1945. Presented in a wood frame, outer dimensions measure 35 ¼ x 29 ¼ x 1 ¾ inches. Image size is 30 x 24 inches. About the Artist: A native of Athol, Kansas, Lyon is primarily associated with Colorado. After several summer vacations at the Boulder Chautauqua and at Manitou near Colorado Springs, his family relocated in 1920 to Boulder where his father had a lumber business. Nine years later they settled in Denver where his father owned the Acme Lumber Company. To comply with his desire for his son’s financial self-reliance, Lyon graduated from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1931 with a B.A. degree in economics. But shortly thereafter he returned to his first love – art – that ultimately became his career. His interest in the arts was nurtured by his mother, herself a talented amateur artist, and by two of his aunts who served as role models. Beginning in 1932, he pursued a five-year course of study at the Chappell School of Art in Denver which by then had become part of the University of Denver. During his time at the school he studied with John E. Thompson and Santa Fe artist, Józef Bakoś. He also met two other Santa Fe-based artists, Willard Nash and B.J.O. Nordfeldt, when they exhibited at Chappell House, then the home of the Denver Art Museum. Lyon likewise attended the Cooke-Daniels Lecture Series there on the arts in the 1930s. Following graduation with a B.F.A. degree from the University of Denver in 1937, he studied privately for about a year with Andrew Dasburg in Taos, New Mexico, that redirected his attention to the rugged Rocky Mountain landscape, which he saw with directness and painted with an economy of means. His canvas, Winter Vista, done following his study with Dasburg, received the Edward J. Yetter Memorial Prize at the 45th Annual Exhibition of the Denver Art Museum in 1939. The painting was reproduced in the September 1939 issue of the Magazine of Art (Washington, DC). That same year his painting, Mount Evans, was included as one of Colorado’s entries in the American Art Today Pavilion at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York. The money he received from the Yetter Prize financed his trip to Mexico City and Guadalajara in 1939 to see firsthand the frescoes of José Clemente Orozco and Diego Rivera and the easel paintings of David Alfaro Siqueiros. Their work was admired by many Americans who participated in the WPA-era mural projects in the United States in the 1930s and early 1940s. The economic fallout from the Great Depression affecting many American artists at the time likewise resulted in Lyon’s participation in the Colorado Art Project, part of the WPA’s national program. Under its auspices he produced three murals in 1940 about the pioneer era of Fort Lupton, Colorado, which were installed in the auditorium of the local high school. Covering 367 square feet of wall space, one of the murals – Behold the West (the largest one) – incorporates the old fort for which the town is named. Before Lyon painted the murals, the students at Fort Lupton High School researched the history of their community and contributed to their cost, facilitating the murals’ allocation to their school under the Colorado Art Project. In the early 1940s Lyon shifted his focus to two new subjects – bathers, and canyons with conifers – reflecting his ongoing search for personal artistic growth. However, his reliance on structure to create form in his paintings and works on paper alienated some of his longtime followers. Nonetheless, his painting Conifers and Canyons won recognition at the 47th Annual Exhibition at the Denver Art Museum. The watercolor version of the piece was among three hundred works in that medium selected by John Marin, Charles Burchfield and Eliot O’Hara from a national competition held by the Section of Fine Arts (Federal Works Agency) and shown at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, in 1941. Later that year Lyon spent time in California where he saw Orozco’s Prometheus, influencing him to increase his range of originality and expression. In 1942 Lyon enlisted in the U.S. Army, spending almost three years in the Mediterranean Theater – Africa and Italy – preparing camouflage operations and scale models of proposed landing sites. He used his free time in Italy to expand his artistic vocabulary by seeing cultural masterpieces in Rome, Florence, Siena and Milan, and through his extensive contact with Giorgio de Chirico, founder of the scuola metafisica art movement, and Gino Severini, a leading member of the Futurist movement. Because of Lyon’s low army rank and pay, de Chirico did a small watercolor for him signing it, "For Mr. Lyon; G de Chirico, 1944." Lyon often visited de Chirico and his wife, Isa, at their apartment near the Spanish Steps in Rome. Following his Army discharge in 1945 fellow Kansas native, Ward Lockwood, invited him to join the Art Department at the University of Texas at Austin where he taught painting from 1946 to 1951. During this period some of Lyon’s work employed the palette of the School of Paris which he had seen while stationed in Europe, while other paintings had a certain flatness found in some of Lockwood’s work from the 1930s. From 1951 to 1953 he was affiliated with the Lower Colorado River Authority in Austin as an illustrator and editor of the employee magazine. In 1953, following time spent in Mexico, he returned to Denver, working as an illustrator at Lowry Air Force Base until retirement in 1961. During that time he did little of his own art because he also was designing and building a home in Arvada, Colorado, and re-establishing himself in the Denver art community after a decade-long absence. His painting, Autumn Aspens (1953-present location unknown) illustrates his experimentation with abstraction. In the early 1960s he began painting from memory that continued until the steadily degenerative effects of Alzheimer’s disease took their toll a decade later. He depicted scenes from his wartime European sojourn and from his early adulthood. The latter include Souvenir of Boulder (1962), a nostalgic return to his boyhood home in Boulder; and Holly Mayer and Friends, a painting of Glenn Miller and his musicians, inspired by Lyon’s first encounter with jazz in Boulder in the 1920s. His lifelong passion for vintage cars and automobile racing...

Photo Opportunity (Tourists, Garden of the Gods, Colorado Springs, Colorado; edition of 30 is a lithograph circa 1935 by Charles Wheeler Locke (1899-19...

Canvas collage and acrylic on wrapped canvas by 20th Century artist Margo Hoff (1910-2008) titled 'Suns and Moon.' It depicts an abstract image of geometric shapes painted in bright ...

Original 1940s watercolor on paper painting by Charles Ragland Bunnell portraying a semi abstracted view of Golden Cycle Mill in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Painted in shades of black and gray. Presented in a custom black frame, outer dimensions measure 18 x 19 ½ x 1 ⅜ inches. Image sight size is 8 ⅛ x 9 ⅝ inches. Golden Cycle Mining and Reduction Company was a mining company in Colorado City (now Old Colorado City) in El Paso County, Colorado. Piece is clean and in excellent condition - please contact us for a detailed condition report. Expedited and international shipping is available - please contact us for a quote. About the artist: Artist and teacher, Charles (“Charlie”) Bunnell worked in a variety of styles throughout his career because as an artist he believed, “I’ve got to paint a thousand different ways. I don’t paint any one way.” At different times he did representational landscapes while concurrently involved with semi- or completely abstract imagery. He was one of a relatively small number of artists in Colorado successfully incorporating into their work the new trends emanating from New York and Europe after World War II. During his lifetime he generally did not attract a great deal of critical attention from museums, critics and academia. However, he personally experienced a highpoint in his career when Katherine Kuh, curator at the Art Institute of Chicago, personally chose one of his paintings – Why? - for its large exhibition of several hundred examples of abstract and surrealist art held in 1947-48, subsequently including it among the fifty pieces selected for a traveling show to ten other American museums. An only child, Bunnell developed his love of art at a young age through frequent drawing and political cartooning. In high school he was interested in baseball and golf and also was the tennis champion for Westport High School in Kansas City. Following graduation, his father moved the family to Denver, Colorado, in 1916 for a better-paying bookkeeping job, before relocating the following year to Colorado Springs to work for local businessman, Edmond C. van Diest, President of the Western Public Service Company and the Colorado Concrete Company. Bunnell would spend almost all of his adult life in Colorado Springs. In 1918 he enlisted in the United States Army, serving in the 62nd Infantry Regiment through the end of World War I. Returning home with a 10% disability, he joined the Zebulon Pike Post No. 1 of the Disabled American Veterans Association and in 1921 used the benefits from his disability to attend a class in commercial art design conducted under a government program in Colorado Springs. The following year he transferred to the Broadmoor Art Academy (founded in 1919) where he studied with William Potter and in 1923 with Birger Sandzén. Sandzén’s influence is reflected in Bunnell’s untitled Colorado landscape (1925) with a bright blue-rose palette. For several years thereafter Bunnell worked independently until returning to the Broadmoor Art Academy to study in 1927-28 with Ernest Lawson, who previously taught at the Kansas City Art Institute where Bunnell himself later taught in the summers of 1929-1930 and in 1940-41. Lawson, a landscapist and colorist, was known for his early twentieth-century connection with “The Eight” in New York, a group of forward-looking painters including Robert Henri and John Sloan whose subject matter combined a modernist style with urban-based realism. Bunnell, who won first-place awards in Lawson’s landscapes classes at the Academy, was promoted to his assistant instructor for the figure classes in the 1928-29 winter term. Lawson, who painted in what New York critic James Huneker termed a “crushed jewel” technique, enjoyed additional recognition as a member of the Committee on Foreign Exhibits that helped organize the landmark New York Armory Exhibition in 1913 in which Lawson showed and which introduced European avant-garde art to the American public. As noted in his 1964 interview for the Archives of American Art in Washington, DC, Bunnell learned the most about his teacher’s use of color by talking with him about it over Scotch as his assistant instructor. “Believe me,” Bunnell later said, “[Ernie] knew color, one of the few Americans that did.” His association with Lawson resulted in local scenes of Pikes Peak, Eleven Mile Canyon, the Gold Cycle Mine near Colorado City and other similar sites, employing built up pigments that allowed the surfaces of his canvases to shimmer with color and light. (Eleven Mile Canyon was shown in the annual juried show at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh in 1928, an early recognition of his talent outside of Colorado.) At the same time, he animated his scenes of Colorado Springs locales by defining the image shapes with color and line as demonstrated in Contrasts (1929). Included in the Midwestern Artists’ Exhibition in Kansas City in 1929, it earned him the gold medal of the Kansas City Art Institute, auguring his career as a professional artist. In the 1930s Bunnell used the oil, watercolor and lithography media to create a mini-genre of Colorado’s old mining towns and mills, subject matter spurned by many local artists at the time in favor of grand mountain scenery. In contrast to his earlier images, these newer ones – both daytime and nocturnal -- such as Blue Bird Mine essentially are form studies. The conical, square and rectangular shapes of the buildings and other structures are placed in the stark, undulating terrain of the mountains and valleys devoid of any vegetation or human presence. In the mid-1930s he also used the same approach in his monochromatic lithographs titled Evolution, Late Evening, K.C. (Kansas City) and The Mill, continuing it into the next decade with his oil painting, Pikes Peak (1942). During the early 1930s he studied for a time with Boardman Robinson, director of the Broadmoor Art Academy and its successor institution, the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center from 1930 to 1947. In 1934 Robinson gave him the mural commission under the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP) for West Junior High School in Colorado Springs, his first involvement in one of several New Deal art...

Watercolor on paper titled "Horse and Boy" painted by Douglas Denniston (1921-2001) from 1945. Semi abstract picture of a young boy and his horse, painte...

Diana and the Three Fates, vintage 1970s semi abstract oil painting on board by 20th century Denver artist, Edward Marecak (1919-1993). Female nude figure of the the Roman virgin goddess, Diana, the protector of childbirth reclining with vases of flowers and the Three Fates looking on. Semi abstract, cubist style painting in bright colors of pink, fuchsia, green, yellow, orange, blue, brown, purple and red. Unframed, custom framing is available. In situ photos are frame mocks ups, the piece is currently unframed. Painting is clean and in very good vintage condition - please contact us for a detailed condition report. Provenance: Estate of Edward Marecak Expedited and international shipping is available - please contact us for a quote. About the Artist: Born to immigrant parents from the Carpathian region in Slovakia, Marecak grew up with his family in the farming community of Bennett’s Corners, now part of the town of Brunswick, near Cleveland, Ohio. When he turned twelve, his family moved to a multi-ethnic neighborhood of Poles, Czechs, Slovaks and Slovenians in Cleveland. His childhood household cherished the customs and Slavic folk tales from the Old Country that later strongly influenced his work as a professional artist. During junior high he painted scenery for puppet shows of "Peter and the Wolf," awakening his interest in art. In his senior year in high school he did Cézanne-inspired watercolors of Ohio barns at seventy-five cents apiece for the National Youth Administration. They earned him a full scholarship to the Cleveland Institute of Art (1938-1942) where he studied with Henry George Keller whose work was included in the 1913 New York Armory Show. In 1940 Marecak also taught at the Museum School of the Cleveland Institute. Before being drafted into the military in 1942, he briefly attended the Cranbrook Academy of Art near Detroit, one of the nation’s leading graduate schools of art, architecture, and design. A center of innovative work in architecture, art and design with an educational approach built on a mentorship model, it has been home to some of the world’s most renowned designers and artists, including Eero Saarinen, Charles Eames, Daniel Libeskind and Harry Bertoia. Marecak’s studies at Cranbrook with painter Zoltan Sepeshy and sculptor Carl Milles were interrupted by U.S. army service in the Aleutian Islands during World War II. Following his military discharge, Marecak studied on the G.I. Bill at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center from 1946 to 1950, having previously met its director, Boardman Robinson, conducting a seminar in mural painting at the Cleveland Institute of Art. Although he did not work with Robinson at the Fine Arts Center, who had become quite ill - retiring in 1947 - he studied Robinson’s specialty of mural painting before leaving to briefly attend the Cranbrook Academy in 1947. That same year he returned to the Fine Arts Center, studying painting with Jean Charlot and Mary Chenoweth, and lithography with Lawrence Barrett with whom he produced some 132 images during 1948-49. At the Fine Arts Center he met his future wife, Donna Fortin, whom he married in 1947. Also a Midwesterner, she had taken night art courses at Hull House in Chicago, later studying at the Art Institute of Chicago with the encouragement of artist Edgar Britton. After World War II she studied with him from 1946 to 1949 at the Fine Arts Center. (He had moved to Colorado Springs to treat his tuberculosis.) Ed Marecak also became good friends with Britton, later collaborating with him on the design of large stained glass windows for a local church. In 1950-51 Marecak returned to the Cleveland Institute of Art to complete his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. A year later he was invited to conduct a summer class at the University of Colorado in Boulder, confirming his interest in the teaching profession. In 1955 he received his teaching certificate from the University of Denver. Vance Kirkland, the head of its art department, helped him get a teaching job with the Denver Public Schools so that he and his family could remain in the Mile High City. For the next twenty-five years he taught art at Skinner, Grove, East, George Washington and Morey Junior High Schools. Prior to coming to Colorado, Marecak did watercolors resembling those of Winslow Homer, John Singer Sargent and Charles Burchfield. However, once in Colorado Springs he decided to destroy much of his earlier ouevre, embarking on a totally new direction unlike anything he had previously done. Initially, in the 1940s he was influenced by surrealist imagery and Paul Klee, and in the West by Indian petroglyphs and Kachinas. His first one-person show at the Garrett Gallery in Colorado Springs in 1949 featured paintings and lithographs rendered in the style of Magic Realism and referential abstraction. The pieces, including an oil Witch with Pink Dish...

Vintage original modernist watercolor painting of horses attached to a carriage and buildings by Alfred Wands (1904-1998). It is painted in blues, yellows, and browns. Presented in a...

Original Arnold Ronnebeck (1885-1947) lithograph of a home in Gregory Point, near Central City, Colorado from the 1930s. Edition of 25 printed. Presented in a custom frame, outer dimensions measure 23 ¼ x 18 ½ inches. Image size is 19 ¼ x 13 ¼ inches Print is clean and in very good vintage condition - please contact us for a detailed condition report. Provenance: Estate of Arnold Ronnebeck Expedited and international shipping is available - please contact us for a quote. 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...

Lithograph on paper titled 'Colorado Gold Dredge, Breckenridge' by Arnold Ronnebeck (1885-1947) from 1932. Numbered 15/25. Depicted is a gold dredge in Colorado mining town Breckenridge with a mountain landscape in the background. Presented in a custom frame measuring 17 ¼ x 21 ¼ inches. Image size measures 10 ¼ x 14 ¼ inches. Print is clean and in very good vintage condition - please contact us for a detailed condition report. Provenance: Estate of Arnold Ronnebeck Expedited and international shipping is available - please contact us for a quote. 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...

Oil on board painting by Edward Marecak (1919-1993) titled "The Argument" from 1968. Semi-abstract oil painting depicting two figures in colors of greens, pinks, blues, and blacks. Presented framed, outer dimensions measure 49 ½ x 33 ¼ x 1 ½ inches. Image size is 48 x 32 inches. Painting is clean and in very good vintage condition - please contact us for a detailed condition report. About the artist: Born to immigrant parents from the Carpathian region in Slovakia, Marecak grew up with his family in the farming community of Bennett’s Corners, now part of the town of Brunswick, near Cleveland, Ohio. When he turned twelve, his family moved to a multi-ethnic neighborhood of Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, and Slovenians in Cleveland. His childhood household cherished the customs and Slavic folk tales from the Old Country that later strongly influenced his work as a professional artist. During junior high he painted scenery for puppet shows of “Peter and the Wolf,” awakening his interest in art. In his senior year in high school he did Cézanne-inspired watercolors of Ohio barns at seventy-five cents apiece for the National Youth Administration. They earned him a full scholarship to the Cleveland Institute of Art (1938-1942) where he studied with Henry George Keller whose work was included in the 1913 New York Armory Show. In 1940 Marecak also taught at the Museum School of the Cleveland Institute. Before being drafted into the military in 1942, he briefly attended the Cranbrook Academy of Art near Detroit, one of the nation’s leading graduate schools of art, architecture, and design. A center of innovative work in architecture, art and design with an educational approach built on a mentorship model, it has been home to some of the world’s most renowned designers and artists, including Eero Saarinen, Charles Eames, Daniel Libeskind and Harry Bertoia. Marecak’s studies at Cranbrook with painter Zoltan Sepeshy and sculptor Carl Milles were interrupted by U.S. army service in the Aleutian Islands during World War II. Following his military discharge, Marecak studied on the G.I. Bill at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center from 1946 to 1950, having previously met its director, Boardman Robinson, conducting a seminar in mural painting at the Cleveland Institute of Art. Although he did not work with Robinson at the Fine Arts Center, who had become quite ill - retiring in 1947 - he studied Robinson’s specialty of mural painting before leaving to briefly attend the Cranbrook Academy in 1947. That same year he returned to the Fine Arts Center, studying painting with Jean Charlot and Mary Chenoweth, and lithography with Lawrence Barrett with whom he produced some 132 images during 1948-49. At the Fine Arts Center he met his future wife, Donna Fortin, whom he married in 1947. Also a Midwesterner, she had taken night art courses at Hull House in Chicago, later studying at the Art Institute of Chicago with the encouragement of artist Edgar Britton. After World War II she studied with him from 1946 to 1949 at the Fine Arts Center. (He had moved to Colorado Springs to treat his tuberculosis.) Ed Marecak also became good friends with Britton, later collaborating with him on the design of large stained glass windows for a local church. In 1950-51 Marecak returned to the Cleveland Institute of Art to complete his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. A year later he was invited to conduct a summer class at the University of Colorado in Boulder, confirming his interest in the teaching profession. In 1955 he received his teaching certificate from the University of Denver. Vance Kirkland, the head of its art department, helped him get a teaching job with the Denver Public Schools so that he and his family could remain in the Mile High City. For the next twenty-five years he taught art at Skinner, Grove, East, George Washington and Morey Junior High Schools. Prior to coming to Colorado, Marecak did watercolors resembling those of Winslow Homer, John Singer Sargent and Charles Burchfield. However, once in Colorado Springs he decided to destroy much of his earlier oeuvre, embarking on a totally new direction unlike anything he had previously done. Initially, in the 1940s, he was influenced by surrealist imagery and Paul Klee and in the West by Indian petroglyphs and Kachinas. His first one-person show at the Garrett Gallery in Colorado Springs in 1949 featured paintings and lithographs rendered in the style of Magic Realism and referential abstraction. The pieces, including an oil Witch with Pink Dish...

Untitled abstract oil on canvas painting by Henriette "Yetti" Stolz. Portraying an abstracted bird in earth tone colors of brown, green, and orange. Presented in a vintage frame meas...