David Cook Galleries

Canvas collage, acrylic and crayon on canvas by 20th Century artist Margo Hoff (1910-2008) titled 'Lighted Street' depicting and abstract image of a street at night with glowing stre...

Lithograph on paper titled 'Silver Mine, Russell Gulch (12/25)' by Arnold Ronnebeck, which is a black and white lithograph print of an oil painting by him of the same name. It shows a mine with a mountain ridge in the background. Presented in a custom frame measuring 20 ½ x 26 ½ 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...

"East Santa Cruz (California)" is an oil on canvas board by Jon Blanchette (1908-1987) of a yellow farm house with dark gray storm clouds overhead. Presented in a custom frame, outer dimensions measure 21 ¾ x 25 ¾ x 1 ½ inches. Image size is 16 x 20 inches. Painting is 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: Jon Blanchette Born England, 1908 Died California, 1987 Jon Blanchette was born in Somerset, England on March 29, 1908. He immigrated to Battle Creek, Michigan in 1918. Artistically inclined at age six, he later studied at the Pittsburgh Art...

Oil on canvas painting by Margo Hoff (1910-2008) titled "Pyramid" from 1979. Shows an abstract depiction of two pyramids on top of each other with a brown and red background. Present...

Oil on panel painting by Lewis Lee Tilley (1921-2005) titled "Opera Matinee" from 1948. Image presents two women at an opera, one in pink leans over to the other in blue to whisper i...

Original watercolor on paper painting by Samuel Bolton Colburn (1909-1993) of a small farm situated in a valley near the mountains. Presented in a custom frame, outer dimensions meas...

"Ortez (Modernist Family Portrait)" is a gouache on paper abstract painting by Lewis Lee Tilley (1921-2005) from 1947 of five family members sitting on a couch. Painted in jewel tone...

'Victor, Colorado', 1942 oil painting on masonite by Martyl Suzanne Schweig (1918-2013). This classic Colorado landscape was painted overlooking a ghost town with the Rocky Mountains visible across the background, completed in rich tones of green, gold, and brown. This painting was completed on a trip with fellow artist, Adolph Dehn...

1970s abstract oil on canvas by Broadmoor Academy artist Lawrence (Larry) Harris (1937-2008). Geometric shapes across the center of the canvas in warm colors of red, orange, yellow, black and brown. Presented in a custom wood frame measuring 20 ½ x 26 ½ inches. Image size measures 18 x 24 inches. Piece is clean and 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: Lawrence Harris...

Acrylic and canvas collage on canvas by 20th century artist Margo Hoff (1910-2008). An abstract geometric painting in Margo's signature style of canvas collage, laying bits of canva...

Crayon and acrylic paint mixed media painting by Denver artist Edward Marecak (1919-1993). Abstract geometric painting done in rich colors of dark purple, blue, and black. Presented ...

1966 American Modernist abstract color lithograph by Lewis Lee Tilley (1921-2005). The print is singed and editioned/numbered 4 of 5 prints by the artist. Presented in a custom frame, outer dimensions measure 29 x 23 inches. Image size is 12 ½ x 10 ½ inches. Piece is clean and in very good condition - please contact us for a detailed condition report. Provenance: Fremont Center for the Arts, Canon City...

"Corralled Horse", is an etching on paper by western artist Ethel Magafan (1916-1993) of a single dark horse standing outside in a wooden fenced corral. Presented in a custom frame, outer dimensions measure 19 x 23 inches. Image size is 10 x 14 inches. This is marked as an Artist Proof Piece is in very good condition - please contact us for a detailed condition report. Provenance: Estate of Artist, Ethel Magafan Expedited and international shipping is available - please contact us for a quote. About the Artist: Ethel Magafan Born 1916 Died 1993 The daughter of a Greek immigrant father and a Polish immigrant mother who met and married in Chicago, Ethel Magafan, her identical twin sister Jenne and their elder sister Sophie grew up in Colorado to which their father relocated the family in 1919. They initially lived in Colorado Springs where he worked as a waiter at the Antlers Hotel before moving to Denver in 1930 to be head waiter at the Albany Hotel. Two years later during the Great Depression Ethel and Jenne experienced at sixteen the tragic loss of their father who had encouraged their artistic aspirations. He was proud when Ethel, a student at Morey Junior High School, won top prizes in student poster contests sponsored by the Denver Chamber of Commerce and the Denver Post. At East High School in Denver she and Jenne contributed their art talents to the school’s and by their senior year were co-art editors of the Angelus, the 1933 yearbook. At East they studied art with Helen Perry, herself a student of André Lhote in Paris and the Art Institute of Chicago. Her decision to abandon an arts career to teach high school students served as an important example to Ethel and Jenne, who early on had decided to become artists. In a city-wide Denver competition for high school art students Ethel won an eighteenweek art course in 1932-33 to study at the Kirkland School of Art which artist Vance Kirkland had recently established in the Mile High City. Perry encouraged the Magafan twins’ talent, exposing them to the work of Matisse, Picasso and Cézanne and introducing them to local artists and architects like Frank Mechau and Jacques Benedict whom she invited to speak in her high school art classes. She paid the modest tuition for Ethel and Jenne to study composition, color, mural designing and painting at Mechau’s School of Art in downtown Denver in 1933-34. In the summer of 1934 and for a time in 1936 they apprenticed with him at his studio in Redstone, Colorado. When they returned to Denver in 1934 with no family breadwinner to support them, their mother insisted that they have real jobs so they worked as fashion artists in a Denver department store. When Jenne won the Carter Memorial Art Scholarship ($90.00) two years later, she shared it with Ethel so that both of them could enroll in the Broadmoor Art Academy (now the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center) where they studied with Mechau. When the scholarship money ran out after two months, he hired them as his assistants. Along with Edward (Eduardo) Chavez and Polly Duncan, they helped him with his federal government mural commissions. At the Fine Arts Center Ethel also studied with Boardman Robinson and Peppino Mangravite, who hired her and Jenne in 1939 to assist him in his New York studio with two murals commissioned for the post office in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Like their Denver high school art teacher, Robinson also stressed the need to draw from nature in order to "feel" the mountains, which later become the dominant subject matter of Ethel’s mature work after World War II. Mechau trained her and her sister in the complex process of mural painting while they studied at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, teaching them the compositional techniques of the European Renaissance masters. This also involved library research for historical accuracy, small scale drawing, and Page 2 of 4 the hand-making of paints and other supplies. Ethel recalled that their teacher "was a lovely man but he was a hard worker. He drove us. There was no fooling around." Her apprenticeship with Mechau prepared her to win four national government competitions, beginning at age twenty-two, for large murals in U.S. post offices: Threshing – Auburn, Nebraska (1938), Cotton Pickers – Wynne, Arkansas (1940), Prairie Fire – Madill, Oklahoma (1940), and The Horse Corral – South Denver, Colorado (1942). In preparation for their commissions Ethel and her sister made trips around the country to pending mural locations, driving their beat-up station wagon, dressed in jeans and cowboy boots with art supplies and dogs in tow. She and Jenne combined their talents in the mural, Mountains in Snow, for the Department of Health and Human Services Building in Washington, DC (1942). A year later Ethel executed her own mural, Andrew Jackson at the Battle of New Orleans, January 8, 1814, for the Recorder of Deeds Building, also in Washington, DC. Her first mural commission, Indian Dance, done in 1937 under the Treasury Department Art Project for the Senate Chamber in the United States Capitol, has since disappeared. Ethel and her sister lived and worked in Colorado Springs until 1941 when their residence became determined by the wartime military postings of Jenne’s husband, Edward Chavez. They moved briefly to Los Angeles (1941-42) and then to Cheyenne, Wyoming, while he was stationed at Fort Warren, and then back to Los Angeles for two years in 1943. While in California, Ethel and Jenne executed a floral mural for the Sun Room of the Beverly Hills Hotel and also painted scenes of the ocean which they exhibited at the Raymond and Raymond Galleries in Beverly Hills. While in Los Angeles they met novelist Irving Stone, author of Lust for Life, who told them about Woodstock, as did artists Arnold Blanch and Doris Lee (both of whom previously taught at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center school. In summer of 1945 Ethel, her sister and brother-in-law drove their station wagon across the country to Woodstock which became their permanent home. A year later Ethel married artist and musician, Bruce Currie, whom she met in Woodstock. In 1948 with the help of the GI Bill they purchased an old barn there that also housed their individual studios located at opposite ends of the house. The spatial arrangement mirrors the advice she gave her daughter, Jenne, also an artist: "Make sure you end up with a man who respects your work…The worst thing for an artist is to be in competition with her husband." In 1951 Ethel won a Fulbright Scholarship to Greece where she and her husband spent 1951-52. In addition to extensively traveling, sketching and painting the local landscape, she reconnected with her late father’s family in the area of Messinia on the Peloponnese peninsula in southern Greece. At the same time, her sister Jenne accompanied Chavez on his Fulbright Scholarship to Italy where they spent a productive year painting and visiting museums. Shortly after returning home, Jenne’s career was cut tragically short when she died of a cerebral hemorrhage at age thirty-six. It deeply affected Ethel whose own work took on a somber quality for several years conveyed by a darkish palette, as seen in her tempera painting, Aftermath (circa 1952). In the 1940s Ethel and her sister successfully made the important transition from government patronage to careers as independent artists. Ethel became distinguished for her modernist landscapes. Even though Ethel became a permanent Woodstock resident after World War II, from her childhood in Colorado she retained her love of the Rocky Mountains, her "earliest source of my lifelong passion for mountain landscape." She and her husband began returning to Colorado for annual summer camping trips on which they later were joined by their daughter, Jenne. Ethel did many sketches and drawings of places she found which had special meaning for her. They enabled her to recall their vital qualities which she later painted in her Woodstock studio, conveying her feeling about places remembered. She also produced a number of watercolors and prints of the Colorado landscape that constituted a departure from the American Scene style of her earlier paintings. Her postwar creative output collectively belongs to the category of landscape abstractionists as described by author Sheldon Cheney, although to a greater or lesser degree her work references Colorado’s mountainous terrain. She introduced a palette of stronger pastels in her paintings such as two temperas, Evening Mountains from the 1950s and Springtime in the Mountains from the early 1960s. In 1968 she was elected an Academician by the National Academy of Design in New York. Two years later, based on results of her many summer trips to Colorado, the U.S. Department of the Interior invited her to make on-the-spot sketches of the western United States, helping to document the water resources development and conservation efforts by the Department of the Interior. Her sketches were exhibited at the National Gallery in Washington, DC, and then sent on a national tour by the Smithsonian Institution. Similarly, her previous work as a muralist earned her a final commission at age sixty-three for a 12 by 20 foot Civil War image, Grant in the Wilderness, installed in 1979 in the Chancellorsville Visitors Center at the Fredericksburg National Military Park in Virginia. In the 1970s, too, she taught as Artist-in-Residence at Syracuse University and at the University of Georgia in Athens. Her many awards include, among others, the Stacey Scholarship (1947); Tiffany Fellowship (1949); Fulbright Grant (1951-52, in Greece with her husband); Tiffany Fellowship (1949); Benjamin Altman Landscape Prize, National Academy of Design (1955); Medal of Honor, Audubon, Artists (1962); Henry Ward Granger Fund Purchase Award, National Academy of Design (1964); Childe Hassam Fund Purchase Award, American Academy of Arts and Letters (1970); Silver Medal, Audubon Artists (1983); Champion International Corporation Award, Silvermine Guild, New Canaan, Connecticut (1984); John Taylor Award, Woodstock Artists Association, Woodstock, New York (1985); Harrison Cady...

Masks And Flowers, vintage original 1984 oil painting on board by Edward Marecak (1919-1993), semi abstract, cubist style painting of tribal mas...

Comanche Dance at San Ildefonso Pueblo (New Mexico). Etching and drypoint, artist's proof from an edition of 50 prints. Presented in a custom frame, outer dimensions measure 22 ¼ x 18 ½ x ½ inches. Image size is 11 ¾ x 14 ½ inches. Print 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: Gene (Alice Geneva) Kloss is considered one of America’s master printmakers. She was born in Oakland, California and established herself as an artist on the West coast. Kloss was introduced to etching by Perham Nahl while at UC Berkley. She graduated in 1924, and in 1925 married poet Phillips Kloss. In her late twenties, Kloss moved to Taos, New Mexico and began her life’s work of the New Mexican landscape and peoples. It was at this time that she received national acclaim. Her artwork exudes an unmistakable content and style. Enchanted by the architecture, mountainous landscapes and rituals of the inhabitants, Kloss captured the beauty of the Southwest and surrounding areas. Her style was bold yet deftly simple, masterfully expressing the elusive Southwestern light...

Charles Bunnell original vintage 1941 signed painting from the artist's Black and Blue Series, Abstract Structure style. Watercolor, Ink and Charcoal on paper in colors of black, wh...

'Gem Mining Company', lithograph by Arnold Ronnebeck from 1932. Colorado mining scene with several mining buildings amongst the mountains. Presented in...

"The Chicken", is ink on paper by Denver artist Edward Marecak (1919-1993) from the 1940's of an abstract depiction of a chicken in black and red. Presented in a custom black frame, outer dimensions measure 23 ¾ x 19 ¾ inches. Image size measures 15 ¾ x 11 ½ inches. Drawing is clean and in very good condition - please contact us for a detailed condition report. Provenance: Estate of the Artist, 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, foreshadowed the output of his entire Colorado-based career, distinguished by a dramatic use of color, intricacy of execution and attention to detail contributing to their visual impact. He once observed, "Each time I start a new painting I always fool myself by saying this time keep it simple and not get entangled with such complex patterns, color and design; but I always find myself getting more involved with richness, color and subject matter." An idiosyncratic artist proficient in oil, acrylic, watercolor, gouache and casein, he did not draw upon Colorado subject matter for his work, unlike many of his fellow painters in the state. Instead he used Midwest landscape imagery, bringing to life in it witches and spirits adapted from the Slovakian folk tales he heard growing up in Ohio. A number of his paintings depict winter witches derived from the Slovak custom in the Tatra Mountains of burning an effigy of the winter witch in the early spring to banish the memory of a hard winter. The folk tale element imparts a dream-like quality to many of his paintings. A devote of Greek mythology, he placed the figures of Circe, Persephone, Sybil, Hera and others in modern settings. The goddess in Persephone Brings a Pumpkin to her Mother, attired as a Midwestern farmer’s daughter, heralds the advent of fall with the pumpkin before departing to spend the winter season in the underworld. Train to Olympus, the meeting place of the gods in ancient Greece, juxtaposes ancient mythology with modernity creating a combination of whimsy and thought-provoking consideration for the viewer. Voyage to Troy #1 alludes to the ancient city that was the site of the Trojan Wars, but has a contemporary, autobiographical component referencing the harbor of the Aleutian Islands recaptured from the Japanese during World War II. In the 1980s Marecak used the goddess Hera in his painting, Hera Contemplates Aspects of the Art Nouveau, to comment on art movements in the latter half of the twentieth century Marecak’s love of classical music and opera, which he shared with his wife and to which he often listened while painting in his Denver basement studio, is reflected in Homage of Offenbach, an abstract work translating the composer’s musical colors into colorful palette. Pace, Pace, Mio Dio, the title of his earliest surrealist painting, is a soprano aria from Verdi’s opera, La Forza del Destino (The Force of Destiny or Fate, a favorite Marecak subject). His Queen of the Night relates to a character from Mozart’s opera, The Magic Flute. In addition to paintings and works on paper, he produced hooked rugs, textiles and ceramics. He likewise produced designs for ceramics, tableware and furniture created by his wife Donna, an accomplished Colorado ceramist. Both of them generally eschewed exhibitions and galleries, preferring to quietly do their work while remaining outside of the mainstream. He initially exhibited at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center in 1948 receiving a purchase award. The following year he had his first one-person show of paintings and lithographs at the Garrett Gallery in Colorado Springs. In the 1950s and early 1960s he participated in group exhibitions at the Print Club (Philadelphia); Amarillo Public Library (Texas); annual Blossom Festival Show (Canon City, Colorado); Adele Simpson’s "Art of Living" in New York; Denver Art Museum; and the Fox Rubenstein-Serkey Gallery (Denver); but he did not have another one-person show until 1966 at the Denver home of his friends, John and Gerda Scott. They arranged for his first one-person show outside of Colorado held two years later at the Martin Lowitz Gallery in Beverly Hills and Palm Springs, California. That same year his work was featured at the Zantman Galleries in Carmel, California. Thereafter he became an infrequent exhibitor after the 1970s so that his work was rarely seen outside his basement studio. In 1980 he, his wife and Mark Zamantakis exhibited at Denver’s Jewish Community Center, and four years later he had a one-person show at the Studio Gallery in Denver. In 1992 he was included in a group show at the Rule Modern and Contemporary Gallery in Denver, and a year later received a large, posthumous retrospective at the Emmanuel...

"Abstract" is a charcoal on paper drawing by Willard Ayers Nash (1898-1942) of an abstracted landscape scene. Presented in a custom black frame measuring 22 x 20 x ¾ inches. Image size measures 14 ½ x 12 ¾ inches. Drawing is clean and 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: Willard Ayer Nash Born Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1897 Died Albuquerque, New Mexico, 1942 Biography courtesy of Owings-Dewey Fine Art Willard Nash was frequently referred to as “the American Cézanne”. Like the French Post-Impressionist Cézanne, Nash created form with color and did wonderful work with shadows. Prior to his arrival in New Mexico, Nash painted in a formal, academic style that he learned while studying at the Detroit School of Fine Arts. However, under the tutelage of Andrew Dasburg, a fellow Santa Fe...

"Acoma Pueble (New Mexico) is a gouache on paper painting by Wolfgang Pogzoba (1936-1982) from 1978 of a landscape and an adobe home over a cliff side in the town of Acoma Pueblo, NM. Presented in a custom frame, outer dimensions measure 22 ⅜ x 25 inches. Image size is 12 x 15 inches. The Acoma Pueblo is located approximately 60 miles west of Albuquerque, New Mexico. 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: Wolfgang Pogzeba...

'Duet', acrylic, crayon and paper collage on canvas painting by Margo Hoff (1910-2008) from 1960-70. Painted in colors of pink, blue, purple, and gray. Presented as a wrapped canvas ...

"A Small City Park", acrylic and watercolor on paper by Denver artist Edward Marecak (1919-1993) of an abstract park broken into four quadrants, separated by brown and white striped borders with different shaped ponds. Inspired by City Park in Denver, Colorado where the artist frequented. Presented framed with all archival materials, outer dimensions measure 21 ¾ x 18 ¾ inches. Image size measures 12 x 15 inches. Painting is clean and in good 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, foreshadowed the output of his entire Colorado-based career, distinguished by a dramatic use of color, intricacy of execution and attention to detail contributing to their visual impact. He once observed, "Each time I start a new painting I always fool myself by saying this time keep it simple and not get entangled with such complex patterns, color and design; but I always find myself getting more involved with richness, color and subject matter." An idiosyncratic artist proficient in oil, acrylic, watercolor, gouache and casein, he did not draw upon Colorado subject matter for his work, unlike many of his fellow painters in the state. Instead he used Midwest landscape imagery, bringing to life in it witches and spirits adapted from the Slovakian folk tales he heard growing up in Ohio. A number of his paintings depict winter witches derived from the Slovak custom in the Tatra Mountains of burning an effigy of the winter witch in the early spring to banish the memory of a hard winter. The folk tale element imparts a dream-like quality to many of his paintings. A devote of Greek mythology, he placed the figures of Circe, Persephone, Sybil, Hera and others in modern settings. The goddess in Persephone Brings a Pumpkin to her Mother, attired as a Midwestern farmer’s daughter, heralds the advent of fall with the pumpkin before departing to spend the winter season in the underworld. Train to Olympus, the meeting place of the gods in ancient Greece, juxtaposes ancient mythology with modernity creating a combination of whimsy and thought-provoking consideration for the viewer. Voyage to Troy #1 alludes to the ancient city that was the site of the Trojan Wars, but has a contemporary, autobiographical component referencing the harbor of the Aleutian Islands recaptured from the Japanese during World War II. In the 1980s Marecak used the goddess Hera in his painting, Hera Contemplates Aspects of the Art Nouveau, to comment on art movements in the latter half of the twentieth century Marecak’s love of classical music and opera, which he shared with his wife and to which he often listened while painting in his Denver basement studio, is reflected in Homage of Offenbach, an abstract work translating the composer’s musical colors into colorful palette. Pace, Pace, Mio Dio, the title of his earliest surrealist painting, is a soprano aria from Verdi’s opera, La Forza del Destino (The Force of Destiny or Fate, a favorite Marecak subject). His Queen of the Night relates to a character from Mozart’s opera, The Magic Flute. In addition to paintings and works on paper, he produced hooked rugs, textiles and ceramics. He likewise produced designs for ceramics, tableware and furniture created by his wife Donna, an accomplished Colorado ceramist. Both of them generally eschewed exhibitions and galleries, preferring to quietly do their work while remaining outside of the mainstream. He initially exhibited at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center in 1948 receiving a purchase award. The following year he had his first one-person show of paintings and lithographs at the Garrett Gallery in Colorado Springs. In the 1950s and early 1960s he participated in group exhibitions at the Print Club (Philadelphia); Amarillo Public Library (Texas); annual Blossom Festival Show (Canon City, Colorado); Adele Simpson’s "Art of Living" in New York; Denver Art Museum; and the Fox Rubenstein-Serkey Gallery (Denver); but he did not have another one-person show until 1966 at the Denver home of his friends, John and Gerda Scott. They arranged for his first one-person show outside of Colorado held two years later at the Martin Lowitz Gallery in Beverly Hills and Palm Springs, California. That same year his work was featured at the Zantman Galleries in Carmel, California. Thereafter he became an infrequent exhibitor after the 1970s so that his work was rarely seen outside his basement studio. In 1980 he, his wife and Mark Zamantakis exhibited at Denver’s Jewish Community Center, and four years later he had a one-person show at the Studio Gallery in Denver. In 1992 he was included in a group show at the Rule Modern and Contemporary Gallery in Denver, and a year later received a large, posthumous retrospective at the Emmanuel...

Oil stick on paper titled "Barn Side with Sliding Doors" by George Vander Sluis (1915-1984) of a grey wooden barn with two windows as well as two r...

Watercolor and ink on paper of an abstract composition of brown, orange and blue shapes between black parallel lines throughout the the piece by Herbert Bayer (1900-1985). Presented in a custom black frame with all archival materials. Framed dimensions measure 17 ⅞ x 22 ⅝ x 1 inches. Image size is 10 ¼ x 15 ½ inches. Painting is clean and 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: Herbert Bayer enjoyed a versatile sixty-year career spanning Europe and America that included abstract and surrealist painting, sculpture, environmental art, industrial design, architecture, murals, graphic design, lithography, photography and tapestry. He was one of the few “total artists” of the twentieth century, producing works that “expressed the needs of an industrial age as well as mirroring the advanced tendencies of the avant-garde.” One of four children of a tax revenue officer growing up in a village in the Austrian Salzkammergut Lake region, Bayer developed a love of nature and a life-long attachment to the mountains. A devotee of the Vienna Secession and the Vienna Workshops (Wiener Werkstätte) whose style influenced Bauhaus craftsmen in the 1920s, his dream of studying at the Academy of Art in Vienna was dashed at age seventeen by his father’s premature death. In 1919 Bayer began an apprenticeship with architect and designer, Georg Schmidthamer, where he produced his first typographic works. Later that same year he moved to Darmstadt, Germany, to work at the Mathildenhöhe Artists’ Colony with architect Emanuel Josef Margold of the Viennese School. As his working apprentice, Bayer first learned about the design of packages – something entirely new at the time – as well as the design of interiors and graphics of a decorative expressionist style, all of which later figured in his professional career. While at Darmstadt, he came across Wassily Kandinsky’s book, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, and learned of the new art school, the Weimar Bauhaus, in which he enrolled in 1921. He initially attended Johannes Itten’s preliminary course, followed by Wassily Kandinsky’s workshop on mural painting. Bayer later recalled, “The early years at the Bauhaus in Weimar became the formative experience of my subsequent work.” Following graduation in 1925, he was appointed head of the newly-created workshop for print and advertising at the Dessau Bauhaus that also produced the school’s own print works. During this time he designed the “Universal” typeface emphasizing legibility by removing the ornaments from letterforms (serifs). Three years later he left the Bauhaus to focus more on his own artwork, moving to Berlin where he worked as a graphic designer in advertising and as an artistic director of the Dorland Studio advertising agency. (Forty years later he designed a vast traveling exhibition, catalog and poster -- 50 Jahre Bauhaus -- shown in Germany, South America, Japan, Canada and the United States.) In pre-World War II Berlin he also pursued the design of exhibitions, painting, photography and photomontage, and was art director of Vogue magazine in Paris. On account of his previous association with the Bauhaus, the German Nazis removed his paintings from German museums and included him among the artists in a large exhibition entitled Degenerate Art (Entartete Kunst) that toured German and Austrian museums in 1937. His inclusion in that exhibition and the worsening political conditions in Nazi Germany prompted him to travel to New York that year with Marcel Breuer, meeting with former Bauhaus colleagues, Walter Gropius and László Moholy-Nagy to explore the possibilities of employment after immigration to the United States. In 1938 Bayer permanently relocated to the United States, settling in New York where he had a long and distinguished career in practically every aspect of the graphic arts, working for drug companies, magazines, department stores, and industrial corporations. In 1938 he arranged the exhibition, “Bauhaus 1919-1928” at the Museum of Modern Art, followed later by “Road to Victory” (1942, directed by Edward Steichen), “Airways to Peace” (1943) and “Art in Progress” (1944). Bayer’s designs for “Modern Art in Advertising” (1945), an exhibition of the Container Corporation of America (CAA) at the Art Institute of Chicago, earned him the support and friendship of Walter Paepcke, the corporation’s president and chairman of the board. Paepcke, whose embrace of modern currents and design changed the look of American advertising and industry, hired him to move to Aspen, Colorado, in 1946 as a design consultant transforming the moribund mountain town into a ski resort and a cultural center. Over the next twenty-eight years he became an influential catalyst in the community as a painter, graphic designer, architect and landscape designer, also serving as a design consultant for the Aspen Cultural Center. In the summer of 1949 Bayer promoted through poster design and other design work Paepcke’s Goethe Bicentennial Convocation attended by 2,000 visitors to Aspen and highlighted by the participation of Albert Schweitzer, Arthur Rubenstein, Jose Ortega y Gasset and Thornton Wilder. The celebration, held in a tent designed by Finnish architect Eero Saarinen, led to the establishment that same year of the world-famous Aspen Music Festival and School regarded as one of the top classical music venues in the United States, and the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies in (now the Aspen Institute), promoting in Paepcke’s words “the cross fertilization of men’s minds.” In 1946 Bayer completed his first architecture design project in Aspen, the Sundeck Ski Restaurant, at an elevation of 11,300 feet on Ajax Mountain. Three years later he built his first studio on Red Mountain, followed by a home which he sold in 1953 to Robert O. Anderson, founder of the Atlantic Richfield Company who became very active in the Aspen Institute. Bayer later designed Anderson’s terrace home in Aspen (1962) and a private chapel for the Anderson family in Valley Hondo, New Mexico (1963). Transplanting German Bauhaus design to the Colorado Rockies, Bayer created along with associate architect, Fredric Benedict, a series of buildings for the modern Aspen Institute complex: Koch Seminar Building (1952), Aspen Meadows guest chalets and Center Building (both 1954), Health Center and Aspen Meadows Restaurant (Copper Kettle, both 1955). For the grounds of the Aspen Institute in 1955 Bayer executed the Marble Garden and conceived the Grass Mound, the first recorded “earthwork” environment In 1973-74 he completed Anderson Park for the Institute, a continuation of his fascination with environmental earth art. In 1961 he designed the Walter Paepcke Auditorium and Memorial Building, completing three years later his most ambitious and original design project – the Musical Festival Tent for the Music Associates of Aspen. (In 2000 the tent was replaced with a design by Harry Teague.) One of Bayer’s ambitious plans from the 1950s, unrealized due to Paepcke’s death in 1960, was an architectural village on the outskirts of the Aspen Institute, featuring seventeen of the world’s most notable architects – Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer, I.M. Pei, Minoru Yamasaki, Edward Durrell Stone and Phillip Johnson – who accepted his offer to design and build houses. Concurrent with Bayer’s design and consultant work while based in Aspen for almost thirty years, he continued painting, printmaking, and mural work. Shortly after relocating to Colorado, he further developed his “Mountains and Convolutions” series begun in Vermont in 1944, exploring nature’s fury and repose. Seeing mountains as “simplified forms reduced to sculptural surface in motion,” he executed in 1948 a series of seven two-color lithographs (edition of 90) for the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center. Colorado’s multi-planal typography similarly inspired Verdure, a large mural commissioned by Walter Gropius for the Harkness Commons Building at Harvard University (1950), and a large exterior sgraffito mural for the Koch Seminar Building at the Aspen Institute (1953). Having exhausted by that time the subject matter of “Mountains and Convulsions,” Bayer returned to geometric abstractions which he pursued over the next three decades. In 1954 he started the “Linear Structure” series containing a richly-colored balance format with bands of sticks of continuously modulated colors. That same year he did a small group of paintings, “Forces of Time,” expressionist abstractions exploring the temporal dimension of nature’s seasonal molting. He also debuted a “Moon and Structure” series in which constructed, architectural form served as the underpinning for the elaboration of color variations and transformations. Geometric abstraction likewise appeared his free-standing metal sculpture, Kaleidoscreen (1957), a large experimental project for ALCOA (Aluminum Corporation of America) installed as an outdoor space divider on the Aspen Meadows in the Aspen Institute complex. Composed of seven prefabricated, multi-colored and textured panels, they could be turned ninety degrees to intersect and form a continuous plane in which the panels recomposed like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. He similarly used prefabricated elements for Articulated Wall, a very tall free-standing sculpture commissioned for the Olympic Games in Mexico...

1935 American Modernist watercolor on paper by Frank "Pancho" Gates (1904-1998). An abstract scene of a mining town in the mountains, completed in colors of red, green, yellow, and black. Presented in a custom frame with all archival materials, outside dimensions measure 14 ¼ x 17 ¼ inches. Image size measures 8 ¾ x 11 ¾ inches. Painting is clean and in good condition, has had restoration work - please contact us for a detailed condition report. Expedited and international shipping is available - please contact us for a quote. About the Artist: A Colorado modernist artist and theater set designer, he grew up in Edgewater, Colorado, near the Manhattan Beach Theater and the winter quarters of the Denver Post’s Sells-Floto Circus which he frequented as a youngster. These two places introduced him early on to the theater. Additionally, his father toured the United States in a wire walking act with the Barnum and Bailey Circus. Gates began his association with the theater in 1919 when just out of high school. He initially worked with scenic artist, Jack Stein, at the old Tabor Theater in the Tabor Grand Opera House (demolished in 1964) in downtown Denver. Soon after that, he became an assistant scenic artist to George Bradford Ashworth, a famous New York stage set designer, who during the summer designed sets for the Elitch Gardens Theater in northwest Denver. Gates later produced the sets there until 1928. He was offered a scholarship to Colorado A & M College (now Colorado State University) in Fort Collins but declined because of his growing commitment to the theater. He followed his tenure at Elitch’s with positions at the Denham Theater in Denver and the Palm Theater in Pueblo. Upon returning to Denver, he became a free-lance artist for studios producing scenery for stage shows at the city’s Tabor, Denver, Paramount, Alladin, Rivoli, Broadway, Orpheum and Empress Theaters. He moved to California, perfecting his craft at the Pasadena Playhouse, a training school for young actors and actresses pursuing stardom in the movies. Later associated with the Technicolor Corporation, he helped to produce the film used in early color movies such as Becky Sharp (1935) and the Garden of Allah...

Lithograph by Kenneth Miller Adams (1897-1966) titled "Card Players 16/100" circa 1959. Interior scene with several male figures sitting around a table enjoying a card game. Presented in a black frame with archival materials, outer dimensions measure 25 ⅝ x 31 ¼ x 1 ⅛ inches. Image sight size is 18 ½ x 24 ¼ inches. Print is clean and in 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: Kenneth Adams was born in Kansas, and first started his art career in Topeka during 1913. He studied with artist, G.M. Stone, who became the basis for his formal education that began three years later at the Art Institute of Chicago. Adams served in WWI, and when he was discharged, he moved to New York City to study at the Art Students League. Soon after completing courses there, Adams moved abroad to study Italian and French art. In 1924, Adams was back in Kansas, where his friend Andrew Dasburg encouraged him to move to New Mexico. Adams settled in Taos, and remained there for the next twelve years. He was the youngest and last member of the Taos Society...

'X Marks the Spot' is an acrylic and pastel on paper by Denver artist Edward Marecak from the 1960s. Abstract mixed media painting painted in colors of black, white, and purple. Pres...

'Façade' is an ink and acrylic painting by Denver artist Edward Marecak circa 1960s. Abstract mixed media painting completed in colors of black, pink, gray, and white. Presented in a...

Oil on board painting by Paul Kauvar Smith (1893-1977) of a still life of flowers on a table in an interior scene with a mirror in the background. American Modernist still life painting with zinnias and abstract paintings in an artists studio. Presented framed, outer dimensions measure 27 ⅝ x 31 ¾ x 1 ⅛ inches. Image size is 19 ½ x 23 ½ inches. Painting is clean and in very good vintage 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: In 1915, Paul Kauver Smith studied commercial art and design at the St. Louis School of Fine Art for two years. His studies were interrupted by World War I during which he served as a corporal in the U.S. Army. After the war he returned to the School of Fine Art and also studied at the Washington University School of Fine Arts in St. Louis with Fred G. Carpenter, himself a student of Jean-Paul Laurens at the Colarossi Academy in Paris. Carpenter was known as a marvelous colorist who "thought every inch of a painting should be fascinating…and should be as interesting close up as from a distance." His approach is reflected in many of Smith’s paintings, both representational and abstract in style, done later in Colorado. In 1921, Smith relocated to Denver where he studied for two years at the Denver Academy of Fine and Applied Arts, formerly located in Brinton Terrace on 18th Street in Denver’s Capitol Hill neighborhood. His teacher was John E. Thompson, another important influence as a pioneer of modernism in Denver. The Academy hired Smith as an instructor in 1923 and that same year the Denver Art Museum included his work for the first time in its 29th annual juried exhibition. He later had two solo shows at the museum, which added his work to its Anne Evans Collection. In 1959 the museum reproduced Houses at Victor, for its Western Heritage Exhibition catalog. During the year of 1928 he witnessed the Articles of Incorporation of the Denver Artists Guild, comprising most of the city’s professional artists. He also belonged to the American Artists Professional League, also organized in 1928 by fifteen members of the Salmagundi Club in New York to protect artists’ interest and promote traditional American art. He was one of some two dozen Colorado artists designated to participate in the Public Works of Art Program (PWAP, 1933-34), the first federally-sponsored program for artists during the Great Depression. Around 1928 Smith became the "Hermit of Stuart Street," and remained a life-long bachelor. One painting, View from My Window, depicts his immediate neighborhood. Living for more than thirty years at 1039 Stuart Street in West Denver, he gave up creature comforts that most people take for granted to have the freedom to devote his life to the pursuit of art. In the first twenty-five years of his career, his paintings focused on the Colorado landscape and its mining towns with their decaying buildings as relics of the past. His piece, Miner’s House at Victor, Colorado illustrates the description of his work in this genre as described by Denver artist and art writer, Arneill Downs, "The jewel-like shapes and colors the artist uses gives the most decrepit objects style. The decaying buildings of ghost towns, grouped together on canvas, glow like a patchwork quilt." Smith described his technique as "I start lean and finish fat." He worked first with turpentine as a medium and ended up with pure pigment put on with a palette knife. In addition to Colorado scenes...

Oil on canvas painting by Charles Ragland Bunnell (1897-1968) circa 1928-1929 of a Manitou, Colorado with a view of Pikes Peak. Early 20th century mountain landscape painting. Presen...

"Untitled (Taos, New Mexico)" is an abstract oil on canvas by James Meek (b. 1928) from 1975 with a rich golden-brown and stark horizontal, parallel lines in blue and orange that con...

Mid 20th Century oil on artist board of a white house near Watsonville, California. 1950s landscape painting with house and trees. Presented in a...

Oil on board painting by George Vander Sluis (1915-1984) titled Storm Over Victor (Colorado Mountain Town) from 1946. WPA Era Mountain Landscape wi...

Depression era watercolor painting by Charles Ragland Bunnell (1897-1968) titled "The Way War First Comes" from 1940 of an outdoor village scene. Presented in a custom black frame wi...

Brown ceramic pot with white parallel lines and etchings throughout by 20th Century artist Claude Conover. Narrow opening at the top, signed and titled on the base. Dimensions measure at 16 inches height and 16 inches in diameter. Piece is clean and in very good vintage condition - please contact us for a detailed condition report. Provenance: Private collection Expedited and international shipping is available - please contact us for a quote. About the Artist: Claude Conover worked for 30 years as a commercial designer before turning to ceramics. By the 1960s he was devoting himself full time to his pots. He exhibited in 14 May Shows; all told his work was shown in 47 exhibitions at museums and arts centers around the country, some traveling internationally. Many regional patrons have made these hand-built stoneware pots -most off-white-some rough, some smooth, part of their home environment. Conover is considered a member of the Cleveland School; a term first coined by Elrick Davis in a 1928 article for the Cleveland Press...

Burnished crayon and acrylic on paper by Edward Marecak (1919-1993) titled The Garden. 1960s abstract mixed media painting in shades of yellow, pink, and blue. Presented in a custom ...

Vintage lithograph titled "Ruins of Central City 31/70" is a modernist landscape with decaying buildings and mountains by Vance Hall Kirkland, from 1935. Presented in a custom black frame with archival materials, outer dimensions measure 25 ⅞ x 29 ⅜ x ⅝ inches. Image sight size is 14 x 17 ¾ inches. Painting is clean and in very good vintage 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: Variously referred to as the "Father of Modern Colorado Painting", "Dean of Colorado Artists", and "Colorado’s pre-eminent artist," Kirkland was an inventive, visionary painter who spent fifty-two years of his fifty-four-year career in Denver. Of the approximately 1,200 paintings he created, about 550 from the first half of his career (1927-1953) are water-based media: acquarelle, gouache, casein and egg tempera, with a few oils. In the latter half of his career (1953-1981) he used oil and his unique oil and water mixture. He also produced five hundred drawings and some ten prints, mostly lithographs on stone, while also engaged in teaching full-time for most of the period. To show people "something they have never seen before and new ways to look at things," he felt he needed to preserve his artistic freedom. Consequently, he chose to spend his entire professional career in Denver far removed from the established American art centers in the East and Midwest. "By minding my own business and working on my own," he said, "I think it was possible to develop in this part of the country… I’ve developed my kind of work [and] I think my paintings are stronger for having worked that way." The geographical isolation resulting from his choice to stay in Colorado did not impede his creativity, as it did other artists, but in fact contributed to his unique vision. The son of a dentist, who was disappointed with his [son’s] choice of art as a career, Kirkland flunked freshman watercolor class in 1924 at the Cleveland School of Art (now the Cleveland Institute of Art) for putting colors into his landscapes that did not exist in nature and for competing colors. Not dissuaded, he won first prize for his watercolors in his junior and senior years. [While in Cleveland,] he studied with three influential teachers. Henry Keller, included in the prestigious New York Armory Show in 1913, introduced him to designed realism which he later used in his Colorado landscapes in the 1930s and 1940s. His other teachers were Bill Eastman, who studied with Hans Hofmann and appreciated all the new movements in modern art, and Frank Wilcox, a fine watercolorist. While a student at the Cleveland School of Art, Kirkland concurrently took liberal arts courses at Western Reserve and the Cleveland School of Education and taught two freshman courses in watercolor and design, receiving his diploma in painting from the school in 1927 by doing four years of work in three. The following year he received a Bachelor of Education in Art degree from the same institution. In 1929 he assumed the position of founding director of the University of Denver’s School of Art, originally known as the Chappell School of Art. He resigned three years later when the university reneged on its agreement to grant its art courses full recognition toward a Bachelor of Arts degree. His students prevailed on him to continue teaching, resulting in the Kirkland School of Art which he opened in 1932 at 1311 Pearl Street in Denver. The building, where he painted until his death in 1981, formerly was the studio of British-born artist, Henry Read, designer of the City of Denver Seal and one of the original thirteen charter members of the Artists’ Club of Denver, forerunner of the Denver Art Museum. The Kirkland School of Art prospered for the next fourteen years with its courses accredited by the University of Colorado Extension Center in Denver. The teaching income from his art school and his painting commissions helped him survive the Great Depression. The U.S. Treasury Department’s Section of Fine Arts commissioned from him two post office murals, Cattle Roundup (1938, Eureka, Kansas), and Land Rush (1940, Sayre, Oklahoma). He also did murals for several Denver clients: the Gerald Hughes mansion (1936, later demolished), Arthur Johnson home (1936-37, Seven Drinks of Man), Albany Hotel (1937, later demolished), Neustetter’s Department Store (1937, "History of Costume," three of five saved in 1987 before the building interior was demolished in advance of its condo conversion), and the Denver Country Club (1945, partially destroyed and later painted over). In 1953 the Ford Times, published by the Ford Motor Company, commissioned Kirkland along with fellow Denver artists, William Sanderson and Richard Sorby, to paint six watercolors each for the publication. Their work appeared in articles [about] Colorado entitled, "Take to the High Road" (of the Colorado Rockies) by Alicita and Warren Hamilton. Kirkland sketched the mountain passes and high roads in the area of Mount Evans, Independence Pass near Aspen, and Trail Ridge Road in Rocky Mountain National Park. In 1946 Kirkland closed his art school when the University of Denver rehired him as director of its School of Art and chairman of the Division of Arts and Humanities. In 1957 the University gave him its highest honor – the "University Lecturer Award." When he retired in 1969 as Professor of Art Emeritus to become a full-time painter, the School of Arts was the university’s largest undergraduate department. In 1971 Governor John Love presented Kirkland the State of Colorado Arts and Humanities Award. In addition to his dual positions as artist and teacher in Denver for more than half a century, he served the Denver Art Museum as a trustee, chairman of the accessions committee, member of the exhibitions committee, curator of European and American art, and honorary curator of painting and sculpture. He also won the battle with the museum’s old guard to establish a department of modern and contemporary art. Additionally, he was one of the fifty-two founding members of the Denver Artists Guild which included most of Colorado’s leading artists who greatly contributed to the state’s cultural history. Kirkland developed five major painting periods during his life encompassing various series with some chronological overlap: Designed Realism (1927-1944); Surrealism (1939-1954); Hard Edge Abstraction, including the Timberline Abstraction Series (1947-1957); Abstract Expressionism with four series – Nebulae, Roman, Asian, and Pure Abstractions (1951-1964); and the Dot Paintings with five series – Energy of Vibrations, Mysteries, Explosions, Forces, and Pure Abstractions (1963-1981). Nevadaville (1931), a watercolor, belongs to Kirkland’s initial period of Designed Realism. Adapting nature by redesigning the realism he saw on location in Colorado allowed him to be "more concerned with the importance of the painting rather than the importance of the landscape." He noted that the rhythms his Cleveland teacher, Henry Keller, "found in nature created a certain movement in his paintings… [that moved] away from the static element of a lot of realistic, representational painting." Kirkland, along with fellow watercolorist Elisabeth Spalding, were some of the first Denver artists interesting themselves in Colorado’s nineteenth-century mining towns west of Denver. They offered an alternative to the overwrought cowboy and Indian subject matter of the previous generation; while the human and architectural components of the mining towns provided a welcome break from the predominant nineteenth-century landscape tradition. Vibrations of Two Yellows in Space (1970), one of Kirkland’s small subseries of "Open Sun Paintings," occupies the final phase in his first series of dot paintings, Energy of Vibrations in Space (1963-1972). Many pieces in the series incorporate his unique mixture of oil paint and water which he developed in the early 1950s. The work in the subseries – a challenge to the viewer’s optic nerve – constitutes his contribution to the international realm of Op Art. Recalling the theory of pulsating galaxies and the universe, he used dots applied with dowels of different sizes to surround and leave round open spaces letting the gradient background show through. Because of the color contrast between the two, the "suns" either recede into the background or jump out in the foreground, creating the powerful pulsing effect. During his lifetime he assembled on a limited budget an extensive collection of fine and decorative art and furniture. His collecting passion dated from his student days when he used his prize money from the Cleveland School of Art to purchase a watercolor by William Eastman and a now-famous set of Russian musician figures by Alexander Blazys, both of whom were his professors. After Kirkland’s death, the Denver Art Museum received a large bequest that included paintings by Roberto Matta, Gene Davis, Charles Burchfield, and Richard Anuszkiewicz (the two latter-named also alumni of the Cleveland Institute of Art); prints by Arthur B. Davies, Roberto Matta, Pablo Picasso, and Robert Rauschenberg; and a sculpture by Ossip Zadkine. Kirkland posthumously was the subject of a television documentary, "Vance Kirkland’s Visual Language," aired on over one hundred PBS television stations (1994-96), and in 1999 a six-scene biographical ballet choreographed by Martin Friedmann with scenario provided by Hugh Grant, founder and director of the Kirkland Museum of Fine & Decorative Art in Denver. Historic Denver also posthumously honored Kirkland as part of the Colorado 100. From 1997 to 2000 Kirkland’s solo exhibition was hosted by thirteen European museums: Fondazione Muduma, Milan; Sala Parpalló Museum Complex, València; Stadtmuseum, Düsseldorf; Frankfurter Kunstverein; Museum of Modern Art, Vienna; Kiscelli Múzeum and the Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest; Czech Museum of Fine Arts, Prague; National Museum, Warsaw; State Gallery of the Art of Poland, Sopot/Gdańsk, National Museum of Art, Kaunas, Lithuania; Latvian Foreign Art Museum, Riga; and the State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg. Solo Exhibitions: Denver Art Museum (1930, 1935, 1939-40, 1942, 1972, 1978-retrospective, 1988, 1998); Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center (1943); Knoedler & Company, New York (1946, 1948, 1952); Pogzeba Art Gallery, Denver (1959); Galleria Schneider, Rome (1960); Birger Sandzén Memorial Gallery, Lindsborg, Kansas (1964-65,1977); Genesis Galleries, Ltd., New York (1978); Valhalla Gallery, Wichita, Kansas (1979); Inkfish Gallery, Denver (1980); Colorado State University, Fort Collins (1981- memorial exhibition); Boulder Center for the Visual Arts (1985); University of Denver, Schwayder Art Gallery (1991). Group Exhibitions (selected): "May Show," Cleveland Museum of Art (1927-28); "Western Annuals," Denver Art Museum (1929-1957, 1964, 1966, 1968, 1971); "International Exhibition of Watercolors, Pastels, Drawings and Monotypes," Art Institute of Chicago (1930-1946); "Abstract and Surrealist American Art," Art Institute of Chicago (1947-48, traveled to ten other American museums); "Midwest Artists Exhibition," Kansas City Art Institute (1932, 1937, 1939-1942); Dallas Museum of Art (1933, 1960); San Diego Museum of Art (1941); "Artists for Victory," Metropolitan Museum of Art (1942); "United Nations Artists in America," Argent Galleries, New York (1943); "California Watercolor Society," Los Angeles County Museum (1943-1945); "Survey of Romantic Painting," Museum of Modern Art, New York (1945); New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe (1945, 1951); Knoedler & Company, New York (1946-57; co-show with Max Ernest, 1950; co-show with Bernard Buffet, 1952); Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha (1948, 1956); Philbrook Art Center, Tulsa, Oklahoma (1951); "Contemporary American Painting," University of Illinois, Urbana (1952); University of Utah, Salt Lake (1952-53); Oakland Art Museum (1954-55); "Reality and Fantasy, 1900-54," Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (1954); "Art U.S.A.," Madison Square Garden, New York (1958); Roswell Museum and Art Center, New Mexico (1961); Burpee Art Museum, Rockford, Illinois (1965-68); University of Arizona Art...

Untitled (Navajo Family) is a watercolor on paper painting of four female figures and an infant by 20th Century artist Lloyd Moylan in orange, brown, and green. Presented in a custom gold frame, outer dimensions measure 28 ⅜ x 22 ¼ x 1 ¾ inches. Image sight size is 20 ⅞ x 14 ⅞ inches. Painting is clean and in very good vintage 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: From St. Paul, Minnesota, Lloyd Moylan was a painter who specialized in Southwest Indian...

Watercolor on paper painting by Eve (Van Ek) Drewelowe titled "The Champagne Cascades, Crescendos, Crashes" from 1945. An abstract landscape scene of a waterfall with white, yellow, and black. Presented in a custom gold frame, outer dimensions measure 43 ¾ x 33 ¾ x ½ inches. Image size is 29 ¾ x 19 ¾ inches. Painting is clean and in very good vintage 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: A painter and sculptor, Eve Drewelowe was the eighth of twelve children and grew up on a farm with a tomboyish spirit. Her farm duties did not permit her to take art classes in her youth that she later felt would have hindered the development of her artistic style. Although her father died when she was eleven, he imparted to her reverence for nature and a true love of the earth, values later reflected in her western oil and watercolor landscapes. She attended the University of Iowa at Iowa City on scholarship, receiving her B.A. degree in graphic and plastic arts in 1923. After graduation and against the advice of her art professor, Charles Atherton Cumming who believed that matrimony ended a woman’s painting career, she married fellow student Jacob Van Ek. While he pursued his doctorate in political science, she enrolled in graduate school at the University of Iowa for her M.A. degree in painting and the history of art. At that time her alma mater was one of the few universities in the United States offering an advanced fine arts degree, and she was its first graduate, receiving her degree in 1924. That year the Van Eks moved to Boulder, Colorado, where Jacob had obtained a position as an assistant professor at the University of Colorado. Five years later he became the Dean of the College of Arts & Sciences, a position he held until 1959. Eve briefly studied at the University. In 1927 and 1928 she taught part-time at the University’s School of Engineering and a decade later summer courses (1936 and 1937) in the University’s Department of Fine Arts. In 1926 she became a charter member of the Boulder Artists Guild and participated in its inaugural exhibition. Like many American artists of her generation, she helped foster an art tradition outside the established cultural centers in the East and Midwest. Her professional career spanning six decades largely was spent in and around Boulder. There she produced more than 1,000 works of art in oil, watercolor, pen and ink, and other media in styles of impressionism, regionalism, and abstraction. She devoted a considerable part of her work to Colorado, Wyoming, and Arizona subject matter depicting colorful and fantastic landscapes pulsating with energy and untouched by humans. Excited by what she saw, the wide open spaces made her feel like a modern-day pioneer. In discussing her work, she once said, “What really motivated me in my youth, in my growth, in maturity was my desire to captivate everything. I put on canvas an eagerness to possess the wonder of nature and beauty of color and line – to encompass everything, not to let anything escape.” Before World War II she and her husband took two international trips that had far-reaching consequences for her career, exposing her to the arts and cultures of countries in Asia and Europe. The first in 1928-29 was an extensive excursion in the Far East for which her husband had received a scholarship to study and report on the socioeconomics of Japan, Korea, China, the Philippines, the Dutch East Indies and India. The year after their return she had her first solo show at the University of Colorado’s library gallery. Discussing the twenty-six oils and sixteen ink drawings on view representing sixteen different countries, the Christian Science Monitor reviewer noted: “The pictures have a wide range and are far from being stereotyped in subject matter, being personal in choice. The ink-brush drawings are spontaneous, well balanced, and striking in their masses, giving the sense of having been done on the spot.” Her second trip with her husband and a party from the Bureau of University Travel had a four-month itinerary that included England, Denmark, Finland, Russia, Turkey, Greece, Italy, and France. It yielded seventeen oils and twenty-six ink-wash drawings which she exhibited in a February 1936 solo show at the Boulder Art Association Gallery. Her creative output in the 1930s attracted the attention of the critic for the Parisian Revue des Arts whose observations were translated and printed in the Boulder Daily Camera on June 10, 1937: To present our readers Eve Van Ek [at that time she signed her work with her married name] …is to give them an opportunity to admire a talent of multiple aspects. The eclecticism of her art passes from a rich skill in forceful oil painting of fine strokes of precision best seen perhaps in her treatment of mountain subjects, of craggy cliffs hewn as in nature, through pen and ink or lithographic crayon design, water color, and occasionally embroidery and sculpture, to the delicate perfection of detail of the miniature. The lofty mountains of Colorado have supplied her with extremely interesting subjects for study; she knows how to represent in an entirely personal way the varying scenes and the curious restlessness of the terrain. While pursuing her art, she also was a dean’s wife. The responsibilities attached to that position proved too restrictive, contributing to a grave illness. She underwent an operation in 1940 at the Mayo Clinic for a gastric polyp, a dangerous procedure at that time. Although she had expected to come back to Boulder “in a box,” the surgery proved successful. Depicting her painful hospital stay in a watercolor, Reincarnation, she reflected on the transformative experience of piecing her life back together. That October she received encouragement from the review of her solo exhibition at the Argent Gallery in New York written by Howard Devree, art critic for the New York Times who said: “The whole exhibition is stimulating…Boats, fences and even flowers in the canvases of Eve Van Ek…seem struggling endlessly to escape from the confines of the frame.” Her watercolor, Crosses, Central City (1940), illustrates her work described in the New York review. The composition pulsates with energy conveyed by the modernist technique of juxtaposing the scene’s various angles, distorting the shapes and positions of the structures, additionally highlighting them with bright colors. The telephone poles at various angles represent crosses figuratively marking a Way of the Cross symbolized by the wooden stairs...

Original western landscape painting of trees near a ranch in Colorado by Irene Fowler, one of Colorado's preeminent women artists of the 20th century. Presented in a custom frame, outer dimensions measure 17 ½ x 23 ½ x 1 ½ inches. Image size is 11 ½ x 17 ¼ 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: An important figure in the development of Denver as an artistic city, Irene Fowler was a public school teacher and founding member of the Denver Artist’s Guild (now the Colorado Artist’s Guild) in addition to being a prolific artist. She exhibited in Denver at the Schlier Gallery (where she had a solo exhibition), at the Chappell House, the University Club...

Yacht Races, Grand Lake, Colorado, vintage 1933 original signed lithograph by Arnold Ronnebeck (1885-1947). Numbered 23 in an edition of 25 prints. Black and white coastal, marine subject. Presented in an archival mat, outer dimensions measure 20 x 16 ⅛ inches. Image size measures 13 ¾ x 9 ⅛ inches (sight). Custom framing services are available. Print is clean and in very good vintage condition - please contact us for a detailed condition report. Provenance: Estate of Arnold Ronnebeck About the Artist: Modernist sculptor, lithographer and museum administrator, Rönnebeck was a noted member of European and American avant-garde circles in the early twentieth century before settling in Denver, Colorado, in 1926. After studying architecture at the Royal Art School in Berlin for two years beginning in 1905, he moved to Paris in 1908 to study sculpture with Aristide Maillol and Émile-Antoine Bourdelle. While there he met and befriended American modernist painter, Marsden Hartley, of whom he sculpted a bronze head that was exhibited at the Salon d’Automne in Paris in 1912 and the following year at Hartley’s solo show of paintings at Alfred Stieglitz’s Gallery 291 in New York. A frequent guest of Gertrude Stein’s Saturday "evenings" in Paris, she described Rönnebeck as "charming and always invited to dinner," along with Pablo Picasso, Mabel Dodge (Luhan) and Charles Demuth. After the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Rönnebeck returned to Germany where he served as an officer in the German Imperial Army on the front lines. Twice wounded, including in the Battle of Marne in France, Kaiser Wilhelm II awarded him the Iron Cross. During the war Hartley fell in love with Rönnebeck’s cousin, Lieutenant Karl von Freyburg, who was killed in combat. As a tribute to Freyburg, Hartley created Portrait of a German Officer (1914) now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. After the war Rönnebeck traveled in Italy with German writer, Max Sidow, and German poet, Theodor Daubler, doing a series of drawings of Positano and the Amalfi Coast that formed the basis for his lithographs on the subject. The death of his finacée, the young American opera singer Alice Miriam in 1922 and his own family’s increasing financial problems in post-World War I Germany led him to immigrate to the United States in 1923. After living briefly with Miriam’s family in Washington, DC, he moved to New York where he became part of the avant-garde circle around Alfred Stieglitz. His essay, "Through the Eyes of a European Sculptor," appeared in the catalog for the Anderson Gallery exhibition, "Alfred Stieglitz Presents Seven Americans: 159 Paintings, Photographs & Things, Recent & Never Publicly Shown, by Arthur G. Dove, Marsden Hartley, John Marin, Charles Demuth, Paul Strand, Georgia O’Keeffe, Alfred Stieglitz." In New York Rönnebeck began producing Precisionist-style lithographs of the city’s urban landscapes which he termed "living cubism." Some of them were reproduced in Vanity Fair magazine. Through Stieglitz he met Erhard Weyhe head of the Weyhe Gallery who, with its director Carl Zigrosser, arranged Rönnebeck’s first solo American exhibition in May 1925 at the gallery in New York. Comprising some sixty works – prints, drawings and sculpture – the show subsequently traveled on a thirteen-month tour of major American cities. Until the end of his life, the gallery represented him, along with other American artists Adolf Dehn, Wanda Gag, Rockwell Kent, J.J. Lankes, Louis Lozowick, Reginald Marsh and John Sloan. In the summer of 1925, as the guest of Mabel Dodge Luhan, Rönnebeck first saw Taos, New Mexico, which Marsden Hartley had encouraged him to visit. It was there that he met his future wife, Louise Emerson, an easel painter and muralist. A year later they were married in New York before relocating to Denver. He served as director of the Denver Art Museum from 1926 to 1930 where he invited Marsden Hartley to lecture on Cézanne’s art in 1928. Rönnebeck fostered the development of the museum’s collection of American Indian art and the curation of modernist art exhibitions. In addition to his work at the museum, he was professor of sculpture at the University of Denver’s College of Fine and Applied Arts from 1929 to 1935, and wrote a weekly art column in the Rocky Mountain News. His best known Denver sculptures from the late 1920s in bronze, copper, stone, wood and terra cotta include a reredos, The Epiphany, at St. Martin’s Chapel; The History of Money (six panels) at the Denver National Bank; The Ascension at the Church of Ascension; and the William V. Hodges Family Memorial at Fairmount Cemetery. At the same time he did a series of terra cotta relief panels for La Fonda Hotel in Santa Fe, New Mexico. In the 1930s his bas-relief aluminum friezes of stylized Pueblo and Hopi Indian Kachina masks...

"In Soquel (California)" is an original oil on board painting by Jon Blanchette (1908-1987) circa 1955. Farm landscape with figure hanging laundry and silo, painted in colors of blue...

Oil on board. Surrealist/Modernist painting with a female nude reaching into a wood burning stove, hilly landscape with barn, houses, still life with a bowl of fruit, stormy sky and a small male figure. Presented in a custom frame, outer dimensions measure 29 ¼ x 35 x ¾ inches. Image size is 24 ¼ x 30 inches. Provenance: Private Collection, Colorado About the Artist: The daughter of a classically-trained pianist mother and a concert violinist father, she had an intellectually stimulating upbringing enhanced by Christian Science values. After graduation from high school in Hannibal, Missouri, she enrolled in the College of Education at Butler University in Indianapolis, Indiana in 1919. Soon, however, she gave up the idea of becoming a teacher and entered at the John Herron Art Institute (whose collections are now part of the Indianapolis Museum of Art). The Institute’s early faculty included artists from the Hoosier Group trained at the Royal Academy in Munich, Germany, who educated artists in the realist tradition. True’s teacher and mentor, William Forsyth, gave her an excellent foundation in drawing and the technical aspects of painting and composition. When the failure of her father’s business in the early 1920s forced her to start earning a living, the Herron Institute hired her as an instructor for its art school, allowing her to support herself while she finished her studies. Following graduation from the Institute in 1925, she received a one-year scholarship to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. Her former teacher William Forsyth wrote in his recommendation: "I can say without exaggeration that she was one of the best pupils I ever had during the twenty-five years I was a teacher at the John Herron Art School." At the Academy, she studied with Daniel Garber, an impressionist landscape painter associated with the New Hope art colony, and Hugh Breckenridge noted for his bold palette and expressionistic use of color, as well as the abstract work he started doing by 1922. She also studied briefly in the art department at Columbia University, perhaps in1928 when she produced some of her New York street scenes. From Pennsylvania, she returned to Indiana teaching for several years at Shortridge High School in Indianapolis. She also began showing her work at several area venues, including the Herron Institute, the Artists of Indiana, and the Hoosier Salon held early on in Chicago. Among the Salon’s exhibitors were Gustave Baumann, Victor Higgins, and Olive Rush, who either were Indiana natives or whose careers included connections with the state. By the 1920s all three of them had become associated with the Santa Fe and Taos art colonies. In the summer of 1928 True experienced both New Mexico communities and Southwest culture firsthand with Francis Hoar and her husband Clement Trucksess, her friends from the Herron Institute. They had relocated to Boulder in 1927 and were teaching at the University of Colorado. She recorded in her journal her initial reaction to the New Mexico landscape: "Might I preserve on canvas my thrill and deep feeling of the grand things of nature I have beheld today….There’s a wideness in God’s country that expresses peace to me." Inspired by her trip, True created a group of watercolors for her solo exhibition in 1928 at the Lieber Gallery in Indianapolis. They marked a transition from the realist style she learned at the Herron Institute to the more modernist, semi-abstract one she soon adopted. In the summer of 1929, she accepted an instructor’s position on the faculty of the Fine Arts Department at the University of Colorado (CU) in Boulder. She after that joined the Art Association of Boulder founded in 1923 by Mrs. Jean Sherwood, an art patron and club woman who relocated from Chicago to teach at the Boulder Chautauqua. Sherwood helped convince Dean Fred B...

Oil on canvas painting by mid 20th century Denver artist Paul K. Smith. Semi abstract interior scene of an artists studio with flowers, paint supplies, ...

Original signed watercolor on paper painting by Charles Ragland Bunnell from 1940 of Cripple Creek or Victor Mine located in Colorado. Mine buildings wit...

Original vintage 1940s Modernist Landscape painting of Red Rocks Park, Colorado by Vance Kirkland (1904-1981). Titled, "Ed (Hicks) Sketching at Red Rocks". This regionalist mountain landscape painting is set near Red Rocks Park, Morrison, Colorado (just west of Denver). The figure in the painting is of Kirkland's friend, Ed Hicks. Watercolor on paper, signed and dated, January 1943, lower left and titled verso by the artist. Painted in colors of red, brown, blue, and green. Presented in a custom gold leaf frame, outer dimensions measure 34 ¾ x 42 ⅞ x 1 ¼ inches. Painting as shown within the mat and frame measures 21 x 29 inches. Provenance: Private Collection, Denver, Colorado About the Artist: Variously referred to as the “Father of Modern Colorado Painting,” “Dean of Colorado Artists” and “Colorado’s pre-eminent artist,” Kirkland was an inventive, visionary painter who spent fifty-two years of his fifty-four year career in Denver. Of the approximately 1,200 paintings he created, about 550 from the first half of his career (1927-1953) are water-based media: acquarelle, gouache, casein and egg tempera, with a few oils. In the latter half of his career (1953-1981) he used oil and his unique oil and water mixture. He also produced five hundred drawings and some ten prints, mostly lithographs on stone, while also engaged in teaching full-time for most of the period. To show people “something they have never seen before and new ways to look at things,” he felt he needed to preserve his artistic freedom. Consequently, he chose to spend his entire professional career in Denver far removed from the established American art centers in the East and Midwest. “By minding my own business and working on my own,” he said, “I think it was possible to develop in this part of the country… I’ve developed my kind of work [and] I think my paintings are stronger for having worked that way.” The geographical isolation resulting from his choice to stay in Colorado did not impede his creativity, as it did other artists, but in fact contributed to his unique vision. The son of a dentist, who was disappointed with his [son’s] choice of art as a career, Kirkland flunked freshman watercolor class in 1924 at the Cleveland School of Art (now the Cleveland Institute of Art) for putting colors into his landscapes that did not exist in nature and for competing colors. Not dissuaded, he won first prize for his watercolors in his junior and senior years. [While in Cleveland,] he studied with three influential teachers. Henry Keller, included in the prestigious New York Armory Show in 1913, introduced him to designed realism which he later used in his Colorado landscapes in the 1930s and 1940s. His other teachers were Bill Eastman, who studied with Hans Hofmann and appreciated all the new movements in modern art, and Frank Wilcox, a fine watercolorist. While a student at the Cleveland School of Art, Kirkland concurrently took liberal arts courses at Western Reserve and the Cleveland School of Education and taught two freshman courses in watercolor and design, receiving his diploma in painting from the school in 1927 by doing four years of work in three. The following year he received a Bachelor of Education in Art degree from the same institution. In 1929 he assumed the position of founding director of the University of Denver’s School of Art, originally known as the Chappell School of Art. He resigned three years later when the university reneged on its agreement to grant its art courses full recognition toward a Bachelor of Arts degree. His students prevailed on him to continue teaching, resulting in the Kirkland School of Art which he opened in 1932 at 1311 Pearl Street in Denver. The building, where he painted until his death in 1981, formerly was the studio of British-born artist, Henry Read, designer of the City of Denver Seal and one of the original thirteen charter members of the Artists’ Club of Denver, forerunner of the Denver Art Museum. The Kirkland School of Art prospered for the next fourteen years with its courses accredited by the University of Colorado Extension Center in Denver. The teaching income from his art school and his painting commissions helped him survive the Great Depression. The U.S. Treasury Department’s Section of Fine Arts commissioned from him two post office murals, Cattle Roundup (1938, Eureka, Kansas), and Land Rush (1940, Sayre, Oklahoma). He also did murals for several Denver clients: the Gerald Hughes mansion (1936, later demolished), Arthur Johnson home (1936-37, Seven Drinks of Man), Albany Hotel (1937, later demolished), Neustetter’s Department Store (1937, “History of Costume,” three of five saved in 1987 before the building interior was demolished in advance of its condo conversion), and the Denver Country Club (1945, partially destroyed and later painted over). In 1953 the Ford Times, published by the Ford Motor Company, commissioned Kirkland along with fellow Denver artists, William Sanderson and Richard Sorby, to paint six watercolors each for the publication. Their work appeared in articles [about] Colorado entitled, “Take to the High Road” (of the Colorado Rockies) by Alicita and Warren Hamilton. Kirkland sketched the mountain passes and high roads in the area of Mount Evans, Independence Pass near Aspen, and Trail Ridge Road in Rocky Mountain National Park. In 1946 Kirkland closed his art school when the University of Denver rehired him as director of its School of Art and chairman of the Division of Arts and Humanities. In 1957...

Oil on paper geometric painting in purple, red, and blue by 20th century artist, Ralph Anderson. Presented in a custom hardwood frame with all archival materials. Outer dimensions ...

Mid Century Modern pen and pencil on paper drawing by James Meek (b. 1928). Geometric abstract drawing. Presented in a custom frame with archival materials, outer dimensions measure 25 x 19 ¼ x 1 ½ inches. Image size is 22 ¼ x 16 ½ inches. Piece is clean and in very good vintage condition - please contact us for a complete condition report. Expedited and international shipping is available - please contact us for a quote. About the Artist: Southwestern artist James Meek was an active member of the Taos, New Mexico art...

Central City (Colorado) 3/25 is a lithograph by Arnold Ronnebeck from 1933 depicting a city scene with buildings. Presented in a custom black frame, outer dimensions measure 24 ½ x 19 ⅝ x ⅝ inches. Image size is 14 ¾ x 10 inches. Piece is clean and in very good vintage condition - please contact us for a complete condition report. Provenance: Private collection, Denver Expedited and internship shipping 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 canvas painting from 1946 by Colorado/Woodstock modernist Jenne Magafan (1916-1952) titled 'Deserted Street'. Single figure portrayed in a ghost town with buildings and teleph...

20th century modernist watercolor painting depicting an old mine and houses in Cortez, Colorado by Richard K. Ayers with colors of blue, green, gold, and brown. Presented in a custom frame with all archival materials, outer dimensions measure 36 ½ x 30 ½ x ¾ inches. Image size is 24 ¾ x 18 ¾ inches. Painting is clean and in very good vintage condition. About the Artist: Richard K. Ayers (1921-2003) studied art at Miami University...

Untitled (Still Life with Pink Roses) is an oil on canvas painting by David Spivak (1893-1932) . Presented in a custom gold frame, outer dimensions measure 19 ⅞ x 24 x 1 ¼ inches. Image size is 12 x 16 inches. Painting is clean and in very good vintage condition - please contact us for a complete condition report. Provenance: Private Collection, Denver, Colorado Expedited and international shipping is available - please contact us for a quote. About the Artist: Born in Philadelphia in 1893, David and his family moved to Denver in 1895 due to his mother’s ill health. He attended elementary and high school in Denver, and was briefly enrolled at the University of Denver, where his mother taught Russian. He was drawn to art at a young age, however the University of Denver did not offer a degree program in fine art, and art education in the Denver area was lacking. Spivak’s father, Dr. Charles Spivak, prominent Denver physician and founder of the Jewish Consumptives Relief Society, was concerned about his son’s career choice, hoping David would instead follow in his footsteps. David’s mother, however, recognized her son’s artistic talent and felt it needed nurturing. In 1912, Spivak moved to Chicago to attend the Chicago Art Institute where he worked under John Morton and Wellington Reynolds (1865 – 1949). After a two-year stint in Chicago, Spivak spent 3 years in New York attending the Arts Students League where he studied under Robert Henri, a prominent Ashcan School artist. Between 1914 and 1917, Spivak mostly painted portraiture, and Henri’s artistic influence can be seen in Spivak’s work during this period. Spivak was drafted into the Army in 1918 because of World War I. He spent a year stationed at Kelly Field in San Antonio, Texas. In 1919, he moved back to Denver in and began working as an artist. His dedication to art extended beyond art making into education. He taught at various high schools throughout Denver, as well as the Denver Academy of Applied Arts, the Denver Art Institute, and the Chappell School of Art. Spivak was also a central figure in the art community, helping to develop the Denver Art Museum, as a founding member, along with Dean Babcock and Albert Bancroft, of the Denver Artists’ Guild in 1928 (where he served as president at the time of his death), and as the head of fine art exhibits at the Colorado State Fair. He believed that bringing art into the lives of all people, regardless of status or class, was paramount. In his short life, Spivak was quite prolific, producing over 300 paintings between 1914 and 1932. He excelled in landscape painting and portraiture, and his style was rooted in impressionism. Spivak’s contemporaries who also painted in an impressionistic manner include Robert Graham, Frank Vavra...

Modernist watercolor on paper painting by Lloyd Mylan of two women sitting amongst an exterior landscape. Painted in colors of pink, orange, blue, and green. Presented in a custom gold frame, outer dimensions measure 24 ¾ x 30 ⅜ x 1 ¾ inches. Image sight size is 13 ⅝ x 19 ½ inches. Painting is clean and 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: Lloyd Moylan studied at the Minneapolis Art Institute, the Art Students League in New York, and the Broadmore Academy in Colorado Springs. Moylan later became the Curator of the Museum of Navajo Ceremonial Art in Santa Fe, New Mexico. During his lifetime, Moylan made numerous trips to Arizona and New Mexico where he sketched and painted the Hispanic and Indian population. He specialized in Southwest Indian...

Oil on board painting by Sister Mary Norbert from 1938 of a summer mountain landscape with lush trees and a farm house. Colors of green, brown, purple, blu...

1950s oil on board painting by George Cecil Carter portraying a modernist couple, thought to be Alfred Stieglitz & Georgia O'Keefe. Presented in a custom frame, outer dimensions measure 20 ⅝ x 13 ½ x 1 ⅞ inches. Image sight size is 16 ⅞ x 9 ⅞ inches. Painting is clean and in very good vintage condition - please contact us for a complete condition report. Provenance: Private Collection, Denver Colorado Expedited and international shipping is available - please contact us for a quote. About the Artist: George Cecil Carter was born in Oklahoma in 1908 and became a noted Colorado abstract expressionist alongside contemporaries including Al Wynne, Mary Chenoweth...

Bronze sculpture titled "Chama" by Edward (Eduardo) Arcenio Chavez (1917-1995) from circa 1966 presented on a wooden base. Overall dimensions measure 7 ¼ H x 10 W x 3 ¼ De inches. Sculpture is 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: Born in Wagonmound, New Mexico, Eduardo Chavez...

Original signed oil painting by Georgina Klitgaard (1893-1976), a Taos, New Mexico mountain landscape painting with figures walking in a meadow with ...

Oil on board painting by Doris Emrick Lee of a Colorado mountain town landscape in the summer time. Landscape including houses, roads, and telephone poll...

An original modernist still life oil painting by John E. Thompson (1882-1945), table is draped in red cloth and flowers in vase are red, yellow, blue/purple and white with green stem...

Mountain Landscape, Near Colorado Springs, Colorado is a vertical oil on board painting by Mary Cane Robinson. Presented in a custom frame, outer dime...