David Cook Galleries

Colorado Modernist landscape, watercolor on paper by Turner B. Messick (1878-1952) from 1938. Tree with houses and mountains in the background, pain...

Vintage Modernist WPA era painting by Arnold Blanch (1896-1968) of a Colorado Landscape, likely near Colorado Springs, Colorado, with green fields, red rocks and mountains in the background under a moody sky. Dominant colors include, green, yellow, red/brown, gray, white and blue. Painting is clean and in good vintage condition - please contact us for a detailed condition report. About the Artist: Arnold Blanch was an illustrator, printmaker, teacher and painter. He was primarily known for his landscape, genre, figurative, realist, and surrealist paintings. Born in Manterville, Minnesota, he was encouraged to study art by his mother, an amateur artist. He began studying at the Minneapolis Art Institute in 1914. In 1916, he received a scholarship to study in New York at the Art Students League. In New York, he studied under Robert Henri, Francis Luis Mora, Boardman Robinson, John Sloan, and Kenneth Hayes Miller. In 1919, Blanch arrived in Woodstock, New York to study at the Art Students League summer school. He married his fellow student Lucile Lundquist, and they settled in Woodstock in 1922 after traveling to France for a year. Blanch remained in Woodstock for more than forty years, until his death. He was an important figure in the Woodstock Artists Association, as he devoted much of his time to maintaining financial and moral support for the Association. Throughout his life, Blanch had more than sixty solo and group exhibits. He was awarded the Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in 1940. In 1962, he had a retrospective at the Krasner Gallery in New York. Blanch's artistic style changed frequently throughout his career. After the 1930's, Blanch's palette became lighter and his subjects became less serious. In the 1930s, after he and his first wife separated, Blanch became romantically involved with artist Doris Lee, and both were influenced by each other's artistic styles for the next thirty years. Blanch was also influenced by the Abstract Expressionists; however, he primarily remained a figurative painter. His last artistic style consisted of shallow pictoral space and tightly arranged structures. ©David Cook Galleries...

WPA era oil on canvas landscape painting by Hayes Lyon (1901-1987) titled 'The Hillside' from 1938. American modernist portrayal of a hillside farm with a b...

Graphite on paper drawing of houses on a hill by Charles Ragland Bunnell (1897-1968) circa 1935. Presented in a custom hardwood frame with all archi...

Oil on canvas painting, titled 'Early Spring' (Thompson's Studio) painted in 1933 and signed by John Edward Thompson (1882-1945). Impressionist style portrayal of the artists studio ...

Original 1939 oil painting by New Mexico modernist, Howard Schleeter (1903-1976), Madonna of the Picture includes a santo of the Virgin Mary, a still life of flowers in a vase and a crucifix. Presented in a custom hand-carved frame, outer dimensions measure 21 x 17 x 2 inches. Image size is 16 x 12 inches. Painting is clean and in very good vintage condition - please contact us for a complete condition report. Provenance: Private Collection, California Expedited and international shipping is available - please contact us for a quote. About the Artist: Howard Schleeter, the son of a commercial artist, studied formally at the Albright Art School in his hometown of Buffalo, New York. However, his studies at Albright were brief and the artist considered himself to be primarily self-taught. He later met Charles Lindbergh while working as an airplane mechanic. However, he soon chose to make his living entirely as an artist and, in 1929, he traveled to New Mexico. The following year he married and the couple made New Mexico their permanent home. Schleeter studied under Brooks Willis during the 1930's and worked in several mediums including gouache, watercolor, oil, scratchboard and engraving. The Great Depression took its toll on Schleeter who occasionally found work digging ditches to make ends meet. In 1936, his financial status greatly improved when he received the first of several commissions from the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Though he worked primarily in abstraction, the five murals he completed for a WPA commission in the Melrose Public School library are realistic depictions of the West. He worked on several more New Deal commissions during the years of 1936 and 1942 in locations including Santa Fe, Clayton, and Washington D.C. During this time, Schleeter furthered his income by teaching at a Las Vegas, New Mexico, art gallery during 1938 and 1939. In 1945, the Encyclopedia Britannica referred to Schleeter as "an artist's artist." He also received local attention when he became one of the first artists chosen by Peter Hurd and Jane Mabry for his significant contributions to New Mexico's art. Schleeter taught at the University of New Mexico during 1950-1951 and 1954. Member: Art League of New Mexico Exhibited: Kansas Art Institute, 1936-1938; New Mexico State Fair, 1939 (prize); New Mexico Art League, 1939 (prize); Cedar City, New Mexico, 1941-1946; Philadelphia Artist Alliance, 1945 (solo); deYoung Memorial Museum, 1946; Art Institute of Chicago, 1947; Museum of New Mexico, Santa Fe, 1951 (purchase prize), 1955 (purchase prize); Vienna, Austria, 1952; Guggenheim Museum, 1954; Karlsruhe Museum, Germany, 1955; Stanford University, 1955 (solo); New Mexico Highlands University, 1957 (purchase prize); Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, 1958; Swope Art Gallery Works Held: A&M College, New Mexico (mural); Art League of New Mexico; Cedar City Institute of Religion; Encyclopaedia Britannica; Miners Hospital, Raton, New Mexico (mural); Museum of New Mexico, Santa Fe; Research Studio, Maitland, Florida; University of New Mexico Further Reading: Artists of 20th-Century New Mexico: the Museum of Fine Arts Collection, Museum of New Mexico Press for the Museum of Fine Arts, Santa Fe, 1992.; The Illustrated Biographical Encyclopedia of Artists of the American West, Peggy and Harold Samuels, Doubleday & Company, Inc., Garden City, New York, 1976.; Taos and Santa Fe: the Artist's Environment, 1882-1942, Van Deren Coke, University of New Mexico Press for the Amon Carter Museum of Western Art, TX and the Art Gallery, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM: 1963.; Treasures on New Mexico Trails: Discover New Deal Art and Architecture: Kathryn A. Flynn ed., Sunstone Press, Santa Fe, NM: 1995.; Who Was Who in American Art 1564-1975: 400 Years of Artists in America, Vol. 1. Peter Hastings Falk, Georgia Kuchen and Veronica Roessler, eds.,Sound View Press, Madison, Connecticut, 1999. 3 Vols. ©David Cook...

Original lithograph by Ross Eugene Braught (1898-1983) titled 'Clear Creek Canyon I (Colorado)' from 1933. Pencil signed by the artist in the lower right margin. Presented in a custom frame with all archival materials measuring 26 ½ x 31 ½ inches, image size is 16 x 23 inches. Clear Creek rises near Loveland Pass...

Lithograph on paper titled 'Mine Near Continental Divide' by Arnold Ronnebeck (1885-1947) from 1933. Depicts a black and white winter scene of a mine in the mountains with snow on the rooftops and hillsides. Presented in a custom frame measuring 18 ¼ x 22 ¼ inches. Image size measures 10 ¼ x 14 ½ inches. Provenance: Estate of the Artist, Arnold Ronnebeck Expedited and international shipping is available - please contact us for a quote. About the Artist: Modernist sculptor, lithographer and museum administrator, Rönnebeck was a noted member of European and American avant-garde circles in the early twentieth century before settling in Denver, Colorado, in 1926. After studying architecture at the Royal Art School in Berlin for two years beginning in 1905, he moved to Paris in 1908 to study sculpture with Aristide Maillol and Émile-Antoine Bourdelle. While there he met and befriended American modernist painter, Marsden Hartley, of whom he sculpted a bronze head that was exhibited at the Salon d’Automne in Paris in 1912 and the following year at Hartley’s solo show of paintings at Alfred Stieglitz’s Gallery 291 in New York. A frequent guest of Gertrude Stein’s Saturday "evenings" in Paris, she described Rönnebeck as "charming and always invited to dinner," along with Pablo Picasso, Mabel Dodge (Luhan) and Charles Demuth. After the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Rönnebeck returned to Germany where he served as an officer in the German Imperial Army on the front lines. Twice wounded, including in the Battle of Marne in France, Kaiser Wilhelm II awarded him the Iron Cross. During the war Hartley fell in love with Rönnebeck’s cousin, Lieutenant Karl von Freyburg, who was killed in combat. As a tribute to Freyburg, Hartley created Portrait of a German Officer (1914) now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. After the war Rönnebeck traveled in Italy with German writer, Max Sidow, and German poet, Theodor Daubler, doing a series of drawings of Positano and the Amalfi Coast that formed the basis for his lithographs on the subject. The death of his finacée, the young American opera singer Alice Miriam in 1922 and his own family’s increasing financial problems in post-World War I Germany led him to immigrate to the United States in 1923. After living briefly with Miriam’s family in Washington, DC, he moved to New York where he became part of the avant-garde circle around Alfred Stieglitz. His essay, "Through the Eyes of a European Sculptor," appeared in the catalog for the Anderson Gallery exhibition, "Alfred Stieglitz Presents Seven Americans: 159 Paintings, Photographs & Things, Recent & Never Publicly Shown, by Arthur G. Dove, Marsden Hartley, John Marin, Charles Demuth, Paul Strand, Georgia O’Keeffe, Alfred Stieglitz." In New York Rönnebeck began producing Precisionist-style lithographs of the city’s urban landscapes which he termed "living cubism." Some of them were reproduced in Vanity Fair magazine. Through Stieglitz he met Erhard Weyhe head of the Weyhe Gallery who, with its director Carl Zigrosser, arranged Rönnebeck’s first solo American exhibition in May 1925 at the gallery in New York. Comprising some sixty works – prints, drawings and sculpture – the show subsequently traveled on a thirteen-month tour of major American cities. Until the end of his life, the gallery represented him, along with other American artists Adolf Dehn, Wanda Gag, Rockwell Kent, J.J. Lankes, Louis Lozowick, Reginald Marsh and John Sloan. In the summer of 1925, as the guest of Mabel Dodge Luhan, Rönnebeck first saw Taos, New Mexico, which Marsden Hartley had encouraged him to visit. It was there that he met his future wife, Louise Emerson, an easel painter and muralist. A year later they were married in New York before relocating to Denver. He served as director of the Denver Art Museum from 1926 to 1930 where he invited Marsden Hartley to lecture on Cézanne’s art in 1928. Rönnebeck fostered the development of the museum’s collection of American Indian art and the curation of modernist art exhibitions. In addition to his work at the museum, he was professor of sculpture at the University of Denver’s College of Fine and Applied Arts from 1929 to 1935, and wrote a weekly art column in the Rocky Mountain News. His best known Denver sculptures from the late 1920s in bronze, copper, stone, wood and terra cotta include a reredos, The Epiphany, at St. Martin’s Chapel; The History of Money (six panels) at the Denver National Bank; The Ascension at the Church of Ascension; and the William V. Hodges Family Memorial at Fairmount Cemetery. At the same time he did a series of terra cotta relief panels for La Fonda Hotel in Santa Fe, New Mexico. In the 1930s his bas-relief aluminum friezes of stylized Pueblo and Hopi Indian Kachina masks...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Original Arnold Ronnebeck (1885-1947) lithograph of a home in Gregory Point, near Central City, Colorado from the 1930s. Edition of 25 printed. Presented in a custom frame, outer dimensions measure 23 ¼ x 18 ½ inches. Image size is 19 ¼ x 13 ¼ inches Print is clean and in very good vintage condition - please contact us for a detailed condition report. Provenance: Estate of Arnold Ronnebeck Expedited and international shipping is available - please contact us for a quote. About the Artist: Modernist sculptor, lithographer and museum administrator, Rönnebeck was a noted member of European and American avant-garde circles in the early twentieth century before settling in Denver, Colorado, in 1926. After studying architecture at the Royal Art School in Berlin for two years beginning in 1905, he moved to Paris in 1908 to study sculpture with Aristide Maillol and Émile-Antoine Bourdelle. While there he met and befriended American modernist painter, Marsden Hartley, of whom he sculpted a bronze head that was exhibited at the Salon d’Automne in Paris in 1912 and the following year at Hartley’s solo show of paintings at Alfred Stieglitz’s Gallery 291 in New York. A frequent guest of Gertrude Stein’s Saturday "evenings" in Paris, she described Rönnebeck as "charming and always invited to dinner," along with Pablo Picasso, Mabel Dodge (Luhan) and Charles Demuth. After the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Rönnebeck returned to Germany where he served as an officer in the German Imperial Army on the front lines. Twice wounded, including in the Battle of Marne in France, Kaiser Wilhelm II awarded him the Iron Cross. During the war Hartley fell in love with Rönnebeck’s cousin, Lieutenant Karl von Freyburg, who was killed in combat. As a tribute to Freyburg, Hartley created Portrait of a German Officer (1914) now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. After the war Rönnebeck traveled in Italy with German writer, Max Sidow, and German poet, Theodor Daubler, doing a series of drawings of Positano and the Amalfi Coast that formed the basis for his lithographs on the subject. The death of his finacée, the young American opera singer Alice Miriam in 1922 and his own family’s increasing financial problems in post-World War I Germany led him to immigrate to the United States in 1923. After living briefly with Miriam’s family in Washington, DC, he moved to New York where he became part of the avant-garde circle around Alfred Stieglitz. His essay, "Through the Eyes of a European Sculptor," appeared in the catalog for the Anderson Gallery exhibition, "Alfred Stieglitz Presents Seven Americans: 159 Paintings, Photographs & Things, Recent & Never Publicly Shown, by Arthur G. Dove, Marsden Hartley, John Marin, Charles Demuth, Paul Strand, Georgia O’Keeffe, Alfred Stieglitz." In New York Rönnebeck began producing Precisionist-style lithographs of the city’s urban landscapes which he termed "living cubism." Some of them were reproduced in Vanity Fair magazine. Through Stieglitz he met Erhard Weyhe head of the Weyhe Gallery who, with its director Carl Zigrosser, arranged Rönnebeck’s first solo American exhibition in May 1925 at the gallery in New York. Comprising some sixty works – prints, drawings and sculpture – the show subsequently traveled on a thirteen-month tour of major American cities. Until the end of his life, the gallery represented him, along with other American artists Adolf Dehn, Wanda Gag, Rockwell Kent, J.J. Lankes, Louis Lozowick, Reginald Marsh and John Sloan. In the summer of 1925, as the guest of Mabel Dodge Luhan, Rönnebeck first saw Taos, New Mexico, which Marsden Hartley had encouraged him to visit. It was there that he met his future wife, Louise Emerson, an easel painter and muralist. A year later they were married in New York before relocating to Denver. He served as director of the Denver Art Museum from 1926 to 1930 where he invited Marsden Hartley to lecture on Cézanne’s art in 1928. Rönnebeck fostered the development of the museum’s collection of American Indian art and the curation of modernist art exhibitions. In addition to his work at the museum, he was professor of sculpture at the University of Denver’s College of Fine and Applied Arts from 1929 to 1935, and wrote a weekly art column in the Rocky Mountain News. His best known Denver sculptures from the late 1920s in bronze, copper, stone, wood and terra cotta include a reredos, The Epiphany, at St. Martin’s Chapel; The History of Money (six panels) at the Denver National Bank; The Ascension at the Church of Ascension; and the William V. Hodges Family Memorial at Fairmount Cemetery. At the same time he did a series of terra cotta relief panels for La Fonda Hotel in Santa Fe, New Mexico. In the 1930s his bas-relief aluminum friezes of stylized Pueblo and Hopi Indian Kachina masks...

Lithograph on paper titled 'Colorado Gold Dredge, Breckenridge' by Arnold Ronnebeck (1885-1947) from 1932. Numbered 15/25. Depicted is a gold dredge in Colorado mining town Breckenridge with a mountain landscape in the background. Presented in a custom frame measuring 17 ¼ x 21 ¼ inches. Image size measures 10 ¼ x 14 ¼ inches. Print is clean and in very good vintage condition - please contact us for a detailed condition report. Provenance: Estate of Arnold Ronnebeck Expedited and international shipping is available - please contact us for a quote. About the Artist: Modernist sculptor, lithographer and museum administrator, Rönnebeck was a noted member of European and American avant-garde circles in the early twentieth century before settling in Denver, Colorado, in 1926. After studying architecture at the Royal Art School in Berlin for two years beginning in 1905, he moved to Paris in 1908 to study sculpture with Aristide Maillol and Émile-Antoine Bourdelle. While there he met and befriended American modernist painter, Marsden Hartley, of whom he sculpted a bronze head that was exhibited at the Salon d’Automne in Paris in 1912 and the following year at Hartley’s solo show of paintings at Alfred Stieglitz’s Gallery 291 in New York. A frequent guest of Gertrude Stein’s Saturday "evenings" in Paris, she described Rönnebeck as "charming and always invited to dinner," along with Pablo Picasso, Mabel Dodge (Luhan) and Charles Demuth. After the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Rönnebeck returned to Germany where he served as an officer in the German Imperial Army on the front lines. Twice wounded, including in the Battle of Marne in France, Kaiser Wilhelm II awarded him the Iron Cross. During the war Hartley fell in love with Rönnebeck’s cousin, Lieutenant Karl von Freyburg, who was killed in combat. As a tribute to Freyburg, Hartley created Portrait of a German Officer (1914) now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. After the war Rönnebeck traveled in Italy with German writer, Max Sidow, and German poet, Theodor Daubler, doing a series of drawings of Positano and the Amalfi Coast that formed the basis for his lithographs on the subject. The death of his finacée, the young American opera singer Alice Miriam in 1922 and his own family’s increasing financial problems in post-World War I Germany led him to immigrate to the United States in 1923. After living briefly with Miriam’s family in Washington, DC, he moved to New York where he became part of the avant-garde circle around Alfred Stieglitz. His essay, "Through the Eyes of a European Sculptor," appeared in the catalog for the Anderson Gallery exhibition, "Alfred Stieglitz Presents Seven Americans: 159 Paintings, Photographs & Things, Recent & Never Publicly Shown, by Arthur G. Dove, Marsden Hartley, John Marin, Charles Demuth, Paul Strand, Georgia O’Keeffe, Alfred Stieglitz." In New York Rönnebeck began producing Precisionist-style lithographs of the city’s urban landscapes which he termed "living cubism." Some of them were reproduced in Vanity Fair magazine. Through Stieglitz he met Erhard Weyhe head of the Weyhe Gallery who, with its director Carl Zigrosser, arranged Rönnebeck’s first solo American exhibition in May 1925 at the gallery in New York. Comprising some sixty works – prints, drawings and sculpture – the show subsequently traveled on a thirteen-month tour of major American cities. Until the end of his life, the gallery represented him, along with other American artists Adolf Dehn, Wanda Gag, Rockwell Kent, J.J. Lankes, Louis Lozowick, Reginald Marsh and John Sloan. In the summer of 1925, as the guest of Mabel Dodge Luhan, Rönnebeck first saw Taos, New Mexico, which Marsden Hartley had encouraged him to visit. It was there that he met his future wife, Louise Emerson, an easel painter and muralist. A year later they were married in New York before relocating to Denver. He served as director of the Denver Art Museum from 1926 to 1930 where he invited Marsden Hartley to lecture on Cézanne’s art in 1928. Rönnebeck fostered the development of the museum’s collection of American Indian art and the curation of modernist art exhibitions. In addition to his work at the museum, he was professor of sculpture at the University of Denver’s College of Fine and Applied Arts from 1929 to 1935, and wrote a weekly art column in the Rocky Mountain News. His best known Denver sculptures from the late 1920s in bronze, copper, stone, wood and terra cotta include a reredos, The Epiphany, at St. Martin’s Chapel; The History of Money (six panels) at the Denver National Bank; The Ascension at the Church of Ascension; and the William V. Hodges Family Memorial at Fairmount Cemetery. At the same time he did a series of terra cotta relief panels for La Fonda Hotel in Santa Fe, New Mexico. In the 1930s his bas-relief aluminum friezes of stylized Pueblo and Hopi Indian Kachina masks...

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...

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...

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

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 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...

"The Vendor of Masques", 1930s modernist painting by Boardman Robinson (1876-1952) of a Mask vendors display with male and female figures (lik...

Georgetown, Colorado, vintage 1938 WPA era ink drawing/painting on paper of a church set in a rocky mountain landscape by Charles Bunnell (1897-1968). Black on a creamy white paper, signed and dated lower right, titled lower left. Presented in a custom frame with all archival materials, outer dimensions measure 16 ¼ x 14 ½ x 1¼ inches. Image size is 7 ¾ x 5 ¾ inches. Drawing is clean and in good vintage condition - please contact us for a detailed condition report. Provenance: Estate of Charles Ragland Bunnell Expedited and international shipping is available - please contact us for a quote. About the Artist: Charles Bunnell developed a love for art as a child in Kansas City, Missouri. Around 1915, Bunnell moved with his family to Colorado Springs, Colorado. He served in World War I and later used his GI Training to study at the Broadmoor Art Academy (later renamed the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center) during 1922 and 1923. In 1922, he married fellow student, Laura Palmer...

Silver Plume, Colorado - near Georgetown, mountain landscape with fall colors, Aspen and Pine trees, river, houses and mountains by early 20th century Co...

Original, signed lithograph titled "Prospector's Cabin" circa 1937 by American Modernist, Archie Musick. WPA era black and white print of a stone cabin among a mountain landscape wit...

Original 1933 drawing, "Pinto" by New Mexico modernist, Hilaire Hiler (1898-1966), black and white line drawing of a Native American Indian figure wearing a feather bonnet headdress on horseback. Ink on vellum, signed lower right. Custom framing is available. Expedited and international shipping is available - please contact us for a quote. About the Artist: Hilaire Hiler was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, and was raised in Providence, Rhode Island. Hiler took art classes as a child at the Rhode Island School of Design. When he was older, Hiler studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Pennsylvania School of Industrial Art, Wharton School of Finance and Commerce, and William Server’s studio. He also studied at the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Denver, Golden State University, and National College in Ontario, Canada. He continued on to France, studying at the University of Paris in 1919. Hiler lived in Paris from 1919-1934, supporting himself as a jazz musician and a piano player for The Jockey Club. Hiler moved back to America in 1934, settling in San Francisco. He was commissioned by the Works Progress Administration to paint murals in the Aquatic Park...

Original vintage 1939 transcendentalist painting by early New Mexico artist, Emil Bisttram (1895-1976) with a stylized cross motif in colors of Pink, ...

Original vintage painting by early Colorado woman artist, Louise Ronnebeck (1901-1980) of a mine in the mountains of Colorado, WPA Era, circ...

Rare WPA era original painting by Colorado/Woodstock modernist, Jenne Magafan (1916-1952). Church in Leadville, 1938 is presented in a custom frame with all archival materials, oute...

Watercolor on paper painting of Cameron's Cove outside of Colorado Springs, Colorado by Charles Ragland Bunnell from the 1930s. Scenic mountain landsc...

Vintage circa 1930 Navajo Trading Post Rug from Chinle, Arizona. Woven of native handspun wool in natural fleece colors of ivory (white) and brown with aniline dyed blue, red and yel...

A blackware jar by San Ildefonso Pueblo potter, Maria Poveka Martinez (1887-1980), signed "Marie" on base. The jar is from circa 1930 and created in the a...

Large vintage Navajo Area Rug weaving from the Hubbell Trading Post in Ganado, Arizona (Southwestern United States). Woven of native hand-spun woo...