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Arnold Rönnebeck"Two Seas and a Moon" Surrealism American Scene WWII Modern WWI Denver WPA Era1943
1943
About the Item
"Two Seas and a Moon" Surrealism American Scene WWII Modern WWI Denver WPA Era
Arnold Ronnebeck (1885 - 1947)
Two Seas and a Moon
30 x 22 1/2 inches
Oil on Canvas, c. 1943
Signed upper left
Unframed
Provenance: Estate of the artist.
Exhibited at Denver Art Museum January 1943 and Santa Barbara Museum of Art June 1943.
From the artist's granddaughter:
Yes, it is surrealist. AR did about 15 paintings, mostly surrealist, in the early 1940s. A review in the Santa Barbara Press Telegram in June 1943 said that it was the Santa Barbara Museum of Art's first surrealist show.
WW2 brought up all sorts of issues for him regarding his experience in WW1. I think, but don't know for sure, that this work has something to do with his lying injured on the battlefield and staring at the moon. He wrote an essay in 1943 entitled "The Moon Stinks" describing the experience.
Concerning the figure. It is funny, all of my guy friends say it is a man. The women all see a woman. So, I don't know. Re the red up top. I always saw it as a woman's red hair. However, based on the idea of the battlefield, it could be blood.
The R-14. I don't know. My guess is it is Ronnebeck and 1914. He was injured in 1914. That is just a guess on my part.
The label with the title on was written by Arnold. There is a tag on a string also, but I don't know what that was for.
The painting will ship from the granddaughter's home.
BIO
Born in Nassau, Germany, Arnold Rönnebeck became a noted sculptor and lithographer and was a strong advocate of modernist art. He traced his lineage back to nobility, and his father was a professor of architecture, a subject that the son studied for several years. Rönnebeck served in the German Imperial Army in World War I, was injured in the line of duty and earned two Iron Crosses. He studied sculpture at the Royal Art School in Berlin and in Munich, and in 1908, moved to Paris where his teachers were Aristide Maillol and Emile Bourdelle. There he was a part of the avant-garde circle of Gertrude Stein, Marsden Hartley and Charles Demuth.
In 1921, still recovering from war wounds, he visited the Italian coastal village of Positano and executed landscape drawings from which he did his earliest prints. However, that subject matter, he also had sculptural focus and described the scenery as “one enormous work of sculpture, houses and rocks seemingly one.”
A year later, his fiancée Alice Miriam, a young American opera singer, died, and this tragedy combined with his family’s increasing financial problems, led him to immigrate to America. In 1923, he arrived in Washington DC and lived briefly with Miriam’s family before moving to New York City. There he became a part of the avant-garde circle around Alfred Stieglitz. Rönnebeck’s prints of the city skyscrapers reflected his fascination with the energy of that cosmopolitan atmosphere and showed his abstract, precisionist style and his emotional responses to that environment.
It was at this time that in addition to being a sculptor, he began to regard himself as a graphic artist. Working from photographs, he executed pencil sketches that served as the basis for his lithographs. Several of his prints were reproduced in Vanity Fair and Vogue magazines.
Through Stieglitz, Rönnebeck met Erhard Weyhe at whose gallery he had his first solo exhibition in April-May 1925. Composed of prints, drawings, and sculpture, the show had sixty pieces expressing subjects that had interested him for the last fifteen years.
That summer, Rönnebeck first went to Taos, where he was a guest of Mabel Dodge Luhan. He was encouraged by Marsden Hartley to visit this artist’s colony, and it was a life-changing experience relative to both his artistic and personal life. He was deeply impressed by the landscape and the native people. He met his future wife, Louise Emerson (1901-1980) whom he married in New York in 1926. The couple returned to New Mexico frequently through the late 1920s and 1930s. Rönnebeck completed a series of terra-cotta wall reliefs of Pueblo ceremonial dances for the public areas of the La Fonda Hotel in Santa Fe.
In 1926, the Rönnebecks settled in Denver, where he became Director of the Denver Art Museum. He resigned that position in 1930, but the couple remained in Colorado where both were active with the lively Denver art community. He continued to execute numerous lithographs of landscapes and townscapes, especially mining towns. Some of his prints were distributed nationally by the American Artists Group.
By 1940, he was deeply discouraged by World War II, which brought back the painful memories of World War I, and his artistic productivity declined. He died in 1947 at age 62, having been very much a part of the art scene of early 20th century America.
- Creator:Arnold Rönnebeck (1885 - 1947)
- Creation Year:1943
- Dimensions:Height: 30 in (76.2 cm)Width: 23 in (58.42 cm)
- Medium:
- Movement & Style:
- Period:
- Framing:Framing Options Available
- Condition:
- Gallery Location:New York, NY
- Reference Number:1stDibs: LU1156214186632
Arnold Rönnebeck
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. After World War I 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. 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. In Colorado, the subject matter of his lithographs became the state’s landscape and its mining towns, as well as Native Americans from the pueblos in neighboring New Mexico. By the early 1930s Colorado’s old mining towns became a popular genre for artists because they were easily accessible, and their architectural components provided a welcome break from the nineteenth-century panoramic landscape tradition and the overwrought cowboy-and-Indian subject matter of the previous generation. As an amateur actor and music enthusiast, Rönnebeck had an additional connection with Central City. In June 1947, some five months before his death, the Denver Art Museum organized a solo exhibition of his sculptures, watercolors and prints. © copyright Stan Cuba for David Cook Galleries
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