Barbara Latham

Saturday Morning (Market, Taos Plaza, New Mexico), 1950s Figural Linocut Print

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...

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...

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

American modern lithograph on paper titled 'Mining Town' signed by artist Robert Beauchamp (1923-1995) featuring a figure walking and a cat sitting on a fence in a mining town. Image...

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

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...

Biographical information on Maurice Robert Dey is hard to find. He was born on 1899 (or maybe 1900), in Switzerland. As an adult he lived and worked in Woodstock, the NY artists' c...

Harold E. Keeler worked in Hollywood as a set designer. That seems especially important here because the Water Fall looks a little as though it could be a woodland stage set -- to me...

The only mention I can find of Evelyn G. Schultz is that she was a charter member of the San Diego Watercolor Society. But the medium of the linocut (here on tan paper) was frequentl...

In this image, Howard Thomas presents the viewer with a domestic interior. The image is dominated by the figure of a black woman, resting her arm on an ironing board. To the right, the tool of her task dangles a chord above a checker tiled floor. Beyond, though a window, neighboring homes fill the landscape. The careful line-work of the linocut adds a sense of expressionism to the scene, but the image nonetheless falls into the Social Realism that captivated most American artists during the Great Depression. This print was published in 1936 as part of the Wisconsin Artists' Calendar for the year 1937, which included 52 original, hand-made prints – one for each week of the year. 6 x 5 inches, image 10 x 7.13 inches, sheet 12.37 x 12.43 inches, frame Entitled "Monday in Wick Haven" lower left (covered by matting) Inscribed "Linoleum Cut" lower center (covered by matting) Artist name "Howard Thomas" lower right (covered by matting) Framed to conservation standards using 100 percent rag matting and museum glass, all housed in a silver gilded moulding. Quaker-born in Ohio, Thomas trained in the Midwest at Ohio State University and the Chicago Art Institute. He taught in the Art Department of the Milwaukee State Teachers College (now University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee) where he became good friends with Carl Holty, Edward Boerner, Robert von Neumann...

Under the Bridge. 1985. Etching and drypoint. 9 1/2 x 12 1/8 (sheet 20 1/16 x 22). Edition 27, #13. Printed on cream wove paper, on the full sheet with deckle edges. A rich impression in excellent condition, housed in an archival folder. The etching has never been matted. Titled and numbered in pencil. by the artist; signed and initialed in pencil by the artist's estate. Provenance: the artist's estate A dramatic view of the lower East Side in New York. Housed in an archival folder awaiting your choice of mat and frame. Painter and printmaker Lawrence Nelson Wilbur...

A modernist lithograph by American artist Stuart Davis. In this cityscape of Paris he begins to show his inclinations towards Cubism, with the slightly skewed perspective and the fla...