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Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center opens Charles Bunnell: Rocky Mountain Modern

Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center opens Charles Bunnell: Rocky Mountain Modern an exhibition on view from June 8 – Sept. 15, 2013.

Charles Bunnell Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center
Charles Bunnell Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center

Charles Bunnell attended the Broadmoor Art Academy – precursor to the Fine Arts Center – where he studied under American impressionist Ernest Lawson in 1927 and 1928 and then became an instructor at the prestigious academy in 1929.

He is among the few artists who learned traditional painting at the Academy and later adopted a more purified form of abstraction in his paintings. In his paintings, pure color and shape are the elements through which our ultimate response is sensory, emotional, and intuitive.
In the 1930s, Bunnell painted and taught under the auspices of Depression-era federal art projects, including work as an assistant to master muralist Frank Mechau. By the 1940s and ’50s, his abstract paintings were exhibited with those of New York School artists who had instigated a vigorous post-war transformation of American art that secured an unprecedented shift in art world attention from Europe to America.

Many of the works for this exhibition come from the Jim and Virginia Moffett Collection of Kansas City. This nationally-recognized collection is comprised of a visionary selection of 19th and 20th century Colorado artists and subjects. The Moffetts spend summers in Colorado, and since 1990, have amassed one of the most important collections of Colorado art.

Also included in the exhibition are magnificent paintings, drawings, prints, and archival materials from various collections in Colorado. Kathy Loo, Jim Raughton, Paul and Teresa Harbaugh, Jack Hays and Janice Kennedy, Tracy and Sushe Felix, the Kirkland Museum of Fine and Decorative Art and anonymous lenders have all contributed works and archival materials from various periods in Bunnell’s career. www.csfineartscenter.org