The Kirkland Museum of Fine and Decorative Art presents 15 Colorado Artists – Breaking With Tradition, on view through July 31, 2011.
There are 25 lenders of 57 works in this exhibition, to whom we are most grateful. An additional 49 works are from Kirkland Museum for a total of 106 works. A book about the 15 Colorado Artists will soon be published by Kirkland Museum.
It was creeping inexorably across America—modern art! An alarm was sounded by Rocky Mountain News columnist Lee Casey on 11 February 1948: “The influence of decadent Parisians…Picasso and Cezanne…has even been felt in the West. Santa Fe has been damaged by it and Denver has not wholly escaped the blight….In Western art, Western literature and bourbon, I’ll take mine straight.”
Eleven Denver newspaper articles in 1948, along with several in 1949, trumpeted the conflict between “conservative” and “radical” artists. A group of rebel artists calling themselves 15 Colorado Artists broke from the 20-year-old Denver Artists Guild (DAG). Eight were DAG members and seven others were local artists. Ten of “the 15” were fellow professors at the University of Denver. This modernist group requested and got a separate, simultaneous exhibition adjoining the Denver Artists Guild exhibition at the Denver Art Museum, 3 December 1948 to 1 January 1949. Newspaper headlines blared: “Modern vs. Traditional Painting Inspires Denver Artists’ Schism,” “What’s Wrong With These Pictures?” and “Time for Showdown in Artists’ Range War.”
The interest in modern art had been growing for some time in Colorado but, in 1948, lines were drawn in the sand of art styles. The public came in droves to see the two dueling exhibitions. People took sides, arguments ensued and artists called each other names—which were printed in the newspapers. Otto Bach (Director, Denver Art Museum 1944-1974) and Vance Kirkland (Director, School of Art, University of Denver 1929-1932, 1946-1969) said that this was one of the most exciting events of Colorado art history in their lives. It was a magical, seminal moment in Colorado art and emblematic that modern art was becoming widespread in America.
As far back as 1913, the avant-garde Armory Show in New York had a profound impact on academia as well as some artists and dealers, but throughout America there was still a strong resistance to modern art until after World War II. Thomas Hart Benton, for example, rejected the New York-Paris modern art scene and moved back permanently to Kansas City, Missouri, in 1935. He and many other regionalists, such as Alexandre Hogue, Reginald Marsh and Edward Hopper, of the 1920s into the 1940s, concerned themselves with developing an American artistic identity without relying on the European styles so much in vogue at the time. The popularity of Regionalism severely affected the position of American modernists and certainly of Colorado modernists, including the 15 Colorado Artists.
Although 15 Colorado Artists demonstrated that modernist art had become established in Colorado, there were earlier isolated instances of Modernism in the state. John E. Thompson (1882-1945) was the first truly modernist artist in Colorado, though his later works became more stylistically conservative before his death. He initially came to Colorado in 1914, when he was doing both Fauvism and Impressionism. He returned permanently in 1917. He and other artists were in the controversial, landmark exhibition held in 1919 at the Denver Public Library. Innocently called the Twenty-fifth Annual Exhibition of the Denver Art Association (renamed the Denver Art Museum in 1923), it was subsequently and notoriously nicknamed the Denver Armory Show, referring to the New York Armory Show in 1913. The headlines in the Rocky Mountain News blared: “Bolshevism in Art” (17 April 1919); “Library Art Exhibit Called ‘Fraud’ and ‘Monstrosity’ by Two Writers” (20 April 1919).
Image: William Sanderson (1905-1990) THE LOVERS, 1947 Oil on canvas, 23-3/4” x 19-1/2” Collection of Kirkland Museum of Fine & Decorative Art, Denver
Kirkland Museum of Fine and Decorative Art
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Denver, CO 80203
Phone: 303-832-8576
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