A general handout for Colorado art survey exhibitions

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History of Colorado Art, from Traditional through Modern at Kirkland Museum
By Hugh Grant, Founding Director and Curator, Kirkland Museum of Fine & Decorative Art
Early Colorado Art
Visitors and even residents of Colorado may not be aware of this state‘s illustrious art history,
upon which living artists continue to build an even greater legacy. Colorado‘s place in American art ranks
very high among the fifty states, probably in the top 10, not only because of the important artists who
made this state their home, but because of the famous artists who visited and worked here including
George Caleb Bingham, Albert Bierstadt, Thomas Moran, Frederick Remington, Hamilton Hamilton,
Robert Reid, Frederick MacMonnies, Alexander Phimister Proctor, Birger Sandzén, Ernest Lawson, Janet
Lippincott, Jackson Pollock and Robert Motherwell to name a few.
Colorado art began with Native American works, which can be seen at the Denver Art Museum.
The first non-native artist was Samuel Seymour who arrived in Colorado in the summer of 1820 with the
government expedition of Major Stephen Long, who would name Longs Peak. The difficulty of traveling
through Colorado with its Rocky Mountains, in addition to the hostilities between the settlers and
American Indians, discouraged visitors for many years. Also greatly impeding homesteading and
development of the West was the fact that Major Long had described much of the area west of the
Mississippi and east of the Rocky Mountains as ―The Great American Desert‖.
Colorado is Settled and Attracts Artists
It was the 1858 Pikes Peak Gold Rush and discovery of gold along Cherry Creek which first
brought many new people to Colorado, including artists. The accomplished painter John Howland came
to Colorado in 1859 and stayed, with more to follow. At first, most of the artists earned a meager living
by executing murals and paintings for saloons and hotels and selling paintings to sparse residents and
tourists. A few fortunate ones painted scenes of Colorado for eastern magazines, such as Albert Bierstadt
(in 1863 and 1876-7) and Thomas Moran (in 1874, 1881 and 1892). With the end of the Civil War (1861–
1865) travel became easier. Several Hudson River School artists worked in Colorado including T.
Worthington Whittredge in 1866 and 1870-71 and John Kensett in 1870. By the 1870s, the towns of
Colorado became increasingly cultural, making it possible for more artists to make a living through their
artwork and also by teaching.
The Territory of Colorado was designated in 1861 and Colorado became a state in 1876. Artists
took up residence in Colorado including Charles Stobie (in 1865), Alexis Comparet (1868), Richard Tallant
(1870), Helen Henderson Chain (1871), Walter Paris (1871), Charles Partridge Adams (1876), Harvey Otis
Young (1879), Charles Craig (1881), William Bancroft (1881) and others. One of our distinguished
muralists, Allen True, was born in Colorado Springs in 1881.
Art Organizations and Schools
Art organizations began to appear in Colorado. In 1880 the University of Denver‘s College of
Music offered drawing and painting courses taught by Ida De Steiguer. From 1883–1885 she was the
Dean of the College of Fine Arts; from 1884–1887 she was listed as the Principal of the Department of
Fine Arts. In 1893 the Denver Artist‘s Club was founded by 13 artists, later becoming the Denver Art
Association in 1917 and then the Denver Art Museum in 1923. English painter and teacher Henry Read
opened his Students‘ School of Art in 1895 in Denver, at which point the University of Denver‘s Art
School only retained Ida De Steiguer to continue to teach art classes. Read had come to Denver in 1890,

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and became one of the 13 founders of the Denver Artist‘s Club in 1893. In 1910-1911 he constructed a
freestanding building for his Students‘ School of Art at 1311 Pearl Street, which is now Kirkland Museum.
Modernism Arrives in Colorado
John Thompson (1882–1945) was the first modernist artist in Colorado, though his later works
became more stylistically conservative. Born in Buffalo, New York, he studied in New York City and then
in Europe from 1902 until the beginning of World War I, where he saw the Paul Cézanne retrospective in
Paris in 1907. He initially came to Colorado in 1914, returning permanently in 1917. Jozef Bakos (1891–
1977) had been Thompson‘s student in Buffalo and followed him to Colorado. Bakos began teaching at
the School of Art of the University of Colorado in Boulder in 1919. In 1921 Bakos and Walter Mruk—both
in the Denver Armory Show—along with Fremont Ellis, Willard Nash, and Will Schuster, formed Santa
Fe‘s first modernist art group, Los Cinco Pintores (―The Five Painters‖).
The Denver Armory Show
Strong divisions arose over the styles of impressionism, mild fauvism and restrained cubism when,
in 1919, a landmark exhibition was held at the Denver Public Library. Innocently called the Twenty-fifth
Annual Exhibition of the Denver Art Association (which was to be renamed the Denver Art Museum in
1923), it was subsequently and notoriously nicknamed The Denver Armory Show, a reference to the 1913
New York Armory Show that shocked America. The Denver exhibition provoked strong reaction from the
press and the public although, to our eyes today, the paintings in the show do not look particularly
adventurous. But at that time the headlines in the Rocky Mountain News blared ―Bolshevism in Art” (April
17, 1919) and ―Library Art Exhibit Called ‗Fraud‘ and ‗Monstrosity‘ by Two Writers” (April 20, 1919).
Broadmoor Art Academy
In 1919, the Broadmoor Art Academy was founded in Colorado Springs, evolving into the
Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center in 1935. The art colony became a major force in art instruction and
national art activity, somewhat overshadowing Denver until the mid-1940s. The Center‘s influence then
began to wane because it did not encourage abstraction and was not attached to a degree-granting
academic institution. Although a few of the teachers, such as Jean Charlot, Mary Chenoweth, and
Emerson Woelffer, were open to modernism by the late 1940s and 1950s, the Center closed its school in
the early 1960s. Some of the faculty, including Chenoweth, then began the Department of Art at
Colorado College in Colorado Springs. The Academy‘s famous teachers included Lawrence Barrett,
George Biddle, Arnold Blanch, Edgar Britton, John Carlson, Adolf Dehn, Otis Dozier, Laura Gilpin, Yasuo
Kuniyoshi, Ernest Lawson, Charles Wheeler Locke, Frank Mechau, Robert Motherwell, Henry Varnum
Poor, Robert Reid, Boardman Robinson, and Birger Sandzén.
Artist Groups in Boulder and Denver
The Boulder Art Association, founded in 1923, continues today. The Boulder Artists‘ Guild was
operating by 1926 and seems to have dispersed in the late 1940s. The Armory Group, formed in Boulder
in 1966, consisted of University of Colorado students such as Clark Richert, Margaret Neumann, Dale
Chisman, John DeAndrea, John Fudge, and one faculty member, George Woodman (about 15 in all).
In 1928, fifty-two charter members of the newly established Denver Artists Guild participated in its
inaugural exhibition. Founding members of the Guild included Donald Bear, Clarence Durham, Laura
Gilpin, Robert Graham, Elsie Haddon Haynes, Vance Kirkland, Albert Olson, Anne Van Briggle Ritter,
Arnold and Louise Rönnebeck, Francis Drexel Smith, Elisabeth Spalding, David Spivak, Margaret Tee,

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John Thompson, Allen True, and Frank Vavra. The Denver Artists Guild continues to operate today under
the name Colorado Artists Guild, to reflect its wide spread membership.
15 Colorado Artists
In 1948, the traditional Denver Artists Guild was fractured, but continued to operate, when some
of its more modern artists broke away. Others joined the renegade group and, calling themselves 15
Colorado Artists, they requested and received a rival exhibition at the Denver Art Museum—at the same
time and across the hall from the Guild‘s annual exhibition. This controversy recalls the earlier heated
debate touched off by the 1919 Denver Armory Show about the validity of modernism. Denver
exemplified the widespread disputes about abstraction superseding traditional painting that occured in
America during the 1920s, then regionalism holding sway over abstraction in the 1930s, and the
dominance of modern art forms that was established in the 1940s. The Denver Artists Guild‘s 1948
schism was a seminal moment in Colorado art history, when the moderns formally broke with the
traditionalists. Eleven articles about the break appeared in the newspapers. People came in droves to the
two dueling exhibitions. They chose sides. The Colorado art war was on.
The 15 Colorado Artists were Don Allen, John Billmyer, Marion Buchan, Jean Charlot, Mina Conant,
Angelo di Benedetto, Eo (Eva Lucille) Kirchner, Vance Kirkland, Moritz Krieg, Duard Marshall, Louise
Emerson Ronnebeck (recently widowed), William Sanderson, Paul K. Smith, J. Richard Sorby and Frank
Vavra, ten of whom taught at the University of Denver. At this time, Charlot was head of the Colorado
Springs Fine Arts Center art school (1947–49) and Kirkland was director of the University of Denver
School of Art (1929–32, 1946–69).
Vance Kirkland and the University of Denver
The Chappell School of Art operated at Thirteenth Avenue and Logan Street in Denver from 1924
to 1928 with H. A. W. (Jack) Manard as its founding director. The University of Denver then purchased
the Chappell School with a grant from the Carnegie Foundation and hired Ohio painter Vance Kirkland
(1904–81), who at age twenty-four became the founding director of the present University of Denver
School of Art, which opened on January 3, 1929. With the faculty that he both developed and inherited
from the former Chappell School, Kirkland encouraged modern art forms and effected a shift of the
state‘s art center from Colorado Springs to Denver in the mid-1940s.
In 1932, as Kirkland‘s senior students approached graduation, the university refused to give credit
for art courses toward degrees. Kirkland resigned and began the Kirkland School of Art in Henry Read‘s
old art school building two blocks east of Chappell House (now Kirkland Museum of Fine & Decorative
Art). By 1933, Kirkland had an agreement with the University of Colorado ―Denver extension‖ (UCD) that
his students could get credit there toward graduation for their art courses. He thereby also founded the
UCD art department and initiated its art program. Kirkland was then 28 years old.
In 1946, when Kirkland had more than two hundred students, the University of Denver hired him
back with a salary equal to the chancellor‘s. Over the years Kirkland‘s faculty included three directors of
the Denver Art Museum who were also very fine artists: Arnold Rönnebeck (director 1926–30), Donald
Bear (director 1934–40), and Otto Bach (director 1944–74). Many other important artists taught with
Kirkland including Julio de Diego, Roger Kotoske, Barbara Locketz, Robert Mangold, Frank Mechau, Anne
Van Briggle Ritter, Beverly Rosen, William Sanderson, Margaret Tee, John Thompson, Maynard Tischler,
and Frank Vavra.
Surrealism and Abstraction in Colorado

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Colorado has had a surprising number of artists, more than 20 that we know of, working in
Surrealism. These would include the German Bauhaus master Herbert Bayer (1900–85), who came in
1945 and stayed nearly thirty years in Aspen, as well as Vance Kirkland, Julio de Diego, Charles Bunnell,
Phyllis Montrose, William Sanderson, Mina Conant, Otto Bach, Margaret Mullin, Frank Samson, M. C.
DeBoer and Moritz Krieg.
The history of abstraction of Colorado is documented in the book, Colorado Abstract •
Paintings and Sculpture by Michael Paglia and Mary Voelz Chandler; Foreword by Hugh Grant.1
In that
book, 37 artists are illustrated in the historic section (1930s to 1970s, except for 1 painting from 1987)
with another 52 artists in the later 20th
to 21st
century section. Important Colorado abstract painters,
working in modern styles, include Herbert Bayer, George Cecil Carter, Mary Chenoweth, Dale Chisman,
Nadine Drummond, Roland Detre, Sushe and Tracy Felix, Frank ―Pancho‖ Gates, Ken Goehring, Charles
―Bill‖ Hayes, Vance Kirkland, Paul Kontny, Emilio Lobato, Virginia Maitland, Gene Matthews, Amy Metier,
Bev Rosen, William Sanderson, Mel Strawn, Al Wynne, Dave Yust and many more. Important Colorado
abstract sculptors include Edgar Britton, Susan Cooper, Robert Delaney, Angelo di Benedetto (also did
painting), James Dixon, Dorothea Greene Dunlop, Bill Joseph (also did painting), Robert Mangold, David
Mazza, Chuck Parson, Bob Ragland, Elizabeth Yanish Shwayder, Wilbert Verhelst, Carley Warren and
others.
Colorado Ceramics and other Media
In addition to painting and sculpture, there have been many significant clay artists working in
Colorado. The most famous family of potters in Colorado, nationally and internationally, is Artus Van
Briggle and Anne Gregory Van Briggle. The couple came to Colorado Springs in 1899, after they had met
and studied in France. Together they designed and produced what appears to be the first and most
important Art Nouveau ceramics in America. Other notable ceramists who have worked in Colorado are
Bebe Alexander, Katie Caron, Richard DeVore, Martha Daniels, Carroll Hansen, Bob LeDonne, William
Long (Denver Denaura), Donna Marecak, Nan and Jim McKinnell, Brad Miller, Bob Nelson, Janey Skeer,
Bob Smith, Paul Soldner, Maynard Tischler, Betty Woodman, Lou Wynne to name a few.
Colorado has also had distinguished artists working in photography, print media, fiber art,
furniture,
tableware, art glass and glassware, enamel, architecture and landscape architecture, costume and set
design,
found object art and assemblage.
Conclusion
This very brief history of Colorado art only begins to suggest how many significant works have
been created in this state. The Colorado collection at Kirkland Museum currently contains 4,562 works by
439 artists (including 163 women artists). Although this is far from comprehensive, with more than 170
Colorado artists on view at any one time at Kirkland Museum, it is the most Colorado art from traditional
through modern styles that has ever been publicly shown on a consistent basis. Furthermore, our
Colorado collection has received national and regional publicity, and we have loaned to many other
organizations. Artists working in Colorado continue to make important contributions not only to our
state and the West, but also to America‘s art history.
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Fresco Fine Art Publications LLC, Albuquerque NM, © 2009, ISBN 9781934491126 [319 pages, hardbound].

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Artistic Styles: This exhibition explores an evolution of Colorado art styles, particularly as one
moves clockwise around the smaller Exhibition Room II. Five principal styles—Early Traditionalism
(Realism and Impressionism), Modernist Regionalism, Surrealism, Referential Abstraction and Pure
Abstraction—are shown in groups. Further works in these styles can be seen throughout the rest of
Kirkland Museum.
Kirkland Museum does not show Contemporary style art because those works can be seen
in many other places around Denver including the Denver Art Museum, the Museum of Contemporary
Art—Denver, the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art and a majority of the galleries. At Kirkland
Museum, visitors can see, in depth, the history of Colorado art from traditional through modern, which
has provided the foundation for contemporary artists. As the modern era waned, Post-modern and
Contemporary art began to take its place from about 1970 to 1980.
The classification of paintings as Early Traditionalism (Realism and Impressionism) sets
them apart from the works of artists who continued to paint realistically in the later 20th
and 21st
centuries.
Regionalism, also known as American Scene Painting, portrayed American subjects with an
entirely American approach (mid 1920s—mid 1940s). Famous examples are paintings by Thomas Hart
Benton, Grant Wood and others, although Regionalism was not limited to the mid-west. Vintage
regionalist paintings are stylized to the extent that they are not Realism or Impressionism, but they are
still representational and not abstract. Since the term Regionalism can apply to any artwork done to
portray a particular region at any time, vintage regional paintings are additionally referred to here as
Modernist Regionalism, which is a more descriptive term than Regionalism. These paintings
represent an early style of modernism and they are not ―realistic Regionalism‖ or ―impressionistic
Regionalism.‖ Starting in the 1940s, Regionalism became largely displaced by abstract art and, to a lesser
extent, surrealism.
Surrealism began in France and grew out of the atrocities of WW I. It spread through Europe,
then to America, resulting in the 1936 exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism given at New York‘s
Museum of Modern Art. Surrealism portrays real, actual things and scenes, but then distorts, alters or
eerily transforms the images, or puts things together in unnatural ways so that scenes become surreal.
The surrealists felt that what appears to be real isn‘t; how people portray themselves is often not
representative of their true nature; reality lies in our subconscious. Surrealist images are therefore like
dreams or frequently like nightmares, or sometimes whimsical and humorous.
Referential Abstraction denotes art that abstracts something but the viewer can still tell what
it is; the abstraction refers to something. Pure Abstraction, also called Non-objective Art, does not
seek to abstract identifiable things, but to create feelings and/or movement and/or optical effects, using
line, form, color, texture and other elements.