David Cook Fine Art always displays a quality selection of 19th and 20th century works by Colorado and other Western artists, with the stock varying month to month as new offerings arrive and others are sold.
But once a year, the gallery pulls out all the stops and puts together a much- anticipated showcase of works depicting Colorado and the surrounding region, often even holding back particularly strong works for display during the exhibit.
The annual show “Colorado & the West” features the expected, the eccentric and the surprising, with minor examples offset by veritable knockouts. The eighth installment, opening today, is no exception.
Many of the region’s blue-chip artists are duly represented, from 19th and early 20th-century Colorado landscape painter Charles Partridge Adams to Raymond Jonson, who moved to New Mexico in 1934 and co-founded the Transcendental Painting Group four years later.
But some of the most eye-catching pieces are by artists with little or no name recognition, talented yet overlooked painters who deserve a second look and are getting it, as the supply of works by their better-known peers become ever more scarce and pricey.
A good example is “Untitled (Mountains, New Mexico)” (circa 1940), a 27-by-31-inch oil on canvas board by the little-known Alfred Morang, who moved to Santa Fe after being diagnosed with tuberculosis in 1938. He died in a studio fire in 1958.
Perhaps not to everyone’s taste because of its darker hues, this masterfully executed, heavily impastoed work depicts the cliffs and crags of a kind of badlands. Blue mountains loom in the distance.
Possessing a slightly longer résumé but still hardly known is Howard Schleeter, who moved to New Mexico in 1929 and subsequently completed several commssions for the Works Progress Adminstration, including murals for a school library in Melrose, N.M.
“The Road, El Camino (New Mexico)” (1938), is a familiar, rural scene rendered with uncommon gusto. Schleeter ably combined vibrant brushwork, bright, impressionistic colors, and a subtly compressed perspective, with a fence jutting toward the viewer on the left.
Although perhaps not associated with the Southwest as much as some artists, Jan Matulka was one of the first modernists to visit, traveling across the region in 1917 and 1918. A good example of his Southwestern imagery is “Untitled (Landscape with Rocks and Trees)” (circa 1925).
Several artists associated with the influential Broadmoor Art Academy, which flourished in Colorado Springs from 1919 through the late 1940s, are represented, including Jenne Magafan, Adolf Dehn and Peppino Mangravite.
Particularly noteworthy are a trio of small and midsize landscapes by Birger Sandzén, a Swedish native who first painted in the Colorado Springs area in 1916 and served on the Broadmoor faculty in 1923-24.
He is sometimes called the American Van Gogh because of his immediately identifiable style, with its lush layers of paint and obvious, well-defined brush strokes. A first-rate example is “New Moon, McPherson County, Kansas” (1929), with its bold, sunset-infused colors.
About half the exhibition is devoted to 50 or so original prints and a group of paintings by George Elbert Burr, who lived in Denver from 1906 through 1924. Included are examples from two of his most famous etching series, “Mountain Moods” and “Desert Set.”
The show includes fine works from three different periods in the ever- changing output of Vance Kirkland, the most important artist in Denver’s history.
Notable are a kind of over-the- top, surrealist abstraction, “No. 20, 1963 (Nebulae Abstraction Series),” and a sublime example of his dot paintings, “Vibrations of Violet on Cerulean, No. 4, 1967.”
Also deserving mention are “Harvest Moon” (circa 1950), a cubist, figurative work by Frank Vavra; “Where the Eagles Fly” (circa 1950), a craggy, semi-abstract mountainscape by Ethel Magafan and “Untitled (Abstract)” (undated), a spectrum-traversing abstraction by Helmuth Naumer.
Fine arts critic Kyle MacMillan can be reached at 303-954-1675 or kmacmillan@denverpost.com.
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“Colorado and the West”
ART EXHIBITION|More than 150 paintings, drawings and original prints from the 19th and 20th centuries|David Cook Fine Art, 1637 Wazee St.|Free|Opens today; 10:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. Mondays through Saturdays; through June 30; 303-623-8181 or davidcookfineart.com.
