Hey, that goes double for the rest of us.
"The Living and the Dead," by Alice Neel, oil on canvas.
"The Getaway," by John Hull, acrylic on canvas.
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Ron Judish Fine Arts, 3011 Vallejo Street
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In a sad though not unexpected development, Roland Detre died on October 30. Detre, an abstract painter, remains in death what he was during his lifetime -- one of the most important artists in the state's history.
Detre's classic paintings are simple abstractions of everyday subjects such as figures or sailboats. One of the most remarkable aspects of his paintings is the gorgeous scabrous surface he created by applying the pigments when they were nearly dry. His powdery palette, which ranged from pastels to jewel tones, is also worth noting. "He was a mystic," says Jack Kunin, Denver's premier art appraiser, "and his medium was painting."
Born in Budapest in 1903, Detre had a precocious talent for art. At the age of twelve, he was already exhibiting his work in galleries, and he entered the academy in Budapest in 1920, when he was only seventeen. At the academy, Detre studied with noted Hungarian painter Janos Vaszary, who had been trained in Paris.
Detre left Hungary in 1926, going first to Berlin, which was an important art center at the time. Then, after marrying Rose Szilard, a fashion designer from Budapest, he moved to Paris in 1930. The time Detre spent in Paris would have a lifelong effect on his style of painting, and his work always carried with it the tradition of School of Paris modernism. The influence of Braque is obvious, as is that of Matisse.
In 1936, playing the starving artist in depression-ravaged Paris, Detre got an unlikely lucky break when he came down with tuberculosis, just like Mimi in La Bohème. What made this a stroke of luck for the artist (though, alas, not for poor Mimi) was that it meant Detre, a non-practicing Jew, was safely off in a sanatorium in nominally neutral Switzerland when the Nazis invaded France just a few years later. Tuberculosis literally saved Detre and his wife from the horrors of the Holocaust. After the war, Detre moved to New York with the sponsorship of his wife's brother, Leo Szilard, a key figure in the history of physics.
Oddly, tuberculosis was also a lucky break for Denver, because Colorado, like Switzerland, was a famous center for the treatment of the disease; that's why Detre first came here in 1951 after a relapse.
Detre's sophisticated pieces were readily embraced by the Denver art world, and his work was often exhibited at the Denver Art Museum in the 1950s and '60s. The museum even acquired two pieces for its permanent collection, "Corn" and "Adobe Wall." By 1970, Detre, nearly seventy himself, slowly disappeared from public view, but he didn't stop painting. Then, in 1985, the University of Denver put together a retrospective that reintroduced Detre to the public. For many, it was the first time they had seen his work.
After the DU exhibit, several solo shows were mounted in the '80s and '90s devoted to Detre's accomplishments, both at the now-closed Inkfish Gallery and at Elizabeth Schlosser Fine Arts, which has also closed. Paul Hughes, who owned Inkfish, is now a private dealer working out of his home, and he still has a limited number of Detre paintings for sale. Detre's work has also been included over the last few years in shows at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art and at the Mizel Museum of Judaica.
But it's been at least a couple of years since Detre's paintings were displayed somewhere, and more than fifteen years since that DU retrospective, so wouldn't now be the perfect time for some local art institution to start planning a memorial exhibit? I for one, would love to see it.
