The Kitsch Is All Right

D.C. Gallery gives a high profile to lowbrow art

Comments (0) By Patricia Calhoun and Susan Froyd and Jason Heller Thursday, May 6 2004

Get a jump on that summer road trip with a stop at David Cook Fine Art, where The Painter's Eye: Colorado and the West takes you through a hundred years of Western art and just as many stunning vistas. "It's going to be arguably the nicest one we've done," says Norm Anderson, director of the five-year-old gallery, which was still receiving paintings a week out. Arriving last Friday, for example: another Birger Sandzen (there are eight in the show, including the one pictured here) called "Edge of the Range," a 36-by-48-inch painting of Manitou done in 1919. "It's fun for us, because at the last minute, you find more things to throw in there."

And that's after searching through estates and collections for months, looking for the best of the Broadmoor School as well as other great artists who painted Colorado and the West from the nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth. Those efforts paid off with a show of over a hundred paintings, drawings and prints, by everyone from Charles Partridge Adams to Eve Drewelowe. Although David Cook's emphasis has always been "the best of the older Colorado painters," Anderson says, "it's starting to get the attention it deserves."

Amy Tan

David Cook Fine Art lassoes Western vistas.

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It should get plenty when the show opens at 6:30 p.m. tonight at the gallery, 1637 Wazee Street. For more information, go to www.davidcookfineart.com. -- Patricia Calhoun