The Modernaires

I've recently wondered why everyone seems to be so retrospective right now, with so many of the latest exhibits highlighting the state's glorious aesthetic past. In the last several weeks, I've promoted a group of these shows, including the groundbreaking Decades of Influence, Colorado 1985--Present, being jointly presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art/Denver, the Center for Visual Art, the Gates Sculpture Triangle and the Carol Keller Project Space; The Armory Group, featuring artists who met in Boulder in the 1960s, at the Singer Gallery of the Mizel Center for Arts and Culture; and VAVRA Triptych, at the Kirkland Museum of Fine and Decorative Art, which looks at three artists from the Vavra family. The final note in the summer-long nostalgic cavalcade is Colorado Modernism: 1930-1970, which opened last week at Foothills Art Center in Golden and is one of the best of this very strong lot.

I won't be the first to say that Colorado Modernism is one of the most beautiful shows ever presented at Foothills, but I'll say it anyway. This observation provides the perfect cover for my only real complaint about the show: There's no catalogue. Oh, I know budgets are tight, but it strikes me as the height of irony that such virtually worthless shows as this year's Colorado Clay and North American Sculpture Exhibition both had catalogues while this very worthwhile effort does not.

Colorado Modernism was put together by Tracy Felix, one of the state's best-known painters. In addition to making his own work, Felix has organized a number of exhibits focusing on the history of Colorado art over the past twenty years. He first became interested in local art history while employed at Frameworks in Colorado Springs. Owned by sculptor Bill Burgess, it was both a frame shop and a gallery that featured small exhibitions of work by local artists. In the mid-'80s, Felix and his wife, Sushe, opened their own gallery, Tracy Felix Artspace, in downtown Colorado Springs. A sophisticated big-city gallery, it might have flown in Denver, but it closed after just a few years in the Springs. Though Felix was finished with art retailing, he was thoroughly hooked on old Colorado art, and he avidly collected a ton of it.

The show at Foothills is one of his most ambitious undertakings as a curator, surveying forty years of modern art and using nearly forty artists to make the case. Felix zeroed in on painting and only briefly touches on other mediums such as sculpture or photography.

Even limiting his story in this way, it's still an elaborate tale, so Felix broke up the enormous exhibit into a number of different sections. The first part is out in the Carol and Don Dickinson Sculpture Garden, where three Robert Mangold abstract steel sculptures are installed. Mangold has been a major player in Denver art since the 1950s and is best known for his kinetic sculptures, though none of the pieces at Foothills are kinetic. Instead, he is represented by two examples of his "I-Beam" series and one from his "Tetrahedral Hypersphere" series.

The "I-Beam" sculptures, in which an I-beam has been cut and reassembled, represent a stunningly simple idea, and the result is minimalist formal essays that stand straight up like beefy spikes in the garden. The "Tetrahedral" sculpture is more elaborate, cantilevering over its integral base. All of the sculptures have earthy, naturalistic patinas.

The show proper gets under way in the intimate Metsopoulos Gallery, just beyond the admissions desk, where Felix has installed a group of smallish works that reveal the influence of cubism and other European vanguard styles on Colorado painters. In the late '20s and into the 1940s, artists throughout the West were making pieces based on the landscape tradition but using then-current contemporary approaches. For this first leg of Colorado Modernism, Felix assembled a group of these artists, showing off how they cut up their compositions by introducing linear elements and conventionalized and simplified volumes into their mountain scenes. The Charles Bunnell lithograph "Evolution" is instructive because it perfectly exemplifies what was happening at the time. Bunnell's taking-off point is the mountain landscape, but he converted the mountains and clouds into geometric forms. It's easy to see how pieces like this Bunnell and his watercolor, "Trees and More Trees," influenced Felix's own work.