Image: Denver Art Museum
The Denver Art Museum has opened 'John E. Thompson and Colorado Modernism,' a presentation focused on the artist and educator John E. Thompson and the circle of artists and patrons around him. The exhibition is now on view in the Martin Building, Level 7, and entry is included with general admission.
According to the museum, the show celebrates Thompson’s work and career alongside those of his friends and students during the first half of the 1900s. It brings together 28 artworks and is organized by the Denver Art Museum with support from donors to the Annual Fund Leadership Campaign and residents who support the Scientific and Cultural Facilities District. The museum says the artists and patrons in the exhibition changed the course of artistic production and connoisseurship in Colorado.
Thompson, who lived from 1882 to 1945, is identified by the museum as a key figure in bringing the expressive colors, simplified shapes and tilted perspectives of European modernism to the Rocky Mountain West. The museum notes that he was born in Buffalo, New York, moved to Denver in 1918 after 12 years in Europe, and influenced generations of artists through classes at the Chappell School of Art, the Denver Academy of Fine and Applied Arts and the University of Denver.
The exhibition also draws on Thompson’s long relationship with the Denver Art Museum. The museum says he participated in nearly every annual exhibition from 1919 to 1945, served on the Board of Trustees and was the subject of a memorial exhibition at the museum in 1945. That institutional history places the present installation within a longer account of Denver’s modern art network, rather than treating Thompson as an isolated figure.
Works listed on the exhibition page include 'Organization of Rocks and Trees' and 'Woods Interior' by Thompson, along with paintings by Andrew Dasburg, Jozef G. Bakos, Willard Nash, Walter Mruk, Raymond Jonson, Elisabeth Spalding and B. J. O. Nordfeldt. The selection suggests a broader regional modernist field in which Thompson’s practice is presented alongside artists associated with related experiments in landscape, abstraction and portraiture.
The Denver Art Museum’s newsletter described the exhibition as one of The Denver Post’s '5 exhibits keeping Colorado art interesting this summer.' On its exhibitions page, the museum lists 'John E. Thompson and Colorado Modernism' as now on view, alongside other current presentations including 'Knife Fork Spoon: Everyday Tools, Extraordinary Design' and 'What We’ve Been Up To: People.'
