Modern America Loo Family Gallery

Arthur Dove, Fog Horns, 1929, oil on canvas, Anonymous Gift

By the early 1900s, American artists had been introduced to the visual language of European Modern art. Through a growing number of Modern art exhibitions in cities like New York, American painters began to embrace the expressive forms and bold colors they witnessed in works by artists such as Paul Cézanne, Pablo Picasso, and Henri Matisse. Cubism in particular offered American artists such as Arthur Dove and Marsden Hartley a new form of expression with its fragmented picture planes. Colorado artist Sushe Felix has employed Cubism to great effect as visual representation of a single mother’s fractured life.

While early 20th century Modern artists kept one foot in recognizable images, later artists such as Richard Diebenkorn and Robert Motherwell took their paintings a bold step further into pure abstraction by eliminating identifiable objects and scenes in favor of shapes and colors that they believed could inspire pure emotional response in the viewer. Recently, pure abstraction has taken different forms in the painterly expression of Manitou Springs artist Floyd Tunson and in the minimal aesthetic of Colorado Springs artist Pard Morrison.