Arnold Rönnebeck (1885 – 1947)
Two Seas and a Moon
30 x 22 1/2 inches
Oil on Canvas, c. 1943
Signed upper left
Unframed

Born in Nassau, Germany, Arnold Rönnebeck became a noted sculptor and lithographer and was a strong advocate of modernist art. He traced his lineage back to nobility, and his father was a professor of architecture, a subject that the son studied for several years. Rönnebeck served in the German Imperial Army in World War I, was injured in the line of duty and earned two Iron Crosses. He studied sculpture at the Royal Art School in Berlin and in Munich, and in 1908, moved to Paris where his teachers were Aristide Maillol and Emile Bourdelle. There he was a part of the avant-garde circle of Gertrude Stein, Marsden Hartley and Charles Demuth.

In 1921, still recovering from war wounds, he visited the Italian coastal village of Positano and executed landscape drawings from which he did his earliest prints. However, that subject matter, he also had sculptural focus and described the scenery as “one enormous work of sculpture, houses and rocks seemingly one.”

A year later, his fiancée Alice Miriam, a young American opera singer, died, and this tragedy combined with his family’s increasing financial problems, led him to immigrate to America. In 1923, he arrived in Washington DC and lived briefly with Miriam’s family before moving to New York City. There he became a part of the avant-garde circle around Alfred Stieglitz. Rönnebeck’s prints of the city skyscrapers reflected his fascination with the energy of that cosmopolitan atmosphere and showed his abstract, precisionist style and his emotional responses to that environment.

It was at this time that in addition to being a sculptor, he began to regard himself as a graphic artist. Working from photographs, he executed pencil sketches that served as the basis for his lithographs. Several of his prints were reproduced in Vanity Fair and Vogue magazines.

Through Stieglitz, Rönnebeck met Erhard Weyhe at whose gallery he had his first solo exhibition in April-May 1925. Composed of prints, drawings, and sculpture, the show had sixty pieces expressing subjects that had interested him for the last fifteen years.

That summer, Rönnebeck first went to Taos, where he was a guest of Mabel Dodge Luhan. He was encouraged by Marsden Hartley to visit this artist’s colony, and it was a life-changing experience relative to both his artistic and personal life. He was deeply impressed by the landscape and the native people. He met his future wife, Louise Emerson (1901-1980) whom he married in New York in 1926. The couple returned to New Mexico frequently through the late 1920s and 1930s. Rönnebeck completed a series of terra-cotta wall reliefs of Pueblo ceremonial dances for the public areas of the La Fonda Hotel in Santa Fe.

In 1926, the Rönnebecks settled in Denver, where he became Director of the Denver Art Museum. He resigned that position in 1930, but the couple remained in Colorado where both were active with the lively Denver art community. He continued to execute numerous lithographs of landscapes and townscapes, especially mining towns. Some of his prints were distributed nationally by the American Artists Group.

By 1940, he was deeply discouraged by World War II, which brought back the painful memories of World War I, and his artistic productivity declined. He died in 1947 at age 62, having been very much a part of the art scene of early 20th century America.

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