{"id":702,"date":"2010-05-21T12:57:15","date_gmt":"2010-05-21T19:57:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/allentuppertrueanamericanartist.com\/?p=702"},"modified":"2010-05-21T12:57:15","modified_gmt":"2010-05-21T19:57:15","slug":"center-for-colorado-the-west-reviews-att-biography","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/allentuppertrueanamericanartist.com\/?p=702","title":{"rendered":"Center for Colorado & the West Reviews ATT Biography"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tom Noel, professor of history at the University of Colorado Denver reviewed Allen Tupper True: An American Artist <\/em>for the Center for Colorado & the West’s website. \u00a0Below is his review:<\/p>\n

Center for Colorado & the West at Auraria Library<\/strong><\/p>\n

Published on coloradowest.auraria.edu<\/em> (http:\/\/coloradowest.auraria.edu<\/a>)<\/p>\n

Allen Tupper True: An American Artist<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Author : Jere True and Victoria Tupper Kirby<\/p>\n

Bozeman, MT: Museum of the Rockies, 2009. xx + 492 pages. Illustrations, endnotes,<\/p>\n

Index, 9-1\/2\u201d x 6-1\/2\u201d. $25.00 paperback. $50.00 hardcover.<\/p>\n

Reviewed By: Tom Noel<\/p>\n

University of Colorado Denver<\/td>\n

<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

Artists, historians, and the general public should find this first extensive biography of Colorado\u2019s master muralist, Allen Tupper True (1881\u20131955), valuable. True\u2019s works adorn various public places including the Colorado, Missouri, and Wyoming state capitols and public libraries, the Brown Palace, Colorado National Bank, and Civic Center Park in Denver, making him easily the most seen Colorado artist of all time.<\/p>\n

True\u2019s works and private life are explored in this intimate portrait begun by his eldest daughter, Jere True, and completed by her daughter, Victoria Tupper Kirby. Jere began collecting material and started writing the biography in the early 1990s in hopes of protecting her father\u2019s extant murals. By then, several had already been destroyed when the buildings they were in were demolished, or the walls, which served as their canvases, were painted over. She hoped that the publication of a biography about her father would raise awareness of his significance and works, thus encouraging preservation of his remaining murals. When Jere died in 1999, Victoria took over her mother\u2019s project.<\/p>\n

Based primarily on his diary, True family correspondence, and newspaper accounts, this book focuses on Allen\u2019s personal life, including his childhood, first drawings (in letters to his parents), marriage, divorce, and children. True was born in Colorado Springs. His schoolteacher mother and well-connected father both nurtured his early desire to be an artist. After the family moved to Denver, he graduated from Corona (now Dora Moore) Elementary School and Manual High School before spending two years at the University of Denver. He then went to the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, D.C., before working with a leading illustrator, Howard Pyle, at Pyle\u2019s School in Wilmington, Delaware. There he emerged as a promising illustrator whose work illustrated leading magazines of the day, such as Century<\/em>, Colliers<\/em>, Everybody\u2019s<\/em>, Harper\u2019s<\/em>, Leslie\u2019s<\/em>, McClure\u2019s<\/em>, Outing<\/em>, and the Saturday Evening Post<\/em>. Growing fame led to True\u2019s first one-man show in Denver in 1908. Two years later the Denver Public Library staged another early exhibit introducing the city to its best-known twentieth-century artist. Thanks to his design of the bronco buster still seen on Wyoming license plates, as well as other work in the Cowboy State, he is also a highly visible Wyoming artist.<\/p>\n

Having worked as illustrator, then as an easel artist, True subsequently shifted to murals after studying with one of the world\u2019s leading muralists, Frank Brangwyn, at his London School of Art. Brangwyn enlisted True, whom he called his best student, to help him paint and install murals for San Francisco\u2019s 1915 Panama Pacific Exposition.<\/p>\n

Allen True was no starving artist. His father, a onetime Leadville grocer, became an official with Standard Oil, then with the American Smelting and Refining Company. He helped arrange exhibits and commissions for his son, as did prominent family friends such as Anne Evans, Henry W. Toll, and Claude Boettcher. Evans, the great Denver patroness of the arts, paid True five hundred dollars for the first work he sold, \u201cFree Trappers,\u201d which still hangs in her restored mountain cabin.<\/p>\n

True rejected traditional, classical design to champion Native American and Colorado pioneer types, as well as native flora and fauna. In 1913 he told Denver Times<\/em> reporter Polly Pry he favored western U.S. themes with \u201cromance enough\u201d for \u201ca million miles of canvas,\u201d \u00a0rather than \u201cfat little cupids disporting themselves amidst trailing grape vines loaded with purple fruit, and nude girls with plenteous curves reclining on clouds\u201d (133). Although best known for Native American and Euro-American pioneer subject matter, True portrayed modern telephone workers in his Communications series for the Mountain States Telephone Building (Denver), whimsical Mother Goose figures for the Colorado Springs Child Day Care Center, and underwater sea life for the tub therapy room at Colorado Psychiatric Hospital (Denver).<\/p>\n

No artist better captured Colorado\u2019s pioneer era, which he studied carefully. True spent much of his life exploring Colorado\u2019s outdoors as an avid hunter, fisherman, and camper. He visited numerous Indian tribes to familiarize himself with their lives, customs, art, and clothing. Besides firsthand study and experience, he also immersed himself in studying his subjects in books and museums.<\/p>\n

Artistically, True borrowed from both impressionism and realism. The subtlety of color and feeling in his murals is perhaps a reaction to his magazine illustrating days with their exaggerated color and figures. \u201cArt is nature made rhythmical,\u201d was his motto, and he squeezed natural settings into whatever spaces he was given, exquisitely relating to the surrounding architecture. In Denver\u2019s efforts to become a city beautiful, True played a prominent role by incorporating public art in prominent buildings. True portrayed ordinary, prototypical people, not the rich and famous. Although romanticized, his figures feel like living, vital people.<\/p>\n

True\u2019s masterwork, according to the authors, is his \u201cIndian Memories,\u201d a series of sixteen murals done in 1925 to decorate the lobby of the Colorado National Bank (a neoclassical Greek temple sold in 2009 to developers who claim they will respect the murals when they convert the bank into a hotel).<\/p>\n

As \u201cIndian Memories\u201d illustrates, True strived to elevate Native American art and life. \u201cGreeks gave us the conventional border which have been used by decorators for 2,000 years,\u201d True declared, \u201cand yet here in the West I have seen Navajo Indians making designs far more beautiful, in colors that were a joy to the spirit\u201d (133). True used Native American color and designs in his largest work\u2014selecting color schemes and designs for the powerhouse and public places at Boulder (now Hoover) Dam as the consulting artist. \u201cWhy go on forever with Greek, Roman and Egyptian motifs when our own native sources are right along side the Boulder Dam,\u201d he asked and used \u201cstepped mesas, rain, lightning and clouds rather than the lotus, fasces, garlands\u201d of classical design (345). Pleased with what The New<\/em> Yorker<\/em> magazine called \u201cthe prettiest power plant in the world,\u201d the Bureau of Reclamation subsequently hir\u00a0ed True to work as the consulting artist on Shasta, Grand Coulee, and seven other dams.<\/p>\n

True was a slender man, 5\u2019 11\u201d tall, with hazel eyes, prematurely balding brown hair and a moustache. Many photographs show him smoking a pipe, evidence that he broke his childhood promise to his mother never to smoke and drink. He drank only moderately. A devoted family man, he doted on his parents as well as his children, grandchildren, and dogs. Crushed when his wife left him for a younger man, he never remarried, burying himself in his work. He found consolation in family and friends, including Denver artists Frank Mechau and Ernest and Louise Ronnebeck, architects Jacques Benedict and Burnham Hoyt, and Denver poet Thomas Hornsby Ferril. Visitors to True\u2019s home and studio at 2392 Raleigh Street also included novelist Thomas Wolfe, poets Robert Frost and Carl Sandburg, sculptor Gutzon Borglum of Mount Rushmore fame, and Rocky Mountain News<\/em> editor Jack Foster. True also rubbed shoulders with Ernest Blumenschein, Victor Higgins, Mable Dodge Luhan, Charlie Russell, and N. C. Wyeth, a lifelong friend from their days together at the Howard Pyle School.<\/p>\n

The authors discuss True\u2019s failures as well as his successes. His dream of painting murals in Denver\u2019s Union Station never materialized. Nor did working on the new Technicolor films of Hollywood, although he moved there and flirted with Hollywood types such as Cecil B. DeMille. An embittered True returned to Denver denouncing Hollywood as \u201ca psychopathic ward\u201d where \u201ceveryone is popeyed crazy except those who get away regularly and forget.\u201d<\/p>\n

While focusing on the artist, this book also reveals an unsung hero, one of the many prominent women largely lost to Colorado history, his mother Margaret True. Committed to education for all, she served on the Denver School Board and as its president spearheaded the campaign to establish medical and dental clinics for schoolchildren. She worked with Judge Ben Lindsey and his Denver Juvenile Court to focus on troubled youth. She served as that court\u2019s truancy officer, determinedly visiting homes in search of reluctant students. \u201cMother is head over heels in her work,\u201d Allen once wrote. \u201cHardly a day goes by without her unloading some tale of child tragedy that would make a novel. [She gives] kids the first glimpse of real sympathy and understanding that they have ever known\u201d (125).<\/p>\n

Many family photos and superb color plates enhance this book, including images of some of the twenty to twenty-five True murals that have disappeared or been demolished. A few problems are inevitable in any book. Among the nits to pick here is the improbable, undocumented claim that Allen\u2019s father \u201coperated a mule train of 1,600 animals, reputedly the biggest ever put together\u201d (10). \u00a0In discussing True\u2019s restoration of its ceiling mural, the authors err in calling the Central City Opera House \u201cthe second oldest theatre in America\u201d (304). When art works are discussed in the text it would be a service to readers to cite the page where they appear in the book.<\/p>\n

The release of the book coincides with a three-part exhibition of True\u2019s art by the Denver Art Museum, the Denver Public Library, and the Colorado History Museum. Between the collaborative endeavor of the three cultural institutions and the publication of this intimate and comprehensive book, there may be a resurgence of interest in Allen Tupper True\u2014just as his daughter hoped.<\/p>\n

Tom Noel is a professor of history at the University of Colorado Denver, where he directs the Public History & Preservation Program and co-directs the Center for Colorado & the West at Auraria Library. His latest book, co-authored with Debra Faulkner, <\/em>Mile High Tourism, is scheduled for publication in March 2010.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tom Noel, professor of history at the University of Colorado Denver reviewed Allen Tupper True: An American Artist for the Center for Colorado & the West’s website. \u00a0Below is his review: Center for Colorado & the West at Auraria Library Published on coloradowest.auraria.edu (http:\/\/coloradowest.auraria.edu) Allen Tupper True: An American Artist Author : Jere True and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[22,18],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/allentuppertrueanamericanartist.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/702"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/allentuppertrueanamericanartist.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/allentuppertrueanamericanartist.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/allentuppertrueanamericanartist.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/allentuppertrueanamericanartist.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=702"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/allentuppertrueanamericanartist.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/702\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":705,"href":"https:\/\/allentuppertrueanamericanartist.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/702\/revisions\/705"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/allentuppertrueanamericanartist.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=702"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/allentuppertrueanamericanartist.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=702"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/allentuppertrueanamericanartist.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=702"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}