Eugene weekly., February 16, 2017, Page 22, Image 22

VISUAL ARTS
BY BOB KEEFER
AN OREGON PAINTER
WHO ONCE ROCKED
NEW YORK CITY
The Louis Bunce retrospective
in Salem looks back to an era
when painting mattered
BUNCE’S ‘BURNED LAND NO. 2’
22
February 16, 2017 • eugeneweekly.com
W
alk into the luscious new Louis Bunce
retrospective at Willamette University’s
Hallie Ford Museum of Art in Salem, and
you’re immediately confronted with a 1932
self-portrait of the artist.
Wearing a banded fedora and sporting a 20-something’s
raffish sneer, Bunce — whose career as an Oregon painter
spanned the mid 20th century — glances forward through
the decades as if to challenge the 21st century museum-
goer: “You’ll never meet another artist quite like me,” he
seems to say.
All the portrait needs is a cigarette dangling from the
lips under that pencil-thin mustache to bring it fully to life.
A generous and charismatic teacher, a hard smoker and
drinker, a lover of the Oregon coast, a ladies’ man and a
friend of the New York art elite, Bunce was among the
most famous Northwest painters working at a time when
American middlebrow culture worshipped painting. He
was written up in Life magazine and in The New York Times.
He was a friend of Jackson Pollock — Bunce encouraged
the meeting of Pollock and his wife, Lee Krasner — and of
such luminaries as Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko and
Robert Motherwell.
As illustrated in this thoughtful and engaging retrospec-
tive, Bunce’s career was born in the social realism of the
1930s and ’40s, blossomed during the cool modernism of the
1950s, and then seemed to lose its way as the artist chased the
explosion of art-isms that followed, from abstract expression-
ism and post-modernism to a return to romanticism.
Roger Hull, a retired art historian from Willamette,
curated Louis Bunce: Dialogue with Modernism. Hull
stops at the little self-portrait as he offers a visitor a guided
tour. “Louie was very debonair,” Hull says, using Bunce’s
nickname. “I never met him, but I feel like I know him now.”
Bunce was born in Wyoming in 1907. The family moved
to Oregon in 1920, and the young Bunce graduated from
Jefferson High School, attended the Portland Art Museum
school for a year, and then headed with a friend to New
York City, where he studied painting at the prestigious Art
Students League.
In the city, he met Pollock and de Kooning and saw the
new Museum of Modern Art’s first exhibition, in 1929,
which showed works by Vincent Van Gogh, Georges Seurat,
Paul Gauguin and — most influentially — Paul Cézanne.
Cézanne’s work had a profound effect on the young
Bunce. You can see that clearly in the early landscapes in
the Hallie Ford show, such as a small 1929 oil painting
“Roadway, Maine,” whose swirling energy and earth-toned
palette echo those of the French genius, or the structural
drawing in the 1934 “Beach, Port Orford,” painted here
after his return to Oregon in the early 1930s.
On his return to Portland, Bunce set himself up for the
first time as a serious artist, having rejected the security
of a career as a commercial illustrator after ogling those
delicious Cézannes. With the country plunged into the
Great Depression, he worked for the federal Public Works
Art Project and taught at the Federal Art Center in Salem.
And he met and married a Swedish beauty, Eda Hult (yes,
from that Hult family). He and his new wife opened the Kha-
rouba Gallery in Portland in 1949, showing contemporary art
by such Northwest artists as Jack McClarty, Manuel Izqui-
erdo, Charles Heaney and Amanda Snyder. (The marriage and
the gallery would founder together six years later.)
The couple also had a son, John (now Jon), Bunce’s
only child. Bunce and his wife traveled back and forth
between Portland and New York, establishing a practice of
introducing Northwest artists to the larger East Coast scene.
As the 1950s dawned, Bunce’s painting had grown more
sophisticated, darker and moodier. He created large, nearly
abstract landscapes at the Oregon coast, and he became
fascinated by the enormous devastation still apparent in
the Coast Range’s Tillamook Burn, the 500-square mile
stretch of forest that was still smoldering from a series of
wildfires that began in the 1930s.
The ’50s were Bunce’s decade. He had work in a
survey show at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.
His painting “Burned Land No. 2,” which you can see in
the retrospective, was featured in the 1951-52 Whitney