Telluride Gallery of Fine Art: July Art Walk, Bernie Fuchs

29 Jun Telluride Gallery of Fine Art: July Art Walk, Bernie Fuchs

Elizabeth Taylor, by Bernie Fuchs

The fireworks start on Tuesday – and may end with Tuesday unless the weather gods shed some tears– with a special holiday edition of Telluride Arts‘ monthly Art Walk. Venues all over town feature exciting exhibitions showcasing local, even internationally recognized talent – such as painter-illustrator Bernie Fuchs at the Telluride Gallery of Fine Art.

In June 2008, the Telluride Gallery of Fine Art gave Fuchs a blockbuster 50-year retrospective to honor a great artist who owner Will Thompson once felt was “sorely undervalued and overlooked.” But when Bernie Fuchs died September 17, 2009 of cancer, both The New York Times and The Washington Post paid homage to the man whose work was familiar to nearly everyone in America through reproduction alone.

Over the years, Fuchs worked regularly and steadily for all the major automobile companies, publications from Sports Illustrated (25 years) to The New Yorker, McCall’s, Cosmopolitan, Ladies Home Journal, and TV Guide, as well advertising agencies and large corporations from Rolex to Citigroup. He also illustrated dozens of children’s books.

Fuchs’ illustrious clients included political titans – JFK, Queen Elizabeth, Lyndon Johnson, the Reagans – and celebrities, among them, Frank Sinatra, Katherine Hepburn, Elizabeth Taylor, Sean Connery, and Pablo Casals.

Bernie Fuchs lived the American Dream. His rags to riches story began in the small, Midwest town of O’Fallon, Illinois. By age six, Fuchs had determined to become a musician in Glenn Miller’s band. Had it not been for an industrial accident that cost him three fingers on his right hand he might have become a leading jazz trumpeter like his friend Jack Sheldon. Instead, a tough love art teacher at Washington University School of Fine Art in St. Louis taught Fuchs how to draw holding the chalk with his remaining fingers. A prodigy, Fuchs wound up turning the field of commercial illustration on its head, becoming the youngest artist ever to be elected into the Illustrators Hall of Fame.

A Kiss in the Pool, by Bernie Fuchs

As an artist, Fuchs was often compared Norman Rockwell. However, apart from the fact that they are both illustrators, Fuchs is a modernist in realist’s clothes, more interested in abstract design and composition than in the representational narratives of his predecessors. At exactly the same time another art world superstar, Robert Rauschenberg, was wowing critics with his montages, Fuchs created a TV Guide cover – he is credited with 39 – using multiple images to tell his story. His innovative assemblages challenged the prevailing orthodoxy that illustration had to be a single image. Like the Baroque masters, Bernie Fuchs favored dynamic asymmetries.

Bernie Fuchs also stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the best painters of light, among them, Rembrandt, Vermeer, J.W. Turner, and the Impressionists. His paintings are bathed in an amber glow so soft the light appears to have been blown on to the surface. His colors shimmer like jewels.

Like the best portrait artists, Fuchs manages to convey his subject’s inner life: his JFK for example is contemplative and vulnerable and no wonder – although it was still top secret, the Cuban missile crisis was about to break.

The latest show of Bernie Fuch’s work was hand-picked by Telluride Gallery of Fine Art director Baerbel Hacke, who visited the Connecticut home of Fuch’s widow to select the images.

To more fully understand what Bernie Fuchs was all about and his close relationship with the Gallery, watch this video.

Editor’s note: In addition to the Fuchs show, The Gallery is also showcasing the wonderfully whimsical, always metaphorical work of ceramic artist Julie McNair and a new collection by award-winning jeweler Barbara Heinrich.