“Would like to hear from you Lou wish you hadn’t left New York,” Jackson Pollock wrote to his friend and fellow artist Louis Bunce in 1946.
Like Pollock, Bunce was originally from Wyoming, moving with his family to Portland when he was 13. At the time of Pollock’s letter, one of many the two artists exchanged after meeting at the Art Students League of New York, Bunce was debating whether to stay in Portland or move back to New York, then the definitive center of the international art world. Bunce chose Portland, altering the trajectory of his career and making a lasting impact on art, artists and collectors in the Northwest.
The retrospective of Bunce’s work now on view at the Hallie Ford Museum of Art at Willamette University in Salem thoughtfully lays out the career of this artist credited with bringing modernism to Oregon. Distilled to a succinct 49 works, it spans five decades, from 1932 through 1981, giving serious, if brief, consideration to the many styles Bunce worked through in a lifetime of assiduous painting.
Bunce was a polyglot, which this exhibition makes clear. Like an immersive art history survey course, it moves evenly and deferentially from early works influenced by the modernism of Cezanne and Picasso, through surrealism and abstract expressionism, culminating in the lush, overblown shapes and colors of postmodernism.
In two of the earliest works included in the show, Bunce emulates Cezanne. With the same warm hues and squared-off shapes that Cezanne used to paint his native southern France, Bunce depicts the scenic Columbia River Highway and the hills around Mosier. In another small work, “The Butchers” from 1934, he paints the figures of two men wrestling with a hanging slab of meat in a style that recalls the American painter Guy Pene du Bois, who taught in the 1920s at the Art Students League, where Bunce may have met him.
Bunce translated himself to New York twice, once in the 1920s — he worked in a meatpacking plant in North Portland to help fund this first trip — and again in the early 1940s. After the first of these stays, more urban scenes made their way into his work, but over the years and as Bunce moved through and experimented with various -isms, he returned again and again to the inspiration found in the nearby landscape of the Pacific Northwest.
The works of the 1950s and 1960s, the strongest in the exhibition, are abstracted scenes of sea and land. This is the period when Bunce was exhibiting widely, with group shows at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, as well as other institutions around the country. Confidently painted pieces like “Big Green” from 1960 demonstrate Bunce’s fluency in the language of abstract expressionism, with the addition of his own softly rounded gestural forms.
It was in the 1950s, too, that modern art became contentious in Portland with Bunce’s commission to paint a mural for Portland International Airport. By then an established artist, Bunce was invited to propose a mural for the airport’s new steel and glass passenger terminal, but when the Port of Portland commissioners saw a study for it, they rejected it out of hand as unintelligible. Outraged by the commissioners’ decision, Portland’s artistic community rose to Bunce’s defense, and the commission was reinstated. A very public, often rancorous discourse about the mural continued even after it was installed, although period images show the mural fitting naturally into the modernist architecture of the airport. In the study, on loan from the Port and included in the exhibition, the vigorous brushwork and interlocking forms rendered in vermillion, ochre and cobalt blue still feel fresh. Today, the mural perches above the Blue Star Donuts in the airport’s pre-security Oregon Market, a little out of keeping with the slats of warm wood that now surround it, but no less vivid.
By the late 1960s and 1970s, Bunce’s national prominence was on the wane. The works in the exhibition from that period are a not-so-eloquent take on Pop art. More successful are the moody, diffused works that seem to reference Mark Rothko, another artist with ties to Portland who made his way to New York around the same time as Bunce and for all intents and purposes didn’t look back.
Rothko’s work will return to Portland with the opening of the Portland Art Museum’s new Rothko Pavilion, scheduled for late 2020 or early 2021. Bunce may have made this possible. As a teacher for nearly 30 years at the Museum Art School (now the Pacific Northwest College of Art), he taught a new style of painting to several generations of artists. He helped to open the first galleries in Portland where these artists could show their work and where the work of other new and exciting artists from outside the region could be seen. He used his New York connections to bring some of the major names of the art world to Portland. Through his boundless enthusiasm and ardent commitment, Bunce, who died in 1983 at age 75, cultivated a Portland art scene that didn’t exist before.
“Understanding your history is fundamental to understanding your present,” notes Martha Lee of the Russo Lee Gallery, which represents the Bunce estate as well as several artists who studied under him. Indeed, Bunce was fundamental to the arts in Portland.
–Briana Miller, for The Oregonian/OregonLive
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“Louis Bunce: Dialogue with Modernism”
What: Retrospective of Oregon artist Louis Bunce
Where: Hallie Ford Museum of Art, Willamette University, 900 State St., Salem
When: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday, 1-5 p.m. Sunday, through March 26.
Tickets: $6 general, $4 seniors (55 and older), $3 students (18 and older with identification); willamette.edu/arts/hfma or 503-370-6855.
Additional programming: Concurrent with the Hallie Ford exhibition, exhibitions of Bunce’s work will be on view at the Russo Lee Gallery, 805 N.W. 21st Ave., and the Karin Clarke Gallery, 760 Willamette St., Eugene, both through Saturday, Feb. 25. There will also be a panel discussion, “Remembering Louis Bunce,” moderated by exhibition curator Roger Hull with former student and gallerist Arlene Schnitzer and artists George Johanson, Lucinda Parker and Jack Portland, at 2 p.m. Sunday, Feb. 26, in Paulus Lecture Hall, Willamette University College of Law, 900 State St., Salem.
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