A FINE LINEAGE

Streamline Gallery brings a diverse world of modern art to Denver

Fans of early twentieth-century art just got lucky. Previously confined to scouring the Denver Art Museum and out-of-the-way spaces for high-end pieces, they can now check out the Gold family’s Streamline Gallery at 816 Santa Fe Drive. The gallery specializes in paintings, sculpture, and furniture from the turn of the century through the ‘70s.

Streamline, which opened on November 1, contains a variety of works by European and American artists including Frank Lloyd Wright, Y. Constantine, John Hoskin, Eero Arnio, and Leo Prochownik. Ashipment of 16 new paintings and several pieces of furniture recently arrived at the gallery from Europe. Packed tightly, but conscientiously, the two-room gallery seems to overflow with treasures once one enters its red-lit door.

European art is a particular specialty of Greg Whitlock, Streamline’s gallery director. An art collector for 25 years, he worked for almost 18 of those years at the Tadema Gallery in London, England. Several of the pieces hanging in Streamline now are from his personal collection.

One such, Y. Constantine’s 1954 oil-on-canvas Oh what power give us, to see ourselves as others see us, arrests the eye from its vantage on the gallery’s rear wall. In the foreground of the painting, a minstrel/jester and an aristocratic lady with a cat obscure a view of a Cossack soldier and a blonde woman. According to Whitlock, the two front figures are how the woman and the soldier see each other, grande dame and clown, while the two rear figures are how the people view themselves.

That piece is joined by another 1954 oil of Constantine’s, Moonlight, which arrived as part of the new European shipment. Moonlight features juxtaposed people and fish in pale, night-washed colors, blocked out in rectangles suggestive of moonlight through windows. Constantine, born in Russia in 1920, is also well-known as a film producer and director.

John Hoskin’s sculpture in steel rod with copper coating also graces the new gallery space. The untitled work, which fills most of the picture-window in the vanity wall separating the gallery’s two rooms, flows upwards from a stone base like a fountain just before the water breaks in its curve.

Perhaps the most touching work in Streamline, though, comes from German Jewish painter Leo Prochownik (1875—1936). A renowned painter and art designer from 1897 to the early ‘20s, most of his work was destroyed by the Nazis in 1941 because he was a Jew. The piece in Streamline, a warm impressionistic oil of bathers near a lakeside in Berlin, was sealed in a wall of the Berlin Jewish Hospital with approximately 250 other paintings. The work was rediscovered during a construction project, Whitlock said.

Other new paintings in the gallery include Andre-Jean Evard’s Still Life, John Howlin’s Orpheus, Dorothy Bordass’s Vernal Equinox, and Henry Inlander’s Yellow Painting. The latter’s paint lividly curls over its canvas, looking alive and providing a sharp contrast to Richard Willis’s Blue Dominant.

Although much of Streamline’s strength lies in paintings, the gallery also has an impressive collection of furniture and pottery from key artistic periods. A diningroom set of Frank Lloyd Wright’s furniture dominates the second room. The pieces, previously working parts of a home, display a juxtaposition of strong style and worn patina, while still remaining in excellent condition. To a certain kind of observer, the implications of high art with a food stain on the seat cannot be overestimated; the rarefied becomes more real.

Sometimes, though, that effect can backfire, as Whitlock related: “We had this nice little old couple in here. They looked around and said, ‘Oh—you sell used furniture.’”

Fortunately, the Lloyd Wright pieces are separated from a visually contesting work: Eero Arnio’s famous Tomato Chair. Appropriately named, the chair sports not only the fruit’s color but also a fleshy roundness. Three bulbs form the base, with the seat caved in at the center as though the stem was cut away from the pulp. The sitter, therefore, takes the stem’s place, connecting the chair to the outside world.

Near the Tomato Chair, a complete set of Enid Seeney’s Homemaker Tableware rounds out Streamline’s collection. The ‘50s dishes are covered with a black-and-white household goods motif: carving knives, boomerang-shaped tables, potted plants, hors d’ouevres, and other whimsi-cal objects self-consciously celebrating the ‘50s lifestyle.

—Kate Williamson

photos by Sean Hartgrove