Low Winter Light, Coors, Denver

 

Harold Emerson Keeler

  1905 - 1968 (biography)

c. 1935  

lithograph 

12 x 16 13/16" image size 

pencil, lower right 

13 of 16  

pencil titled, editioned, inscribed secondary title along bottom sheet edge 

 

white Strathmore Fairfield wove 

published 

artist 

LIBU138 

SOLD

Colorado-born printmaker Harold Keeler worked in the Colorado WPA after studying at the Art Institute of Chicago. During the 1930s he also worked as a Master Printer in Denver and was employed by the Denver Art Museum as a Print Researcher, focusing on Albrecht Durer's woodcuts. In 1942 he moved to Seattle, Washington. He was one of the first printmakers to work at Tamarind Lithographic Workshop, Los Angeles in 1961. This Modernist composition focuses on the Coors brewery in Golden, Colorado, near Denver, done around 1935. Keeler uses the color of the paper as a white contrast to the angular shadowed structures in the foreground. In the foreground the artist has added figures, which give the viewer a sense of scale for the vastness of the brewery. The Coors Brewery, built in 1873, is one of the oldest breweries in the United States and is situated in Golden at the base of South Table Mountain with Castle Rock at the top, depicted in the background of the image. It managed to remain open during Prohibition by selling malted milk to Mars candy and non-alcoholic "near beer".