Art Collection

Modrall Sperling is proud to present its art collection as a feature of our website. Our law firm is committed to the arts, and it is our privilege to celebrate the rich cultural and artistic traditions of the Southwest by acquiring and displaying art that represents our region. Modrall Sperling was founded in 1937, and this collection is integral to the tradition of our firm and its support of the arts.

Dick Modrall, one of our firm's founders, was a cowboy-rancher turned lawyer and an appreciator of western art. In the 1950s, his wife, Connie Modrall, founded the Western Art Gallery on Amherst Street in Albuquerque. The gallery became known for its diverse collection of outstanding New Mexican and other western artists. Over the years, pieces from the Modrall family's collection have hung in the Modrall Sperling firm. Recently, the firm acquired a significant portion of the Modrall family collection. Representative pieces from our collection are shown on our website. We display this collection both as a representation of western art and as a remembrance of Dick Modrall and his affinity for the images of New Mexico. May we always appreciate the people and the landscapes that enrich and enliven our American Southwest.

The law firm would like to thank Peter Eller of Peter Eller Gallery at 206 Dartmouth NE, Albuquerque, New Mexico, for the important contribution his expertise, research, and text have made to the presentation of the Modrall Sperling Art Collection. Contact Peter at (505) 268-7437 or send an email to peter@peterellerart.com.

Early Prints

In New Mexico, as in many other southwestern states, the western aesthetic provided a vision of a more elemental life. The spiritual heart of this vision stretched from the ceremonial rhythm of the Pueblos of the Rio Grande to the cattle country of the eastern plains along the Canadian and Pecos Rivers. The main themes were romantic, in the affirmation of homely, pre-industrial virtues and the admiration of nature’s spectacle, and nostalgic in the fundamental acknowledgment that even in the West the constant press of progress made the staples and mainstays of this way of life into transient, receding endeavors.

The cowboy aesthetic is a more particular vision that focused not simply, as some would have it, on gunfights and runaway trains, but mainly on the working life of the people who raised and herded cattle in a land that was often scenically grand but also desolate and raw. The cowboy aesthetic represented a simpler, often less artificial, sensibility that, as E. Wuerpel observed in 1951 in New Mexico Quarterly regarding the work of Oscar Berninghaus, offered "No puzzling inquiry, no psychological bewilderment. . . . All is quite straight forward, simple and clear," (Quoted in V. D. Coke, Taos and Santa Fe: The Artist’s Environment: 1882-1942, p. 18). All in all, therefore, the western sensibility in art also represented a reaction against the complexity and ambiguity of modern life.

The core of the law firm’s collection is its early prints. The firm’s prints by Kenneth Adams, Peter Hurd, Theodore Van Soelen, Gene Kloss, Edward Borein, Oscar Berninghaus, Andrew Dasburg, and others are fine and diverse examples of the western and cowboy aesthetic.

Paintings and Later Prints

In addition to its early, more traditional prints, the law firm’s collection also contains notable paintings and prints by later generations of artists. Examples of these other works are shown here.

Among the more colorful local artists was Albuquerque’s Carl Von Hassler, and the firm has in its possession two good, representative examples of his New Mexico landscapes. These are complemented by work from the famous Taos eccentric painter, Dorothy Brett, as well as work by one of the earliest known Taos artists, Julius Rolshoven.

Constance Modrall’s Western Art Gallery was among the earliest supporters of a new generation of Indian painters and painters of Indian subjects. Three of these were Earl Biss, Jr., his teacher Fritz Scholder, and the young Rudolph Carl (R.C.) Gorman. At the time, aesthetic sensibilities in the Southwest were changing, and in that change Indian art took the lead over western art in incorporating abstract styles of image making.

Also, in the 1970s, color offset lithography reinvigorated the often rocky relationship between art and business. The ability to print as many multiples of an image as there was paper and ink provided an opportunity for advertising. The standard for this type of association was the relationship of the western artist then living near Albuquerque, Gordon Snidow, and the Coors Brewing Company of Golden, Colorado. Snidow’s hard-bitten cowboy with a can of the company’s beverage became an icon of western and advertising art. Other artists saw in the medium a means to make reproductions of photographic fidelity available to a wide audience. Three of these were noted Albuquerque artist Wilson Hurley, Henriette Wyeth of San Patricio, New Mexico, and Tom Ryan, then living in Texas.

Conclusion

By acquiring the collection, Modrall Sperling, one of the oldest law firms in New Mexico, has aligned itself with one of New Mexico’s oldest cultural traditions, the making and display of art. In the firm’s reception areas and conference rooms, clients and other visitors are able to share in this rich and enriching tradition.