Untitled (Still Life with Bowl of Fruit), Painting, dated 1957

A Denver native, Arnest attended East High School where he studied with its long-time art teacher, Helen Perry. In the early 1930’s, her leading students included Eugene Trentham, Ethel and Jenne Magafan, and Edward Chavez, all of whom later enjoyed successful careers as professional artists. At Perry’s recommendation, he benefited from supplemental instruction at the newly founded Kirkland School of Art and at the School of Fine Art and Design operated in downtown Denver by Colorado artist Frank Mechau, recently returned from a five-year sojourn in Paris.

Following graduation, he enrolled at the Broadmoor Art Academy in Colorado Springs where he studied with artists Boardman Robinson and Henry Varnum Poor. Several of Arnest’s small-format paintings done as Robinson’s student depict scenes of harvesting and cattle ranching, a daily part of western life.

This subject matter, which focused on interpreting local scenes and vignettes from contemporary life, was a significant aspect of Contemporary Realism and American Scene painting from the 1930s and early 1940s. Additionally, the style distinguished the majority of murals produced for Federal buildings during the Depression-era, during which time the government established several programs to financially assist artists suffering from widespread economic dislocation. The Center’s Fine Arts School, whose leading mural instructors were Robinson and Frank Mechau, had an enviable success record in winning government mural competitions. From 1936 to 1940, students and graduates of the Center completed forty murals, while current and former teachers produced twenty more, all awarded through open competition.

Arnest won the commission for the post office in Wellington, Texas, in 1939 and installed the completed mural the following year, where it still can be seen in its original location. Titled Settlers on the Texas Plains and executed in a combination of tempera and oil on canvas, the mural shows a group of people building a shelter and sowing crops on the Texas Plains, “fundamental activities,” in his words, “of opening and using a new land.”

In 1940, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation awarded Arnest a fellowship in painting. He used the time to do creative painting in San Francisco and to experience the city’s thriving art scene. That same year, the San Francisco Museum of (Modern) Art mounted his one-man show, the first of a number in his professional career.
In 1941, shortly before America’s entry into World War II, Arnest enlisted into the Army Signal Corps. Commissioned as a Second Lieutenant a year later, he served for nine months in Iceland in 1943, followed by a stint in England with the 10th Replacement Depot. In 1944, Arnest joined a five-man team of artists attached to the Historical Section of the U.S. Army’s European Theater Headquarters and served as the Section’s Chief War Artist through the end of the war.

Although not specifically trained as a war artist, he—like many of his contemporaries—had been schooled in representation and visual interpretation during the political and economic turmoil of the 1930s and the Great Depression, which prepared him to document the Western European wartime theater. From 1944 to the war’s conclusion, Arnest worked in England, France, Germany, Belgium and The Netherlands, sketching and painting vignettes of American army life, Buchenwald concentration camp prisoners, the meeting of Soviet and American troops at Strehla in 1945, and the ruins of bombed-out towns and cities. He also received a Bronze Star for assisting a rescue mission near a minefield in Aachen, Germany.

After the war, Arnest worked for two years in New York City, believing that every artist should spend at least one year there. During that time, he began a 39-year affiliation with the Kraushaar Gallery that persisted until his death in 1986. In addition to acquainting himself with the new postwar developments in American art, he traveled up and down the East Coast painting scenes from North Carolina to New Hampshire. In 1947, he fortuitously received a job offer from the Minneapolis School of Fine Arts (since 1970, Minneapolis College of Art and Design-MCAD). Shortly after assuming his new position as instructor of painting, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts gave him a one-man show of rural and urban landscape paintings and drawings of Eastern and wartime European subjects.

In Minneapolis, he painted a number of referentially abstract cityscapes and geometric form studies, as well as several portraits and still life paintings. He also enjoyed an excursion into Abstract Expressionism, the dominant art style at that time. He termed it “the most beautiful of all forms, when the painter was no longer obliged (or even interested) to picture, only to paint.” On account of his engagement with the University of Minnesota (Instructor – 1949; Assistant Professor – 1950, and Associate Professor – 1955), he also lectured at the Walker Art Center and the John Hay Fellows Program.

In 1957, Arnest relocated his family to Colorado Springs. With three young children to support, he found it difficult to resist the attractive salary offered by Colorado College to join its faculty as Professor and Chairman of the Department after the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center had closed its Fine Arts School. As an art educator, he likewise was a principal consultant for the Advanced Placement in Art program developed by the College Entrance Examination Board. During this time, he also served as a consultant for the art programs at Stanford University, Pennsylvania State University, and the Ford Foundation.

In Colorado, he painted subjects similar to those he had previously created in Minnesota, chief among them landscapes which he termed “appreciations and escapes from any metaphysical cargo.” Additionally, he continued with portraits and still life paintings “made in the belief that there is a reciprocity between observation, as distinct from imitation and imagination.” On the occasion of his retrospective exhibition at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center in 1981, curator Charles Guerin summed up the essence of his art:

Bernard Arnest has demonstrated throughout his long career a continuing ability to produce works of art which are unique. Unlike so many artists whose paintings are simply a logical progression of the work of other artists or an eclectic combination of current or past styles, Arnest’s pictures are highly personal and intuitive statements. They seem to possess a contained energy which emanates from the work and creates a sense of presence which is unmistakable. The works cannot be ignored. They captivate the viewer quietly as they demand consideration.

Arnest retired from Colorado College in 1982 as Professor Emeritus of Art. While he enjoyed teaching, he welcomed the lack of schedules and deadlines, which enabled him to paint and write freely. Although not very nostalgic, he could look back with satisfaction on a career as a distinguished teacher and as a participant with other leading American artists juried into important and prestigious national annual/biennial exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the National Academy of Design both in New York; the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia; and the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In 1984, the City of Colorado Springs awarded Arnest its Medal of Distinction for his outstanding contributions to the arts.

©David Cook Galleries, LLC