THE arts in Colorado are rather more interesting historically, as reflections of a rapidly changing cultural pattern, than for bulk of achievement or development of new and significant forms. In the field of architecture the stress at first was necessarily on the purely utilitarian, but the early structures were no less interesting and even beautiful on that account. Many had a simplicity of line, an economy of space, a plain and unadorned functionalism, that many more pretentious buildings of a later and more affluent day have lamentably lacked. In recent years a return to simple lines and less needlessly elaborated forms has been marked both in dwellings and larger buildings, public and private.

And so in literature. The plain, graphic, unvarnished accounts of the Rocky Mountain West by Zebulon Pike, Dr. Edwin James of the Long expedition, John Fremont, Francis Parkman, George Frederick Ruxton, and other early wanderers and explorers, were lost in a flood of pseudo-historical works by tenderfoot journalists; these fanciful hacks had no difficulty in believing, or at least in writing, that in the Wild and Woolly West even the least accomplished "hero" began the day by shooting, preferably before breakfast, "a buffalo, two Cheyennes, and a grizzly, without pausing to draw breath." Later came "genteel" travelogues, such as that of Isabella Bird Bishop, English journalist, and the sentimental romances of the Helen Hunt Jackson school, which offered, if nothing better, at least a pleasant change from the prevailing motif of general slaughter and preposterous last-minute rescues. Here, too, there has been within recent years a broader, deeper, more realistic appraisal of the Colorado scene.

Painting has followed a somewhat similar course from the simple but excellent sketches of Samuel Seymour, George Catlin, and J. M. Stanley, through the monumental landscapes of Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran, to the less "heroic" but more sentient canvases of contemporary painters. Many of these have rediscovered the Indian and have been markedly influenced by his highly stylized forms and flat use of color.

The golden age of the Frontier theater has long since passed. In ceasing to be "for gentlemen only," it has become conventionally polite, respectable, and serious, perhaps even a bit too pompously solemn a the sacrifice of its high animal spirits and its rough, Rabelaisian, but really innocent humor.

Music in Colorado has been more derivative than the other arts, more in the traditions and prevailing fashions elsewhere. Even on its informal side, in old cowboy and miners’ songs, it is rather more Western than distinctively Coloradoan.

Little today distinguishes the usual Colorado town or city from communities of comparable size anywhere in the West or Middle West. But tucked away in the plains villages, in Spanish-American hamlets in the southern part of the State, in mountain-ringed mining towns, and in the older sections of the larger cities, are interesting architectural landmarks.

Clay, stone, wood, sod, and other structural materials are plentiful in Colorado, and all have been ingeniously employed within its boundaries for centuries. A thousand years ago the Cliff Dwellers used stone in building their fortress-like and curiously modern "apartment houses" in great natural caves and crevices high on the canyon walls at Mesa Verde and Hovenweep.

The structural use of Colorado clay in the form of adobe, practicable only in arid climates, has been traced back some two thousand years to the Basket Makers, who covered their pit dwellings with dome-shaped roofs fashioned of interlaced willow bows and plastered with adobe mud. Spanish priests early taught the Indians to use adobe in the form of precast bricks, a superior type of construction to the aboriginal method of puddling. The traditional form of adobe dwellings antedates the Spanish, however, and was adopted by them from the design of the pueblos of the mesa country and the dwellings of the common folk among the Aztecs and other peoples of Mexico. The first Spanish-speaking settlers in the southern valleys of Colorado found adobe clay in quantity and naturally built such houses as they had known farther south. Adobe structures are beautiful in an appropriate setting of cliff wall and mesa, for their simple lines and soft coloring harmonize well with their background.

The true adobe house is simple in design, usually consisting of a single room, with walls of sun-dried bricks about a foot long, six inches wide, and three inches thick, made of adobe and straw. The flat roof is also of adobe, supported by rafters called vagas, hewn from long logs; these are usually allowed to project beyond the walls at each end of the house. West of Trinidad, at Tijeras and Cordova Plazas, some of the old single-room houses erected in the 1870's have been converted into large communal dwellings by adding bays of rooms or additional apartments to the sides of the original building as members of the family have married. Although adobe construction has declined, its influence is apparent in the lines of "modern pueblo" houses built by some who have become rather bored with the usual bungalow, early Tudor, Spanish villa, and Georgian Colonial styles that prevail in the better residential section of the cities.

From the beginning of settlement, construction and design were influenced at once by climate and the character of available materials. Each region early developed types of houses and buildings best suited to the local scene and the means at hand; these types have in part persisted although ease of transportation has brought a measure of uniformity and standardization by making readily available in widely separated communities all kinds of structural materials—brick has been shipped into granite-bottomed mountain towns, dressed lumber into the treeless plains.

The early settler, faced with the all-engrossing problems of survival, had little time or energy for embellishing his house; its primary purpose was to shelter him and his family from sun and storm. The first settlers on the plains—cattlemen and buffalo hunters who came in the 1860's and 1870's—found no stone and no timber, not even the useful adobe. Their first habitations were therefore crude dugouts with roofs of brush and dirt, a type still to be seen in parts of the dry mesa country in southwestern Colorado. The farmers who followed the cattlemen improved upon this construction by plowing up narrow slabs of sod, which were used to build walls and roofs; flowers often continued to sprout and bloom on the sod houses, transforming them into curious gardens. Cool in summer, warm in winter, these sod houses, few of which survive, were in many respects more serviceable than the flimsy frame structures that succeeded them.

The mining camps in the mountains were initially marked by structural forms as simple as those of the plains or mesa country. Here again use was made of the material at hand. As thick stands of pine covered the mountains, the first structures in the camps were of logs, either unpeeled or roughly squared. Soon portable sawmills were cutting slabs of green pine lumber, and frame construction began. Use of masonry in the camps was usually deferred until a reasonable degree of permanency seemed assured, but the miners' chronic optimism often induced disastrous illusions. This was the day of false-fronts, when rows of one-story buildings in every town were camouflaged to give an impression of far greater size. False-front buildings still characterize many mountain towns and plains villages. Log houses have never gone out of fashion in the mountains, and such construction has reached elaborate proportions in "rustic" hotels and lodges.

The discovery near Denver in the 1860's of fine brick clay profoundly influenced the trend of architectural design. Bonanza kings and merchant princes saw in the product of the kilns a material well suited to give expression to their conceptions of elegance and grandeur. It became a mark of distinction, a matter of prestige, to build with brick, especially where it was most expensive; tons and tons of brick were shipped at great cost to Leadville and other boom camps in the mountains to build cottages, business buildings, and opera houses. The more pretentious structures were usually "jigsaw" in a late Victorian manner, being heavily ornamented with wooden scrollwork; a number of these "jigsaw" houses remain in Central City, one of the more notable being the Frederick Kruse House, built in 1874, which stands beside the highway on the boundary between Central City and Blackhawk. Later, brick exteriors were embellished with cast iron trim. Among the better brick structures of this period are the Teller House at Central City and the ornate Hotel de Paris at Georgetown. The Tabor Opera House at Denver, a brick building erected in 1880-81 and regarded as one of the finest playhouses in the country of its day, reflected the then-budding Romanesque Revival. Other examples of early brick buildings stand along Blake Street in Denver. A notable exception to the use of brick is the Central City Opera House, completed in 1878, built of granite from the surrounding hills.

A change of fashion among the wealthier was heralded by Glen Eyrie, built early in the 1870’s a few miles northwest of Colorado Springs by General William J. Palmer, railroad promoter. Believing that a man's house is and literally should be his castle, the General built a remarkable one, with towers, turrets, and other obsolete military appurtenances. The neighborhood was searched for flat weathered stones to impart an aspect of great age to the building. As the roof looked too new, the General had it torn off and rebuilt with tiles from an old English church; antipathetic to chimneys, he had a tunnel dug into and up the mountainside to carry off smoke. Glen Eyrie is unoccupied today.

The Romanesque Revival that swept the country during the 1880’s and 1890’s influenced the design both of business and private houses, and several of the old mansions still standing on Capitol Hill in Denver are as fine examples of this style as any in America. Many of these rambling brick and sandstone structures with high pitched gable roofs and tall chimneys were designed by H. T. E. Wendell, Frederick Sterner, and T. A. S. Green, who were among the first professional architects in Colorado. The Hughes House at East 12th Avenue and Grant Street, Denver, was designed by Wendell and is one of the finer residences of the period, as is the Patterson House at East 11th Avenue and Pennsylvania Street. From a purely structural standpoint these buildings have scarcely been improved upon by later and equally imitative generations.

As designers have struggled for greater freedom of expression, encouraging advances have been made in the field of public buildings and monumental architecture. The design of the new Denver Federal Building, with its simple classic lines and well-planned interior, represents a notable improvement on the clumsy and cluttered structure it replaced. Similarly, the Denver City and County Building, the work of the Allied Architects of Denver, is the antithesis of the classic State Capitol with its vast and useless maze of wide corridors and grand staircases. Probably the finest achievements, however, have been made in the design of educational institutions, for here the architect has been allowed the greatest latitude in demonstrating that the useful and the beautiful can be one. The adaptation of a rural Italian style, so well suited to the mountainous setting of Boulder and the richly colored stone quarried near by, spared the University of Colorado campus the monotony of the usual Collegiate Gothic. This work by Charles Zeller Klauder and Frank Miles Day of Philadelphia promises to make the university one of the most attractive architecturally in the country.

Other impressive buildings are Burnham Hoyt's Lake Junior High School in Denver, and the South Denver High School, designed by W. E. and A. A. Fisher. The modernistic has an exemplar in John Gow Meem's Fine Arts Center at Colorado Springs, executed with severe simplicity in concrete and aluminum. Many business buildings reflect a similar modern trend, notably the Telephone Building in Denver, the largest commercial structure in the State, with its vertical mass lines and want of traditional detail.

Little is known of the earliest aboriginal art in Colorado. Few traces remain of the Basket Maker culture. The Cliff Dwellers were accomplished in the ceramic arts, but decoration of pottery appears to have been developed by them only a short time before their mysterious disappearance. Their painting was purely ceremonial, and the few examples of their petroglyphs that have been found are so highly stylized that in most instances the subjects can only be conjectured. The Indian nomads of plains and mountains painted on leather, both for decorative purposes and to record historical events, using highly developed geometric designs as well as human and animal figures; the latter were often strongly and imaginatively conceived.

The first pictorial representations of the State, it appears, were by Samuel Seymour, a draughtsman member of Major Stephen H. Long's expedition in 1820; his work appeared as illustrations of the published account of the expedition. In 1832 George Catlin, a Philadelphia law student, came west to live among the Indians and paint their portraits and mode of life; much of his work is preserved in the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D. C. His Illustrations of the Manner, Customs, and Conditions of the North American Indians, published in 1841, constitutes a significant chapter in the history of American genre painting. Another early artist was J. M. Stanley, who came in the 1840’s to paint Indian and pioneer life; his work, for the most part, appeared only in the annals of the Smithsonian Institution. John C. Fremont, a better engineer and soldier than artist, made sketches of the mountains on his expedition of 1842. Others of the pioneer period were Walter Carey, illustrator for various periodicals, and John ("Captain Jack") Rowland, for many years staff artist on Harper s Weekly, who began painting western scenes in 1857. Rowland later studied in France and attained some recognition as a sculptor; his Soldiers' Monument (1907) stands on the lawn of the capitol at Denver, and several paintings of his earlier period are in private collections in Colorado.

These artists, largely self-taught, were followed by painters with formal European training—among others, Albert Bierstadt, who, brought to America as a child, returned to his native Dusseldorf, Germany, to study in the genre school of Auchenbach. Returning to America in 1858, he joined the Landers surveying expedition to the Colorado Rockies, where he found inspiration for most of his better-known works. On this first visit he executed Morning in the Rocky Mountains, as well as Rocky Mountains—Landers Peak, now in the Metropolitan Museum, New York City. He painted prolifically on his many Western trips, and as art proved to be an excellent medium for selling stocks and bonds abroad to finance construction of railroads on the frontier, Bierstadt accumulated a larger bank balance than most painters, for his canvases caught the fancy of the wealthy, the Federal Government, and many foreign governments. The Congress appropriated $20,000 for one work, and the eccentric Earl of Dunraven paid $15,000 for his Park in Colorado. Among his better known canvases are Storm in the Rocky Mountains and The Last of the Buffalo, both painted in 1863. Examples of his work hang in museums at New York and Chicago, in the Corcoran Gallery, Washington, D. C., and in the Royal Academy, London.