Archive Post: 12/21/2014

Happy Holidays!

Christmas Lights, Kansas City, Missouri, Rockne Krebs, 1956

“I find CITY LIGHTS painted in 1956 by Krebs as a teenager of the Christmas lights in the Plaza in Kansas City, prophetic of the homages to the urban landscape that he would create a decade and a half later and would describe in a 1972 essay titled Light Is The City At Night.  In the interim Krebs would pursue the rather typical course of the serious student artist, majoring in sculpture at the University of Kansas with the sculptors Elden Tefft, Bernard Frazier, Jim Bass and James Sterrit.  The fact of his long artistic apprenticeship has been over looked because he appeared to most art world observers to have been born with lasers in the sixties….”   Jay Belloli, 1990

“Definite Wow. Predictive of so much!” Benjamin Forgey, an Art and Architecture critic living in Washington, DC, 2022

On the back of the painting the typed text “Scholastic Regional Art Awards. Emery, Bird, Thayer Co. Kansas City MO. Co-sponsors Western Missouri Scholastic Magazines National Sponsor, Scholastic Art and Photography Awards. Rockne Krebs 18 yrs. old. Grade 12, Transparent + water color, Award: Key."