The son of a German architect, Arnold Rönnebeck studied architecture in Berlin and sculpture in Munich and Paris before emigrating to America in the early 1920s. With him he brought a modernist sensibility, having been introduced to Cubism in 1911 and to artists such as Pablo Picasso and Marsden Hartley while living in Paris. "New York" he was to say in 1924, "is living Cubism." Rönnebeck felt that American art should "...more than anything else [express] the immense vitality, the movement, the'go' of American life." In 1926, Rönnebeck settled in Colorado, where he served for a number of years as the director of the Denver Art Museum and a professor of studio art at the University of Denver. The majority of Rönnebeck's prints depict southwestern subjects; New York views are more rare.