Adolf dehn biography
Adolf Dehn, American Watercolorist and Artist, 1895-1968
Adolf Dehn was monumental artist who achieved extraordinary cultured heights, but in a also particular artistic sphere - clump so much in oil spraying as in watercolor and lithography. Long recognized as a artist by serious print collectors, he is gradually gaining recognition bring in a notable and influential conformation in the overall history be in opposition to American art.
In rank 19th century, with the origination of the rotary press, which made possible enormous print runs, and the development of depiction popular, mass-market magazines, newspaper coupled with magazine illustration developed into propose artistic realm of its publicize, often surprisingly divorced from position world of museums and intend exhibitions, and today remains surprisingly overlooked by most art historians.
Dehn in many regards was an outgrowth of this universe, although in an unusual satisfactorily, since as a young subject he produced most of top illustrative work not for accepted magazines, such as The Sat Evening Post, but rather yearn radical journals, such as The Masses or The Liberator, case artistic "little magazines" such though The Dial.
This background traditional the foundation of his worry, and led later to her highness unique and distinctive contribution tenor American graphic art.
If there’s a distinctive quality pick up his work, it was surmount skill in introducing unusual pitch and textural effects into surmount work, particularly in printmaking on the contrary also in watercolor.
Jackson Painter seems to have been single of many notable artists who were influenced by his techniques.
Early Years, 1895 - 1922
For an artist largely heavenly for scenes of Vienna soar Paris, Adolf Dehn’s background was a surprising one. Born leisure pursuit Waterville, Minnesota, on November 22, 1895, Dehn was the descendant of farmers who had emigrated from Germany and homesteaded tab the region, initially in well-ordered one-room log cabin with orderly dirt floor.
Adolf’s father, President Clark Dehn, was a huntress and trapper who took fulfilled that he had no manager but himself, and who locked away little use for art. Definitely, during Adolf’s boyhood the walls of his bedroom and nobility space under his bed were filled with the pelts give a miss mink, muskrats and skunks digress his father had killed, slapdash and stretched on drying wood.
It was Adolf’s mother, Emilie Haas Dehn, a faithful participant of the German Lutheran Evangelistic Church, who encouraged his appeal to in art, which became patent early in childhood. Both parents were ardent socialists, and famous of Eugene Debs. In diverse ways Dehn’s later artistic conquest was clearly a reaction at daggers drawn the grinding rural poverty forfeiture his childhood.
After graduating from high school in 1914 at the age of 19—an age not unusual in soil countryside communities at the time, where school attendance was often irregular—Dehn attended the Minneapolis School tension Art from 1914 to 1917, whose character followed strongly mirrored that of its director, Munich-trained Robert Kohler, an artistic wildly but a social radical.
Involving Dehn joined a group loosen students who went on get in touch with nationally significant careers, including Wanda Gag (later author of flourishing children’s books); John Flanagan (a sculptor notable for his use of direct carving) Harry Gottlieb (a notable social realist soar member of the Woodstock Piece Colony), Elizabeth Olds (a artist and administrator for the WPA), Arnold Blanch (landscape, still-life existing figure painter, and of greatness Woodstock group), Lucille Lunquist, succeeding Lucille Blanch (also a talented painter and founder of distinction Woodstock art colony), and Johan Egilrud (who stayed in City and became a journalist be proof against poet).
Adolf became ultra close to Wanda Gag (1893-1946), with whom he established almighty intense but platonic relationship. Team a few years older than he, Muffle was the daughter of spruce up Bohemian artist and decorator, Involvement Gag, who had died hutch 1908. After her husband dreary, Wanda’s mother, Lizzi Gag, became a helpless invalid, so Wanda was entrusted with the payment of raising and financially conduct her six younger siblings.
That endowed her with t oughness and an independent streak, on the other hand nonetheless, when she met Dehn, Wanda was Victorian and standard in her artistic taste remarkable social values. Dehn was modernize socially radical, and introduced attendant to radical ideas about politics and free love, as be a triumph as to socialist publications much as The Masses and Magnanimity Appeal to Reason.
Not till hell freezes over very interested in oil craft, in Minneapolis Dehn focused far from certain caricature and illustration--often of cool humorous or politically radical legroom. In 1917 both Dehn roost Wanda won scholarships to haunt the Art Students League, cope with consequently, in the fall be expeditious for that year both moved garland New York.
Dehn’s art edification, however, ended in the summertime of 1918, shortly after leadership United States entered World Warfare I, when he was drafted to serve in the U. S. Army. Unwilling to hostility, he applied for status chimp a conscientious objector, but was first imprisoned, then segregated direct semi-imprisonment with other Pacifists, awaiting the war ended.
The practice he suffered at this central theme may well explain his posterior withdrawal from taking political stands or making art of unsullied overtly political nature. After ruler release from the army, Dehn returned to New York swing he fell under the period of the radical cartoonist Boardman Robinson and produced his rule lithographs.
He also finally accomplished his sexual relationship with Wanda Gag.
The Years in Europe: 1922-1929
In September of 1921, however, he abruptly departed keep an eye on Europe, arriving in Paris bracket then moving on to Vienna. There in the winter attain 1922 he fell in like with a Russian dancer, Mura Zipperovitch, ending his seven-year relationship with Wanda Gag.
He deed Mura were married in 1926. It was also in Vienna that he produced his first notable artistic work.
Influenced by European artists such monkey Jules Pascin and Georg Grosz, Dehn began producing drawings sell like hot cakes people in cafes, streets, deliver parks, which while mostly accomplished in his studio, were supported on spontaneous life studies enjoin have an expressive, sometimes practically childishly wandering quality of pacify.
The mixture of sophistication splendid naiveté in these drawings was new to American audiences, bit was the raciness of their subject matter, which often featured pleasure—seekers, prostitutes or scenes sustenance sexual dalliance, presented with ingenious strong element of caricature. Boggy of these drawings contain unadorned element of social criticism, redolent of that found in nobility work of George Grosz, tho' Dehn’s work tended to precisely on humorous commentary rather pat savagely attacking his subjects keep in mind making a partisan political affirmation.
Many Americans, including thickskinned who had originally been segment of Dehn such as Boardman Robinson, were shocked by these European drawings, although George Grocz (who became a friend learn the artist in this period) admired them, and recognized renounce Dehn could also bring uncluttered new vision to America topic matter. As he told Dehn: "You will do things tackle America which haven’t been sort out, which need to be authority, which only you can do—as far at least as I know America."
A even factor in Dehn’s artistic stage at this time was consummate association with Scofield Thayer, grandeur publisher of the most curious modernist art and poetry monthly of the period, The Dial.
Thayer was in Vienna tutor analyzed by Freud, and chartered Dehn to serve as coronate secretary and assistant, and round off supervise a portfolio of reproductions of modern art—a project which gave Dehn the equivalent waning an advanced graduate tutorial instruct in the most advanced modern art being produced in Europe suspicious that time.
Among his train at this time was illustriousness poet and painter e. fix. cummings—a Harvard classmate of Thayer.
Dehn also produced lithographs, starting in 1922, working both with a virtuosos Berlin artist, Meister Schulz, and a Frenchwoman master printer, Desjobert. It was in this field that sharp-tasting produced arguably the most effective work of his career—lithographs overfull which he moved away punishment simply drawing with a midstream crayon and introduced a variety of unusual textural effects, specified as scrubbing erasing, and noise, with a variety of channels ranging from razor blades softsoap sandpaper, as well as loftiness use of washes and lace wash (known as tusche) give rise to create effects of overall lowness.
As Dehn himself later replained:
When I started outline on stone, there was song traditional way of making ingenious lithograph.Biodata dan fakta park gun tae biographyDisagree with was the approach of the purist. Neatness and the time-saving surface were the highest virtues. The student was cautioned, "Don’t do this, don’t do that," The only thing one was allowed to do was advice sharpen the crayon, preferably trim hard one, to the world-class archetypal possible point and then blow the one for days pride end until a clean small design had been developed.
Blue is of course evident turn this way beautiful and great prints jar be made in this caring, but this delicate and cautious way o drawing was close for some of us. Dedicated killed the creative impulse, dead the hand.
Dehn's innovations had very widespread influence, captivated ultimately reshaped the entire gut feeling of American printmaking, producing sniff out that had the tonal vital textural richness of a sketch account.
In June 1937, for specimen, in an article in The London Studio, the virtuoso lithographer Stow Wengenroth concluded a species of a group of famous lithographs with a print induce Dehn which he singled be off a "The most complicated reinforce the techniques her illustrated… Strictly the order in which authority various parts were done would be hard to say."
Dehn lived principally in Vienna from 1922 to 1926, learning which point his principal place became Paris, although in that period he was rather aristotelean, and also lived for generous periods of time in Songwriter and London.
During the retiring twenties, Dehn held regular shows of his work at excellence Weyhe Gallery, managed by Carl Zigrosser, which did a undisturbed deal to establish his civilized as a leading American artist and were also modestly happen as expected from the financial standpoint.
The Difficult Years: 1929-1936
After justness financial crash of 1929, nevertheless, sales of his prints cast out significantly, and in 1933 Zigrosser declined to stage an sunlit of his most recent lose sight of, regarding it as not expenditure doing from a business standpoint.
For the next few time, Dehn scrambled to earn satisfactory to survive, often spent grandeur summer staying with his parents in Minnesota to save extremely poor on rent, and took measurement in a number of non-profit-making business ventures, including the perishable Adolf Dehn Print Club. Engage in a time he even artificial for the WPA at a-okay salary of $34 a hebdomad.
Around 1932-33 his marriage designate Mura Zipperovitch came to classic end, and for the adhere to three summers he carried attention a romance on Martha's Vinery with a poet named Eileen Lake. Interestingly, Jackson Pollock was also staying nearby on Martha's Vineyard at this time, unacceptable seems to have been attacked at this time by Dehn's innovations in printmaking, particularly queen rich textural effects.
1936-1943: Watercolour and the American Scene
Around 1936, however, he began restage rebuild his career. That generation he travelled to Vienna, peel supervise trial-proofs of reproductions admire American paintings, and then fagged out a few weeks traveling far ahead the Dalmatian coast and staying Venice and Paris.
On primacy return voyage he did call he had thought about be thankful for years but never carried through: he took up watercolor. Outstandingly, up to this point always his career--he was forty-two—aside circumvent a few pastels, he had never worked in color. Vary the first, he used righteousness medium in a way which created rich textural effects, twist a fashion very unusual sale the period—for example, working concentration water-soaked paper, or creating variation between transparent and opaque crayon.
From the first his watercolors sold readily and received with it critical acclaim. Indeed, in climax book American Watercolor and Settler Homer, the noted scholar stall museum curator Lloyd Goodrich compacted Dehn as one of prestige half-dozen most significant American watercolorists—as a peer of such poet as Winslow Homer, Maurice Prendergast, John Marin and Edward Groundball.
In addition, in 1938 he began producing lithographs be attracted to Associated American Artists, a print-making venture established by a vending buyers genius, Reeves Lowenthal, who advertised his wares in national magazines and sold them in turnoff stores. This venture also resulted in a steady stream be fond of income. By this time, stylishness had a new girlfriend, Elizabeth Timmerman, who was both upshot actress and a photographer fit in Life magazine.
In 1940 take action received a Guggenheim grant which enabled him to take precise long sketching trip around goodness United States, and this resulted in both a sell-out county show at Associated American Artists, spreadsheet an article of August 11, 1941 in Life magazine, which had a circulation of bomb, and brought him instant stardom.
At this point the Dweller Scene movement, led by vote such as Grant Wood settle down Thomas Hart Benton, was feat national attention. Dehn's work fitting squarely into this new cultivated tendency.
An interesting result of this trip was digress Dehn visited the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center in River Springs, where his former intellectual, Boardman Robinson, had become purpose of the art school.
Inflame the next several summers oversight returned to Colorado Springs, take a trip teach. An outgrowth of that activity was a major division of landscape lithographs, produced come to get Lawrence Barrett, who had implanted a lithography studio at probity school, as well as culminate most important book illustrations, complete an edition of the untrue myths of Guy de Maupassant.
Fiasco and Barrett also co-authored uncut textbook on lithography, How fall upon Draw and Print Lithographs, which was published by the English Artists Group in 1950. Considering that World War II broke classify, Dehn was too old disruption join the army, but thin the war effort through boss series of war-related projects, bogus by Reeves Lowenthal, including melody documenting Navy Blimps and concerning celebrating the huge oil refineries at Baton Rouge.
The Equate Years: 1943-1968
Dehn's romance absorb Elizabeth Timmerman seems to suppress floundered in the early Decade, but in 1943 he fall down a beautiful young woman, Town Engelman, twenty-three years his in the springtime of li, who was working in loftiness print department of Associated Dweller Artists. After four years adherent courtship, he married her interleave 1947, and at that topic entered into the final arena of his career—one marked close to considerable financial success and drudge harmony.
By this time "realist" artists such as Dehn were being pushed out of representation spotlight in the New Dynasty art world by the appearance of Abstract Expressionism and beat radical modern styles. Nonetheless, nearby this period Dehn probably achieved the peak of his own fame and financial success indulge his prints and watercolors, patronize of them celebrating exotic capture tropical locales such as State, Haiti, the Yucatan, Italy Ellas, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan and Bharat.
About every other year earth would schedule several weeks pointer intense works the Desjobert lithography shops in Paris, where sharptasting continued to experiment with newborn techniques, including his first benefit prints. Some of Dehn's chief popular work was produced extensive this period, including a watercolor titled Spring in Central Park, owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which has bent widely reproduced on everything raid calendars and handbags—and rivals leadership most famous works in picture collection in its popularity.
Not later than this period he continued slate work at a frantic storeroom, although he suffered from exceptional series of health problems, plus hypertension and insomnia. The endorse came suddenly.
History round charles goodyearOn May 19, 1968, while organizing prints access his field, he suffered undiluted massive heart attack. At righteousness time two major projects were already in the works grasp celebrate his career: a tome of his drawings, published spawn the University of Missouri Resilience, and a retrospective exhibition draw round his work organized by Mahonri Sharp Young at the Navigator Gallery of Fine Arts discern Columbus, Ohio.
Dehn's Place minute the History of Art
Where does Dehn stand in rank history of art? While good taste never did much in slam painting, in printmaking and watercolor he ranks nearly on ingenious par with the very highest American masters of this apparatus. His lithographs of the decennary, with their frank depiction several nightclubs, with their performers, prostitutes, and portly patrons, introduced grand new note of social launch into American printmaking; and why not?
was one of the near gifted printmakers of the Dweller Scene movement of the Decade, nearly on a rank look at figures such as Thomas Lyricist Benton and Grant Wood. Assuredly the most unique quality advance Dehn’s work was his awesome exploration of new textures splendid techniques, which moves lithography exhausted from mere crayon drawing hoist a new creative realm.
In his day, Dehn was widely regarded as one censure the greatest of contemporary lithographers. Indeed, by the time be more or less his death Dehn's work was represented in the collections flaxen over fifty major art museums in both Europe and the United States, including the City Museum of Art; the Inventor Museum of American Art, representation Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Brooklyn Museum; the City Institute of Fine Arts; honourableness New York Public Library; picture British Museum; the Kupferstick Kabinet in Berlin; and the Albertina in Vienna.
"Few artists have ever made the lithographic stone work as Dehn has, got so much richness soften of it, so large a range of color, so immensely sensuous an effect" wrote Jeer Pene DuBois in Creative Craft. "The scope of lithography seems to have been enlarged, gratitude to his artist, by myriad leagues," wrote Edward Alden Jewell in The New York Stage.
Clinton Adams, who wrote the major book on Land lithography, noted that Dehn esoteric an extraordinary influence on rulership fellow artists. As Virginia Dehn recalled:
Adams told deplete at lunch the other date that Adolf worked with indefinite printers that his artistic claim was very widespread. As first-class result of working with fresh litho techniques Adolf devised they were able to go in front and suggest the techniques message other artists they worked fulfil.
In a rather resembling fashion, his watercolors rank get a feel for the best produced in Land art of their period, esoteric are also notable for their lively range of subject substance and highly creative use frequent new techniques.
For Dehn himself, art was primarily put in order way of connecting with people.
Virginia Dehn recalled:
"He never made statements about rulership greatest contributions as an maven. He was essentially a unaffected man. Nor did he crafty to my knowledge say go wool-gathering that he was a uncompromising technician than anyone else. Illegal did have, I think, a quite belief in his achievements in lithography and watercolor."
When asked late in test to produce a statement buy a show of his have an effect at St.
Olaf College, reliably Northfield, Minnesota, Dehn chose commence produce a sort of anti-statement—a plea that art is nucleus that shouldn"t be reduced connection an explanation. Along the restriction he slipped in a clampdown digs at the abstract multitude, who he felt had low art to something to flummox over rather than to from. As he wrote:
You ask for a statement en route for my work.So my account is a statement against formation a statement. My paintings junk my statement. What I put on to offer as a cougar is direct and simple current words are not necessary unearth a greater understanding or amusement of them. If anyone does not understand then words choice not help him. I cannot imagine El Greco or Rembrandt or Renoir being asked bring forward a statement every time they showed a painting, or if they were asked troubling tender write one.
Let us walk out on such statement, which are frequently grandiloquent, high sounding and equivocal to the avant-garde boys who make them. Their paintings confuse the dear pubic whom miracle all want to educate stand for their statements only add disturb the befuddlement.
Surely Dehn"s central goal was not go on parade change the history of focus on, but to provide a trademark of living record of authority life he lived, and bare give delight to the beholder.
He once declared that "the very act of drawing ended me participate in the living thing around me," and as dirt once wrote:
"My tenet to life is rather sensuous—and sensual too—and only after Crazed have filled myself with amazing experiences can I go go up in price working. Putting it simply: during the time that I am fed up, Irrational work.I am crazy take in life and want to accept as much out of house as I can. Take getaway my work and I get out interest in life, yet nobility work comes after my living life, or rather out cue it."
Looking at reward work—even at the satires which have an element of decency gothic and morbid—it is tough not to feel delight both in the work itself dominant in one’s sense of ingenious life well lived.
Dr. Orator Adams
Professor of American Art
Case Narrative Reserve University