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Adolf Dehn
San Francisco Cable Car WPA Artist Adolf Dehn Modernist Art Gouache Oil Painting
c.1930-1940

Name: San Francisco Cable Car WPA Artist Adolf Dehn Modernist Art Gouache Oil Painting
Brand: Adolf Dehn
Rating: 4.9 (110 reviews)

$3,600List Price

About the Item

ADOLF ARTHUR DEHN (American, 1895-1969) San Francisco Bay Area street scene, with Trolley, Streetcar, Cable Car with bay and Alcatraz Island in background. Hand signed LRC. Sight 19" x 15", overall 23" x 19". Adolf Dehn (November 22, 1895 – May 19, 1968) was an American artist known mainly as a lithographer. Throughout his artistic career, he participated in and helped define some important movements in American art, including regionalism, social realism, and caricature. A two-time recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship, he was known for both his technical skills and his high-spirited, droll depictions of human foibles. Adolph Dehn was born in 1895 in Waterville, Minnesota. He began creating artwork at the age of six, and by the time of his death had created nearly 650 images. Dehn went to the Minneapolis School of Art (known today as the Minneapolis College of Art and Design), where he met and became a close friend of Wanda Gag. In 1917 he and Gág were two of only a dozen students in the country to earn a scholarship to the Art Students League of New York. He was drafted to serve in World War I in 1918, but declared himself a conscientious objector and spent four months in a guardhouse detention camp in Spartanburg, SC and then worked for eight months as a painting teacher at an arm rehabilitation hospital in Asheville, NC. Later, Dehn returned to the Art Students League for another year of study and created his first lithograph, The Harvest. In 1921 Dehn's lithographs were featured in his first exhibition at Weyhe Gallery in New York City. From 1920 to 1921 in Manhattan, he was connected to New York's politically left-leaning activists. In 1921, he went to Europe. In Paris and Vienna he belonged to a group of expatriate intellectuals and artists, including Andrée Ruellan, Gertrude Stein, and ee cummings. Dehn found living in Europe cheap and was able to embark on artist adventures of what some consider the "glory years" of the 20s. He was influenced in this period by European artists such as Jules Pascin and George Grosz. About his time in Europe, he said, "Life in Paris is simply glorious." He supported himself through his time in Europe by providing light-hearted cartoons and scenic European landscapes to editors back in the U.S. A number of the caricatures he drew depicting the Roaring 20s, burlesque, opera houses, and the café scene appeared in such magazines as Vanity Fair. The fame that Dehn achieved during his time in Europe, his illustrations appearing in many leftist publications such as The Liberator, The New Masses, and The Dial, was noted by hometown paper The Minneapolis Journal in 1925. Throughout his time in Europe, Dehn was in contact with many other notable intellectuals and artists of the time, including Josephine Baker, Kurt Weill, and Leo Stein. In 1929 Dehn returned to New York City with his wife. In New York, he began to focus his art on depicting scenes of Manhattan, showcasing the skyline and views of the city from the Staten Island Ferry. As the Great Depression had taken hold of the country, Dehn and his wife were desperately poor, and their financial difficulties contributed to their ultimate divorce. In the 1930s, his work began to appear in magazines such as The New Yorker and Vogue. During his period as a lithographer, his striking images of New York, including Central Park, captured the essence of the Roaring 20s and the 1930s Depression. He summered on Martha's Vineyard from 1933 to 1936, often in the company of Thomas Hart Benton, Jackson Pollock, Georges Schreiber, and others in the vicinity of Gay Head and Menemsha, and joined by his girlfriend at the time, Eileen Lake. In the early 1930s, Dehn established The Adolf Dehn Print Club and became a founding member of the Associated American Artists. Prints magazine selected Dehn as one of the 10 best printmakers in the United States in 1936. Dehn earned a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1939, which allowed him to travel to the western United States and Mexico. In the early 40s, he worked as an instructor of etching and lithography at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center and received a citation from the U.S. treasury department for "Distinguished Service Rendered in Behalf of War Savings Program." Dehn worked for the Works Progress Administration, WPA in this period. Many well known Jewish and Immigrant artists worked for the Federal Art Project (the New Deal) commonly referred to as the WPA, including Berenice Abbott, William Baziotes, Aaron Bohrod, Ilya Bolotowsky, Stuart Davis, Adolf Dehn, Ben Shahn, Willem de Kooning, William Gropper, Arshile Gorky, Jan Matulka, Irene Rice Pereira, Louis Schanker and Jean Xceron. Dehn started executing watercolor paintings in late 1936, admitting he had "been afraid of color" in the first decades of his career. He was a part of the American Scene movement, led by figures such as Grant Wood and Thomas Hart Benton and was getting national attention. Dehn's work fit squarely into this new artistic tendency. He rose to the top tier of American watercolorists in short order, seen in a feature article on his landscape watercolors in Life magazine (August, 1941) and a traveling show organized by the Museum of Modern Art, "Four American Water Colorists" (1943–44) in which eleven Dehn watercolors were joined with the works of Winslow Homer, John Singer Sargent, and Charles Burchfield. Watercolor painting and casein painting represented signature second and third arms of Dehn's artistic output for the rest of his career. In 1947 he joined the Society of American Graphic Artists, exhibiting his lithograph, Lake in Central Park, in the 32nd Annual Exhibition. As well as visiting and painting Key West and the southwestern region of the United States, he went to Venezuela, Cuba, Haiti, Afghanistan and other areas of the world. The wide range of subject matter found in his prints, drawings, and paintings reflects his travels. He was awarded a second Guggenheim Fellowship in 1951. In 1961, Dehn was elected as a full academician to the National Academy of Design, and in 1965 he was elected as a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. He visited Paris for the last time in 1967, where he worked at the Atelier Desjobert. Dehn died in New York City on May 19, 1968. He is remembered as a prolific artist of great range. His works are held in over 100 museums (including the National Gallery of Art, National Portrait Gallery, Metropolitan Museum, Museum of Modern Art, and Whitney Museum of American Art); over 25 museums hold extensive collections of his output. Selection of Museum Collections Albertina Museum Vienna, Austria Albright-Knox Art Gallery Buffalo, NY Art Institute of Chicago Chicago, IL Audubon House and Tropical Gardens Key West, FL Boca Raton Museum of Art Boca Raton, FL British Museum London, UK Brooklyn Museum Brooklyn, NY Buffalo Bill Center of the West Cody, WY The Butler Institute of American Art Youngstown, OH Carnegie Museum of Art Pittsburgh, PA Detroit Institute of Arts Detroit, MI Smithsonian Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden Washington, DC The Metropolitan Museum of Art New York, NY Mitchell Wolfson Collection Miami Beach, FL Museum of Modern Art New York, NY National Gallery of Art Washington, DC Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts Philadelphia, PA Philadelphia Museum of Art Philadelphia, PA San Francisco Museum of Modern Art San Francisco, CA São Paulo Museum of Art São Paulo, Brazil Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery Washington, DC Wadsworth Atheneum Hartford, CT Walker Art Center Minneapolis, MN Whitney Museum of American Art New York, NY Woodstock Artists Association and Museum Woodstock, NY Yale University Art Gallery New Haven, CT Exhibition history Select Adolf Dehn exhibitions, Engaging the Far West: Adolf Dehn's Colorado and Peter Hurd's New Mexico D. Wigmore Gallery, New York, NY Artist Book Foundation (at MASS MoCA), North Adams, MA Adolf Dehn: Love, Labour, Leisure Mercy Gallery, Richmond Art Center Adolf Dehn: A Retrospective of Prints Associated American Artists Galleries 1979 Adolf Dehn The Full Range Hirschl & Adler Galleries, New York, NY 1970-1971 Represented by Kennedy Galleries, New York, NY 1957 New Painting Milch Gallery, New York, NY March 1956 New Paintings Associated American Artists Galleries, New York, NY 1951 Haitian World Associated American Artists Galleries, New York, NY 1948 Exhibition Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY 1947 Lithographs by Adolf Dehn Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC 1945 Solo exhibition at national museum, Caracas, Venezuela 1944 Four American Watercolorists Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY Naval Aviation Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY January 1943 International Watercolor Exhibit, The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL 1942 Exhibition Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY 1940 Watercolors by Adolf Dehn Weyhe Gallery, New York, NY 1931 Ink Drawings by Adolf Dehn Weyhe Gallery, New York, NY 1928 Solo gallery exhibition Paris, France 1923 Group exhibition Wurthle and Sohn Gallery, Vienna, Austria 1915 First museum show (drawings) Minneapolis Institute of Arts

Creator:
Adolf Dehn (1895 - 1968, American)
Creation Year:
c.1930-1940
Dimensions:
Height: 23 in (58.42 cm)Width: 19 in (48.26 cm)
Medium:
Gouache,Oil
Movement & Style:
American Modern
Period:
1930-1939
Condition:
Frame with age commensurate wear. Small area of minor chipping/cracking to paint on surface. Please see photos.
Gallery Location:
Surfside, FL
Reference Number:
1stDibs: LU38212326012

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