| Adolf Dehn was one of the most well-known artists to come out of Minnesota. By the end of his career he had revolutionized the use of the lithograph in art. "Technically Dehn is one of the ablest lithographers alive. He has achieved complete freedom and spontaneity on stone.... He works on stone as if it were a piece of paper."(Z1, p22) |  |
| Early Years New York and the War Europe Success Late in Life Gallery of Work |
Dehn was born November 22, 1895 in Waterville, Minnesota. "His parents were second-generation German-Americans and free-thinking iconoclasts, and Adolf was reared on baseball, hunting, fishing, and Thomas Paine's The Age of Reason." (C1,p167) He had two sisters, Olivia and Viola. "He began sketching farm animals at the age of three, and at nine he dazzled the townfolk attending the Waterville Festival with a big drawing of a train." (L1, p2) After graduating from high school, he decided to attend the Minneapolis School of Art (now the Minneapolis College of Art and Design) in 1914. Neither of his parents approved of his choice because they wanted him to be able to find a job after school. After he told them he would be a cartoonist-illustrator, they begrudgingly agreed to let him go.
The Minneapolis School of Art, at this time, had several students who would go on to become artists of national and international acclaim. They include Dehn himself, Wanda Gag, and Harry Gottlieb. Minneapolis lacked a vibrant art scene during the early 20th century, but Dehn, Gag and others found plenty of cultural and political activities to keep them occupied. Gottlieb recalls, "We went downtown to work, drink, and hear political speeches, not to look at art." (L1, p2) Adolf and Wanda hit it off especially well and they would be nearly inseparable for the time they were in school. This was also a time when Dehn was learning much of his artistic technique. Although he disliked the basic drawing and modeling classes, his professors "encouraged ... [his] tendency towards caricature, exaggeration, [and] wildness, cautioning that [he] should be careful not to ignore good drawing and good modeling at the same time." (C1, p169)
Adolf and Wanda were two of only twelve artists in the nation to win scholarships to the Art Students League in New York. They moved to New York after completing their degrees and found places to live within one block of each other. They enjoyed day-trips around the city and supported themselves by doing odd jobs. Their carefree days soon came to an end, however. Dehn was drafted into the army to fight in World War I on July 29, 1918. He considered the war in Europe unjust and declared himself a conscientious objector. Dehn was detained in the Spartanburg, South Carolina camp for the next two years. Once the word of his refusal to fight returned to Waterville, the local paper, as well as many of the townspeople, abused the Dehn family for their son's lack of courage. "He would have to wait until well into the 1930s before he would be forgiven by the town and some of his family." (C1,p173)
Adolf and Wanda's friendship blossomed into romance after the war as well, but America could not contain Dehn's adventurous spirit. He left Gag and his other friends in the summer of 1921 to go to Europe. Wanda planned to join him in Europe, but was unable to disentangle herself from her obligations stateside.
Dehn joined a group of wandering artists and intellectuals in Europe. Living in Europe was cheap since the post-war economy had deflated prices. He made friends with many of the artists, including poet E. E. Cummings. It was in Europe that Dehn perfected his satirical take on his subjects. "He made caricatures that appeared in Vanity Fair and other magazines, caricatures that subordinated human beings to flowing curves and spirals." (Z1, p15) His time in the restaurants and parks of Paris and Berlin gave him ample subject matter, but "[e]ven in these bitter denunciations of the leisure class, Dehn rarely connected his biting satire to any specific political cause or struggle."(C1, p174)
Dehn met his first wife, Mura Ziperovitch, in Paris. Mura was a beautiful and exotic dancer whose family was fleeing from the war-torn Soviet Union. They spent several years together traveling around Europe, but Dehn was inspired to return to America when the famous German artist George Grosz told him "You will do things in America which haven't been done, which need to be done, which only you can do - as far as I know America." (C1,p177) He returned to America with Mura in 1929.
Unfortunately, Dehn came back in the midst of the Great Depression. Art in galleries were not selling well because no one had money to spend on anything but necessities.This was a time when Dehn's career appeared to be going nowhere. He was having a difficult time selling any of his work or even motivating himself to create art. Mura was also failing to establish her dance career on the East Coast. Their difficulties led to a divorce in 1932, but they remained close for many years afterward.
"Just when things appeared the bleakest, Dehn's life began to turn around. Modest successes in commercial art saved him from who-knows-what fate in the middle years of the thirties. He did drawings for the New Yorker, Vogue, Ringmaster, and the New York Times Book Review, as well as for various political journals." (L1, p15) It was also during this time that Dehn began to make frequent trips back to his hometown of Waterville, Minnesota. Dehn started to work seriously work on his second common theme, landscapes. He worked on several watercolors in the late 1930s which depicted Minnesota landscapes around Waterville. Dehn made friends with Cameron Booth, another Minnesota artist, and they drove around the Minnesota countryside to look for scenes to paint.
A few years later in 1943, Adolf met his second wife Virginia Engleman. She was working in the sale department at the Associated American Artists Gallery. "Over the twenty years of their marriage, they were inseperable companions, two artists working side by side." (L1, p17) He attained modest commercial success in this period of the 50s and 60s, selling many of his lithographs through New York galleries. During the later period of his life, Dehn was able to use his financial success in art to travel around the world. He travelled to Mexico, India, Haiti, and Venezuela to find subjects for his art. After his election to the National Academy of Design in 1961, he remarked "That's as high as I can go. I told Virginia, now there's nothing left but to drop dead." (L1, p19) His health was indeed beginning to fail around this time because of his extensive travels. Dehn died on May 19, 1968. Adolf Dehn will be remembered not only for his technical contributions to the art of lithography, but for his creative and care-free spirit which depicted people and lands from around the world.
See a gallery of Adolf Dehn's lithographs
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