Hay Meadows

Adolf Dehn's Hay Meadows is a panoramic view over low-lying countryside under a dramatic cloudscape. Using broad washes of varying shades of green and brown, the artist brushed in the undulating pastoral landscape, focusing on the rounded forms of the hay mounds in the near distance and a farther grove of trees on the horizon at the center of the image. A meandering river crosses the view, reflecting the varied grays of the sky. In a technique he used frequently in his landscapes of the 1930s, Dehn allowed dark tones to "bleed" into wetted areas of the white paper, capturing something of the dynamism of the shifting cloudscape overhanging the peaceful, static landscape below.

When he began painting in watercolors in 1936, Dehn was an accomplished draftsman and lithographer (a maker of prints using smooth-surfaced stone plates that bear images drawn in a water-resistant medium to which an oil-based ink adheres). As exemplified by Art Lovers (TF 1996.15), his graphic images were often satirical, informed by his socialist sympathies and targeted at the pretensions of the urban middle-class. As he began to paint in color, however, Dehn opened his artistic vision to the rural landscape, effectively revisiting the Minnesota farmland in which he had been raised. In watercolor, Dehn often explored a pure expression of nature's moods, removed from the pointed, often wryly humorous social commentary of his lithographs and drawings.

Dehn's exploration of rural subjects reflects current trends toward the imaging of the American heartland in so-called American Scene painting. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, many of Dehn's contemporaries gave pictorial expression to the widespread culture of celebrating the American everyman and his surroundings, especially the rural landscape and the wholesome native values with which it was popularly associated. In Hay Meadows, the grain stacks, a hallowed symbol of agrarian hard work and abundance, infuse this otherwise neutral view of nature with an upbeat tone echoed by the parting clouds overhead.

Extended loan, Vassar College Art Gallery, Poughkeepsie, New York, until 1984.