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Adolf Dehn
1895–1968
BirthplaceWaterville, Minnesota, United States of America
Death placeNew York, New York, United States of America
BiographyWatercolor painter, draftsman, and innovative printmaker, Adolph Dehn is best known for satirical views of modern American life. Dehn was born in rural Waterville, Minnesota, the son of a commercial trapper and fisherman. He studied at the Minneapolis Art School with painter and printmaker Gustav Goetsch (1877–1969). In 1917, a one-year scholarship brought Dehn to the Art Students League in New York City, where his teachers included Kenneth Hayes Miller, a social realist artist, and radical cartoonist Boardman Robinson (1876–1952). Dehn was a conscientious objector during World War I, when he spent several months in Asheville, North Carolina, teaching art to soldiers afflicted with tuberculosis.
In 1920, back in New York, Dehn made his first lithograph (a print made from smooth-surfaced stone plate bearing an image drawn in a water-resistant medium to which an oil-based ink adheres). The following year he traveled to Europe. Living in Vienna and then in Paris, Dehn published a series of lithographic illustrations in several avant-garde magazines and contributed to the socialist journal The Masses. In Paris, he worked with French printer and publisher Edmond Desjobert in a workshop that nurtured a generation of important American printmakers. Dehn made his own technical innovations, which he introduced to American artists on several extended trips to the United States.
Dehn himself lived a somewhat peripatetic existence that took him to exotic destinations in Africa, Asia, and South America in the course of his career; Guggenheim Fellowships in 1939 and 1951 funded visits to the American West, Mexico, and Cuba. From his home base of New York, he became a leader among American printmakers. He exhibited actively, contributed drawings to publications in both Europe and the United States, and marketed his prints through the Adolph Dehn Print Club, a commercial venture. He also was a founding member of the Contemporary Print Group, formed to promote the work of several American printmakers.
Dehn worked almost exclusively in black and white until the mid-1930s when, discouraged by a lack of sales, he took a decade-long hiatus from printmaking to concentrate on watercolor painting; later he also took up oil painting. In watercolors, Dehn began to explore rural landscape subjects. His watercolors were consistently in demand as magazine illustrations and he also found work as a teacher, notably at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, in Colorado. Dehn published three books of his own on technique in painting and lithography. He was awarded full membership in the National Academy of Design in 1961. Dehn died in New York at the age of seventy-two, a few months after a retrospective exhibition of his work was held at FAR Gallery and the Century Association; the following year the Columbus Gallery of Fine Arts (now the Columbus Museum of Art) in Columbus, Ohio, organized a touring exhibition devoted to the artist.
In 1920, back in New York, Dehn made his first lithograph (a print made from smooth-surfaced stone plate bearing an image drawn in a water-resistant medium to which an oil-based ink adheres). The following year he traveled to Europe. Living in Vienna and then in Paris, Dehn published a series of lithographic illustrations in several avant-garde magazines and contributed to the socialist journal The Masses. In Paris, he worked with French printer and publisher Edmond Desjobert in a workshop that nurtured a generation of important American printmakers. Dehn made his own technical innovations, which he introduced to American artists on several extended trips to the United States.
Dehn himself lived a somewhat peripatetic existence that took him to exotic destinations in Africa, Asia, and South America in the course of his career; Guggenheim Fellowships in 1939 and 1951 funded visits to the American West, Mexico, and Cuba. From his home base of New York, he became a leader among American printmakers. He exhibited actively, contributed drawings to publications in both Europe and the United States, and marketed his prints through the Adolph Dehn Print Club, a commercial venture. He also was a founding member of the Contemporary Print Group, formed to promote the work of several American printmakers.
Dehn worked almost exclusively in black and white until the mid-1930s when, discouraged by a lack of sales, he took a decade-long hiatus from printmaking to concentrate on watercolor painting; later he also took up oil painting. In watercolors, Dehn began to explore rural landscape subjects. His watercolors were consistently in demand as magazine illustrations and he also found work as a teacher, notably at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, in Colorado. Dehn published three books of his own on technique in painting and lithography. He was awarded full membership in the National Academy of Design in 1961. Dehn died in New York at the age of seventy-two, a few months after a retrospective exhibition of his work was held at FAR Gallery and the Century Association; the following year the Columbus Gallery of Fine Arts (now the Columbus Museum of Art) in Columbus, Ohio, organized a touring exhibition devoted to the artist.