NEW YORK, NY.- This exhibition titled Soil and Spirit came out of the opportunity to work again with the estate of Adolf Dehn (1895-1968). I planned to show a dozen of Dehn’s farm scenes, a natural subject for Adolf Dehn who was born and raised in Waterville, Minnesota. His art education began at the Minneapolis School of Art in 1914 and continued at The Art Students League in New York. By 1921, Dehn was represented by the print dealer Weyhe Gallery. To gain more experience Adolf Dehn went to Europe where he gained skill in satirical ink drawings. Dehn’s economic struggle during the 1930s made him nostalgic for Minnesota. He began to visit his hometown of Waterville with both his printmaking tools and watercolor brushes to capture scenes of man’s relationship with the land, an important topic during the Great Depression. Dehn’s sister Viola drove him around the area to farms he might wish to paint. Adolf Dehn went on to paint farm scenes in New York, Pennsylvania, Missouri, and Colorado as well.

The eight Adolf Dehn farm paintings in our exhibition are all views of arrival. What interested Dehn was the way a farm fits into the land and conveys its beauty and purpose. Dehn experimented with materials to capture the interplay of light and dark areas that would achieve a three-dimensional feeling. For example, one of Dehn’s casein paintings, Green Landscape with Red Barns, alternates groupings of dark and light green trees and adds further contrast with dark red barns and light white houses nestled in the trees. The open fields of Green Landscape continue the contrast with light and dark grass areas to achieve a feeling of rolling land. Adolf Dehn sketched each farm scene out-of-doors then took his drawings into the studio to develop them. To convey what he felt for each farm, Dehn experimented with materials. Dehn mastered opaque white, black ink, pastel, casein, and crayon with watercolor to achieve a rich effect. He learned how to retain fluidity using dry pigments for weight and body texture in painting the farm subjects. In repeating the farm subject Dehn gained new forms of expression. Because Dehn was a natural satirist, he occasionally added details to his painting that commented on the scene. In the casein titled Love, Labor, Leisure, 1944, Dehn replaced the environment of heavy farm work with one full of leisure for all but the artist who labors to capture the action. Acquiring Love, Labor, Leisure caused me to expand my planned exhibition of Adolf Dehn’s farm scenes to include 1930s-1940s agricultural paintings by other artists to see what they express.

Paintings of farming subjects were popular because farming had an historic place in the American imagination. Farm work stood for values of self-reliance, industriousness, and public spirit. When Europe was at war from 1914 to 1918, the United States became the breadbasket of the world. As Europe recovered from World War I commodity prices fell and farmers who had borrowed to buy new machinery or land struggled. The Depression for farmers occurred between 1919 and 1932 when their net income fell 70%. In the 1930s the Dust Bowl covered parts of Kansas, Colorado, Oklahoma, Texas, and New Mexico. It was caused by poor land use practices coupled with wind and drought. In our exhibition, The Last Cow, 1937 by William Gropper (1897-1977) pictures the tragedy of a farmer in the Dust Bowl. Gropper was born in New York and raised in a Jewish immigrant family on the Lower East Side. His art education began at the Ferrer School where he studied with Robert Henri and George Bellows. From 1917 through the 1920s, he earned a living doing cartoons for various newspapers and Vanity Fair magazine. In 1936 ACA Galleries in New York became his dealer. Gropper used a Guggenheim Fellowship to travel west in 1937 to see the Dust Bowl area as well as the Hoover and Grand Coulee dams. In addition to Last Cow, our exhibition includes Colorado Landscape from this trip. After the trip west, Gropper did a series of paintings and murals for the Department of Interior in Washington DC and participated in the New York World’s Fair.

The far west is represented in our exhibition with works by Peter Hurd (1904-1984) and Dale Nichols (1904-1995). Peter Hurd presents the dry land used by cattle ranchers in New Mexico. The Mirage, 1947 speaks of the illusion of water. El Papalote focuses on a lone water tank and windmill at day’s end. Dusty Afternoon pictures dust rising around a New Mexican ranch set in low hills. Raised in Roswell, New Mexico, Hurd attended West Point Military Academy for two years before pursuing a career in art. In 1924, he persuaded N. C. Wyeth to give him private lessons and then attended the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts with Wyeth’s oldest child, Henriette. The two married in 1929 and Hurd bought land in San Patricio, New Mexico, fifty miles west of Roswell, which he called Sentinel Ranch. Commissions for post office murals in Big Springs, Texas; Alamogordo, New Mexico; and Dallas, Texas funded Hurd’s development of the ranch and studio. Hurd’s distinct technique involved painting thin washes of oil and tempera over egg tempera on gessoed panels, as seen in The Mirage, 1947. Hurd also worked in wash drawings which he developed into gouaches and watercolor, as seen in El Papalote and Dusty Afternoon. Through his brother-in-law Andrew Wyeth, Hurd maintained relations with New York dealers, including MacBeth Gallery where he had solo exhibitions in 1934 and 1944. A Life magazine article in 1939 titled “Peter Hurd Paints His Own Ranch in New Mexico” brought him national attention.

Dale Nichols (1904-1995) grew up on a grain and livestock farm in David City, Nebraska. His depiction of the American landscape and its people idealized farmers and conveyed the grandeur and loneliness of the plains landscape they cultivated. Nichols left the farm to study art in Chicago which became his base from 1930 to 1945. His first New York solo exhibition was in 1938 at MacBeth Gallery, which continued to represent Dale Nichols throughout the 1940s. Nichols became an illustrator in 1942 and then art editor in 1945 for the Encyclopedia Britannica at its Chicago headquarters. In the 1940s Nichols divided his time between his ranch in Arizona and trips to Nebraska, Alaska, and Mexico. Our exhibition includes two oils: an Arizona ranching scene titled Morning, 1945 and a Nebraska homecoming scene titled Fall, 1946.

Different crops require different kinds of workers. Many are seasonal and migrate to the fields for work. Field Workers, 1930 by Peppino Mangravite (1896-1978) depicts migrant woman doing the harvesting. Born in Lipari, Italy, Peppino Mangravite immigrated to the United States at 14, where he studied at the Cooper Union and Art Students League in New York. He applied a modernist style to regional subjects which brought him early success with exhibitions at Dudensing Gallery in New York in 1929 and 1931. Two scenes of field work by Aiden Lassell Ripley (1896-1969) set in Massachusetts provide a view of New England market gardening. Planting Time, 1946 and Rhubarb Farmers, 1949 show vegetable crops being planted and harvested. Born in Boston and raised in nearby Wakefield, Ripley studied at the Fenway School of Illustration and then the Boston Museum of Art School. By the 1930s Ripley was known for his sporting paintings with dog and bird subjects, though he also painted landscapes, gardens, and farm scenes to show another aspect of rural life.

I chose a selection of Southern farm subjects including three paintings with farm and field workers by Georges Schreiber (1904-1977). Schreiber immigrated to America in 1928 from Brussels, Belgium and when he first arrived in New York, he did freelance illustration for newspapers and books. Dehn and Schreiber were both represented by Associated American Artists and likely traveled the most broadly across America of the gallery’s artists for both personal and commissioned work. From 1936 to 1939, Georges Schreiber made six cross-country trips to record American life. In our exhibition Cotton Pickers, Louisiana is from these travels and was selected for the Whitney Museum of American Art’s 1939 annual for watercolors. Also in 1939, Schreiber had his first solo exhibition at Associated American Artists titled Panorama of America that included 44 oils and watercolors representing 27 states. Our exhibition offers a watercolor titled Boy in Cornfield and an oil titled Spring Storm Over Virginia from Schreiber’s 1942 southern travels on an American Tobacco Company commission that took Schreiber, Thomas Hart Benton, and Ernest Fiene on a road trip to Georgia. Schreiber’s 1943 exhibition at Associated American Artists was titled Southern Journey. Schreiber used all three works in our exhibition to create prints published with Associated American Artists. Schreiber’s travel paintings developed a wide audience as they depicted rural America’s landscape, regional culture, and specific crops. His paintings were frequently reproduced in Life and Fortune magazines. To support Georges Schreiber’s Southern fields of cotton and corn in the exhibition, I added a painting of farm workers topping tobacco by L.J. Cowgill, a Virginia artist, and paintings about grading the tobacco harvest by Frederic Taubes (1900-1981) and Ernest Fiene (1894-1965). South Carolina Tobacco Farm by Oscar Wetherington (1921-1998) shows curing barns for the tobacco crop.

The artists in this exhibition made important records of rural America that preserved knowledge of landscape, work, stock, farm architecture, and specific crops harvested.