Dehn, Adolf (1895–1968)

Adolf Dehn was a lithographer and watercolorist best known for his work in the American regionalist, modernist, and social-realist movements. An important American printmaker, Dehn demonstrated great skill in his works and, often, an irreverent sense of social commentary.

Dehn was born in Waterville on November 22, 1895. In 1914, he began studying at the Minneapolis School of Art. His first work for a major publication appeared in the socialist-progressive magazine The Masses in 1917. That same year, he received a scholarship to study at the Art Students League in New York, where his teachers included Kenneth Hayes Miller and Boardman Robinson.

When the United States joined World War I in 1917, Dehn expected to be drafted. As a socialist and a pacifist, he was initially unsure whether he would join the war or protest as a conscientious objector. Upon his arrival at boot camp in South Carolina, he handed a letter he had written months earlier to a staff sergeant. This letter, stating his pacifist convictions, resulted in Dehn’s imprisonment in the camp guardhouse. Back in Waterville, Dehn’s refusal to fight was a target for vitriolic pro-war and anti-German sentiment in local newspapers. Dehn and his family were harassed and threatened.

Dehn spent four months in Spartanburg and eight as an art instructor in a hospital for war wounded in Asheville, North Carolina. He was discharged from the army in July 1919 and lived for a short time in Waterville, where he met with considerable hostility. He quickly returned to New York, where he developed his lithography skills and carried on a romance with Wanda Gág, another Minnesotan artist. He continued to be involved with political activism and socialism, contributing drawings and lithographs to the socialist magazine The Liberator.

During the 1920s, Dehn traveled in Europe, mostly Vienna and Paris. He continued to contribute art to mainstream and radical publications and exhibited his work at New York’s Weyhe Gallery. In 1929, he returned to New York.

Following the 1929 stock market crash, Dehn dealt with a parallel crash in the art market in an unusual way. In 1934, he started the “Adolf Dehn Print Club,” which allowed subscribers a choice of one of his prints a year. The strategy was successful and profitable until the mid-1930s, when major publications like the New Yorker and Vanity Fair began to publish his work.

Dehn was based in New York for most of his career, although he often returned to Minnesota. While he is best known for his prints and didn’t print in color until the 1930s, many of his works done in Minnesota are bright watercolors of regional scenes. Pieces like Rainstorm in Minnesota, Hay Meadows, and Northern Minnesota Lake show his skill in painting. In their use of line and shape, they are similar to the rest of his work but more saturated with color. They also lack the satirical edge of his prints and are dramatically different in tone.

Dehn is sometimes called the American George Grosz (a German artist known for his biting caricatures of Berlin life). This parallel is visible in prints like Applause, with its mix of sharp-featured and lumpy-faced audience members. Another work, Franky and Johnny in Paris, shows similarly pointed caricatures watching French burlesque dancers.

In addition to his prints and journal illustrations, Dehn provided illustrations for books. In 1945, he illustrated the most famous stories of the French writer Guy de Maupassant. “Babette,” “The Marquis de Fumerol,” “Ugly,” and “Was it a Dream” are from this anthology. These prints show how the writer’s ironic style fit with Dehn’s work.

Dehn exhibited widely and received many honors during his career. He wrote several books on art, including titles on printmaking and painting techniques. He twice won the Guggenheim Fellowship, an award for artists who demonstrate exceptional creative ability. In 1961, Dehn became an Academician of the National Academy of Design.

The Minnesota Historical Society has a large collection of Dehn’s work, including 665 lithographs. He is represented in the collections of Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among others.

Dehn died in New York City on May 19, 1968.