Adolf Dehn (November 22, 1895 – May 19, 1968) was an American artist known mainly as a lithographer. Throughout his artistic career, he participated in and helped define some important movements in American art, including regionalism, social realism, and caricature. A two-time recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship, he was known for both his technical skills and his high-spirited, droll depictions of human foibles.
Biography
Dehn was born in 1895 in Waterville, Minnesota. He began creating artwork at the age of six, and by the time of his death had created nearly 650 images.
After graduating as valedictorian from Waterville High School in 1914, he went to the Minneapolis School of Art (known today as the Minneapolis College of Art and Design), where he met and became a close friend of Wanda Gág. She was Dehn's first love and the two were "practically inseparable for the next five years... " (1916–1921). In 1917 he and Gág were two of only a dozen students in the country to earn a scholarship to the Art Students League of New York. He was drafted to serve in World War I in 1918, but declared himself a conscientious objector and spent four months in a guardhouse detention camp in Spartanburg, SC and then worked for eight months as a painting teacher at an arm rehabilitation hospital in Asheville, NC. Later, Dehn returned to the Art Students League for another year of study and created his first lithograph, The Harvest.
Early career
In 1921 Dehn's lithographs were featured in his first exhibition at Weyhe Gallery in New York City. From 1920 to 1921 in Manhattan, he was connected to New York's politically left-leaning activists. In 1921, he went to Europe. In Paris and Vienna he belonged to a group of expatriate intellectuals and artists, including Andrée Ruellan, Gertrude Stein, and ee cummings.
Dehn found living in Europe cheap and was able to embark on artist adventures of what some consider the "glory years" of the 20s. About his time in Europe, he said, "Life in Paris is simply glorious." He supported himself through his time in Europe by providing light-hearted cartoons and scenic European landscapes to editors back in the U.S. A number of the caricatures he drew depicting the Roaring 20s, burlesque, opera houses, and the café scene appeared in such magazines as Vanity Fair. Dehn himself felt that his caricatures and cartoons were different from others because his motives were "never really political" but more focused on social commentary. The fame that Dehn achieved during his time in Europe, his illustrations appearing in many leftist publications such as The Liberator, The New Masses, and The Dial, was noted by hometown paper The Minneapolis Journal in 1925. The publication described Dehn as "being born with a pitchfork in his mouth" while commenting on the worldly nature of his drawings.
His favorite medium was lithography, and he alternated between spoofing high society and creating beautiful landscapes. Throughout his time in Europe, Dehn was in contact with many other notable intellectuals and artists of the time, including Josephine Baker, Kurt Weill, and Leo Stein. It was in Paris that Dehn met his first wife, Mura Ziperovitch (Mura Dehn), a dancer who had left revolutionary Russia. Upon his return to the U.S. the Chicago Tribunes Paris edition published a farewell to Dehn, stating, "We are sorry to see that Adolf Dehn is going back to America," marking the impression his presence made among the inhabitants of Montparnasse.
Later career
In 1929 Dehn returned to New York City with his wife. In New York, he began to focus his art on depicting scenes of Manhattan, showcasing the skyline and views of the city from the Staten Island Ferry. As the Great Depression had taken hold of the country, Dehn and his wife were desperately poor, and their financial difficulties contributed to their ultimate divorce. In the 1930s, his work began to appear in magazines such as The New Yorker and Vogue. During his period as a lithographer, his striking images of New York, including Central Park, captured the essence of the Roaring 20s and the 1930s Depression.
Beginning in 1930, Dehn made numerous trips back to his home in Minnesota, where he could live cheaply, and he executed a significant number of drawings and lithographs based on Midwest scenes. He also summered on Martha's Vineyard from 1933 to 1936, often in the company of Thomas Hart Benton, Jackson Pollock, Georges Schreiber, and others in the vicinity of Gay Head and Menemsha, and joined by his girlfriend at the time, Eileen Lake.