Adolph Dehn's Paintings

These images of paintings by American impressionist Adolph Dehn were generously contributed by Steve Sleightholm, who found & collected these images which Dehn made while touring Venezuela in 1944. Steve believes that these were most likely commissioned pieces not sold to the public nor lithographed for public sale. If this is the case, then these are indeed extremely rare images from an accomplished 20th-Century American impressionist, and we're grateful to Steve for sharing them with us here.

They represent a unique viewpoint, and they capture a moment of time of a Venezuela that all of us were to become familiar with in different ways in later years. More on the artist is given below.

“Caripito Refinery Under Construction” - 1944

“Jusepin Well Drilling Boilers” - 1944

“Quiriquire Pumping Station” - 1944

“San Juan River and Dock” - 1944

“Lagunillas Dock” - 1944

Adolph Dehn was born in Waterville, Minnesota in 1895. His art school training at the Minneapolis School of Art introduced him to life-long friends Wanda Gag, Harry Gottlieb, John Flannigan, Arnold Blanch, and Lucile Lundquist (Blanch); all of them went to the Art Students League in New York in 1917.

In 1920 Dehn was introduced by the master printer, George Miller, to lithography—which became his preferred medium. After a prolonged European tour from 1921 to 1929, Dehn returned to New York for the opening of an exhibition at the Weyhe Gallery curated by Carl Zigrosser. The exhibition was unusual for its content of 34 lithographs and 15 drawings rather than the more typical oil paintings, but sold well. As the Depression came upon the art world in the 1930s, Dehn formed the Adolph Dehn Print Club, participated in the American Artists Group, and was one of the first and most successful artists in the first year of Associated American Artists in 1934.

From his early Minnesota subjects, Dehn became a world traveler. In 1939 he held a Guggenheim Fellowship that allowed him to travel to the Far West and Mexico. The following year he was appointed summer instructor at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center where he would return for many years. In 1944 he went to Venezuela and in 1948-49 to Key West, Florida, Cuba, and Haiti.

Dehn represents the triumph of lithography in the middle of the 20th century and his prints reflect many of the movements in which he immersed himself and helped to build and define, including Regionalism, The American Scene, Social Realism, and caricature. We are pleased to present him here in this exhibition along with several of his contemporaries, including printmakers such as Ernest Fiene, John Steuart Curry, and Gordon Grant, all of whom were producing landscape lithographs around the same period.

Dehn was an active member of many art societies including the National Academy, American Watercolor Society, Woodstock Artists Alliance and American Artists Congress, among others.

His work is held in the permanent collections of many institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, National Museum of Norway, and numerous others both nationally and internationally.

Dehn is listed in “Who Was Who in American Art” by Falk and “Contemporary American Painting” by Pagano.