-A major monograph on this prolific artist and his love for Manhattan,
featuring a never-before-seen presentation of paintings, prints, and
drawings -This book is for lovers of New York city and beyond,
celebrating its golden age with a fresh, new appreciation for its urban
design, parks, and the eternal romance of art Adolf Dehn (1895-1968), an
American lithographer and watercolorist, left his hometown in Minnesota
after formal training at the Minneapolis Art Institute to study at the
Art Students League in New York. In the early 1920s, he traveled to the
cosmopolitan cities of Paris, Vienna, and Berlin, where he focused on
lithography and printmaking, and soon found success as a magazine
illustrator. As he toured Europe, Dehn quickly acclimated to the
continental lifestyle and was adept at depicting its nuances and
idiosyncrasies through his prolific lithographs and sketches. His
critical and satirical renderings of the political movements, social
conventions, and governmental policies in pre-World War II Europe gave
the Midwestern artist ample material for his growing body of work.
Returning to the United States in 1930, Dehn exhibited his prints in
several solo shows at the Weyhe Gallery in New York, starting in 1935.
As an artist during the era of the Great Depression, Dehn did commercial
artwork and contributed to popular magazines such as The New Yorker,
Vogue, and Vanity Fair. In fact, his clever drawings that reflected the
culture and fashionable society during the Jazz Age, made Dehn a
favourite of Frank Crowninshield, Vanity Fair's renowned editor. During
this time, while Dehn captured the heyday of burlesque theaters, lively
Harlem nightclubs, the impressive skyline, and busy harbour, he was
continuously drawn to Manhattan's Central Park his predilection for the
city's magnificent green space was a sustaining source of inspiration
and subject matter. Adolf Dehn: Midcentury Manhattan candidly examines
the life and work of this exceptional, adventurous, and intrepid artist
as he moved skillfully and capably between lithography, ink-wash
drawings, gouache, casein painting, and in the late 1930s, watercolours.
Combining numerous vintage photographs from the archives of the New York
Historical Society, the Museum of the City of New York, and the New York
Public Library with newly discovered, Manhattan-inspired prints and
drawings from the collections of, among others, the Whitney Museum of
American Art, MoMA, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Adolf Dehn:
Midcentury Manhattan traces how Dehn's art reflected the spirit, pulse,
and uniquely American tonalities captured in composer George Gershwin's
popular Rhapsody in Blue. This is a book for lovers of New York City and
beyond, celebrating its golden age with a fresh, new appreciation for
its urban design, parks, and the eternal romance of art.
