Lot 56
Birger Sandzén(1871-1954)Coastal landscape with cliffs and cypress 20 x 24 1/2in framed 28 x 32in
26 February 2021, 13:00 PST
Los AngelesSold for US$31,562.50 inc. premium
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Aaron Bastian
Director
Kathy Wong
Senior Director, Fine Art
Birger Sandzén (1871-1954)
Coastal landscape with cliffs and cypress
signed 'Birger Sandzen' (lower left)
oil on canvas
20 x 24 1/2in
framed 28 x 32in
Painted circa 1920s.
signed 'Birger Sandzen' (lower left)
oil on canvas
20 x 24 1/2in
framed 28 x 32in
Painted circa 1920s.
Footnotes
Provenance
The artist.
William Postar, Boston, Massachusetts, acquired from the above.
Private collection, Beverly, Massachusetts, circa 1960, acquired from the above.
Birger Sandzén was a Swedish-born artist famous for his distinct and vibrant landscape paintings of the American southwest and his homeland. The son of a minister, Sandzén displayed an early artistic talent, which was encouraged and cultivated by his parents. His formal artistic training was completed in Europe, and in 1894 he immigrated to America, where he accepted a teaching position at Bethany College.
For more than 52 years, Sandzén was a professor of art history, drawing, and painting in the small Kansas town of Lindsborg. He was a staunch advocate of the arts and worked within his community to organize art clubs, exhibitions, and lectures. Surprisingly, Sandzén's own painting was relegated to late night sessions until 1945, when he retired from teaching in order to devote himself to painting full time.
Sandzén's early artistic style was heavily influenced by Tonalism and Scandinavian Romanticism, but once he began spending his summers in the American southwest, his palette exploded with color. He began visiting Taos in the summer of 1918 at the height of the artist colony. Four years later Sandzén was elected an associate member of the Taos Society of Artists. That same year, 1922, he exhibited with the group in New York, where he also had a one-man exhibition at the Babcock Gallery.
Emory Linguist wrote about Sandzén's work: "The kind of simplification that one finds in these canvases is what the modernists have apparently sought but have, to the present time, secured only clumsily. It is the simplification of nature with a broad vision. It is founded on tradition and it has the basic qualities common with all great art...It is modern. It is contemporary. It is essentially American. It breathes the spirit of the West and it opens new vision. Here is a painter who is worth remembering and whose experimentation must be regarded with utmost respect." 1
Displaying the maverick artist's unique response to Impressionism and embodying the spirit of the Post-Impressionists, the present landscape bursts with think, textural impasto and colorful brushwork. A frequently visited compositional motif for the artist, the painting's central cypress grouping extends skyward above a rocky coast. The trees' bold green and yellow foliage is a pronounced punch of color against the white clouds. Sandzén creates layers of curving silhouettes mimicked in the foreground rocks, in the trees, and in the clouds. Unconcerned with naturalistic depictions of light and color, the artist's style instead creates emotion and a singular aesthetic unique to Western landscape painting.
1 E. Lindquist, Birger Sandzén: An Illustrated Biography, Lawrence, Kansas, 1993, p. 81.
