25 Facts About Adolf Dehn

Adolf Dehn was an American artist known mainly as a lithographer.

Adolf Dehn began creating artwork at the age of six, and by the time of his death had created nearly 650 images.

Adolf Dehn 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.

In 1921 Adolf Dehn's lithographs were featured in his first exhibition at Weyhe Gallery in New York City.

Adolf Dehn found living in Europe cheap and was able to embark on artist adventures of what some consider the "glory years" of the 20s.

Adolf 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 Adolf 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 Adolf Dehn as "being born with a pitchfork in his mouth" while commenting on the worldly nature of his drawings.

In 1929 Adolf Dehn returned to New York City with his wife.

Adolf Dehn 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.

Adolf Dehn earned a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1939, which allowed him to travel to the western United States and Mexico.

Adolf Dehn started executing watercolors in late 1936, admitting he had "been afraid of color" in the first decades of his career.

Adolf Dehn rose to the top tier of American watercolorists in short order, seen in a feature article on his landscape watercolors in Life magazine and a traveling show organized by the Museum of Modern Art, "Four American Water Colorists" in which eleven Dehn watercolors were joined with the works of Winslow Homer, John Singer Sargent, and Charles Burchfield.

In 1944, Adolf Dehn met Virginia Engleman, who was working in the Associated American Artists printshop.

Adolf Dehn published his first book, titled Water Color Painting, in 1945.

Adolf Dehn was awarded a second Guggenheim Fellowship in 1951.

In 1961, Adolf Dehn was elected as a full academician to the National Academy of Design, and in 1965 he was elected as a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters.

Adolf Dehn visited Paris for the last time in 1967, where he worked at the Atelier Desjobert.

Adolf Dehn died in New York City on May 19,1968, after suffering a heart attack.

Adolf Dehn is remembered as a prolific artist of great range.

Adolf Dehn's works are held in over 100 museums ; over 25 museums hold extensive collections of his output.

Adolf Dehn's landscapes suggest the grandeur of nature, and a signature element in them for which Adolf Dehn was praised was the magnificence of his clouds.

Many of Adolf Dehn's prints are made using tusche, a liquid lithographic medium which allows for fluid effects.

Adolf Dehn has been called the "Debussy of American lithography" and "Dean of American lithography" by printmaking experts Clinton Adams and Philadelphia Museum of Art's Prints and Drawings curator, Carl Zigrosser.