By Virginia Dehn
Located in Fairlawn, OH
Persephone
Oil on canvas, 1952
Signed lower left (see photo)
Titled reverse "Persephone" Signed "V. 52"
Exhibited: Columbus Gallery of the Arts label "71/30 Bt. 2", see label
Condition: two very small flakes of missing paint
Canvas size: 20 1/8 x 16"
Frame size: 20 7/8 x 16 3/4"
Provenance: Estate of the artist
Dehn Heirs
An important painting by the artist.
Virginia Dehn
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Virginia Dehn (1922-2005)
Virginia Dehn was an American painter and printmaker whose lyrical abstractions drew inspiration from nature, archaeology, ancient civilizations, and the spiritual dimensions of landscape. Born Virginia Engleman in Nevada, Missouri, on October 26, 1922, she studied at Stephens College, the Traphagen School of Design, and the Art Students League in New York. In the 1940s she met the distinguished lithographer and watercolorist Adolf Dehn, whom she married in 1947. Although initially known in connection with her husband's artistic circle, she developed an independent career that spanned more than five decades. Her mature work transformed natural forms, gardens, pottery, geological formations, and symbols from ancient cultures into richly textured, semi-abstract compositions characterized by luminous color and contemplative imagery. Her major series included Gardens and Galaxies, Ancient Landscapes, Earth Memory, The Egyptian Series, The Oriental Series, and The Gold Series.
Dehn exhibited widely throughout the United States and was represented during her career by galleries including the Susan Teller Gallery in New York, Harmon-Meek Gallery in Naples, Florida, Cline LewAllen Contemporary Gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Thomas French Fine Art in Ohio. Her work was featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions and earned recognition for its synthesis of modern abstraction with enduring themes drawn from history and the natural world.
Works by Virginia Dehn are held in a number of public collections, including the New Mexico Museum of Art, the Butler Institute of American Art, the Portland Art Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts, Springfield (Massachusetts), the University of California, Berkeley, the Minnesota Historical Society, and the New York State Library. These institutional holdings reflect the broad geographic reach of her career and the continuing appreciation of her contribution to twentieth-century American art.
Virginia Dehn died in Santa Fe, New Mexico, on July 28, 2005. Today her paintings, drawings, and prints are represented in museum collections and private collections throughout the United States, and her work remains associated with a distinctive vision that united abstraction, memory, and the enduring forms of the natural world.
Virginia and Adolf Dehn
The Dehns lived in a Chelsea brownstone on West 21st Street where they worked side by side. They often hosted gatherings of other influential artists and intellectuals of the 20th century. Among their closest friends were sculptor Federico Castellón and his wife Hilda; writer Sidney Alexander and his wife Frances; artists Sally and Milton Avery; Ferol and Bill Smith, also an artist; and Lily and Georges Schreiber, an artist and writer. Bob Steed and his wife Gittel, an anthropologist, were also good friends of the Dehns. According to friend Gretchen Marple Pracht, "Virginia was a glamorous and sophisticated hostess who welcomed visitors to their home and always invited a diverse crowd of guests..." Despite their active social life, the two were disciplined artists, working at their easels nearly daily and taking Saturdays to visit galleries and view new work.
The Dehns made annual trips to France to work on lithographs at the Atelier Desjobert in Paris. Virginia used a bamboo pen to draw directly on the stone for her lithographs, which often depicted trees or still lifes. The Dehns' other travels included visits to Key West, Colorado, Mexico, and countries such as Greece, Haiti, Afghanistan, and India.
Dehn's style of art differend greatly from that of her husband, though the two sometimes exhibited together. A friend of the couple remarked, "Adolf paints landscapes; Virginia paints inscapes." Virginia Dehn generally painted an interior vision based on her feelings for a subject, rather than a literal rendition of it.] Many of her paintings consist of several layers, with earlier layers showing through. She found inspiration in the Abstract Expressionism movement that dominated the New York and Paris art scenes in the 1950s. Some of her favorite artists included Adolf Gottileb, Rothko, William Baziotes, Pomodoro, and Antonio Tapies.
Dehn most often worked with bold, vibrant colors in large formats. Her subjects were not literal, but intuitive. She learned new techniques of lithography from her husband Adolf, and did her own prints. Texture was very important to her in her work. Her art was influenced by a variety of sources. In the late 1960s she came across a book that included photographs of organic patterns of life as revealed under a microscope. These images inspired her to change the direction of some of her paintings. Other influences on Dehn's art came from ancient and traditional arts of various cultures throughout the world, including Persian miniatures, illuminated manuscripts, Dutch still life painting, Asian art, ancient Egyptian artifacts...
Category
1950s American Modern Dominique MULHEM Art
