Biography
Elof Wedin was born in Härnösand, Sweden in the year 1901. He was the son of a man who worked at insulating and lining boilers. And, while he spent as much time as he could in childhood with painting, he trained to follow his father into the same profession.
In 1919 Elof immigrated to the United States, choosing Minneapolis as a place to live, since 25% of its population was Swedish. From 1921-1925 he attended night school at the Minneapolis School of Art (now the Minneapolis College of Art and Design). In 1926 he spent a few months at the Art Institute of Chicago, studying with George Oberteuffer, a classically training impressionist landscape painter.
Wedin had exhibitions at the Minneapolis Institute of Art and the Minnesota State Fair in 1926, but 1928 found him back at work, wrapping ducts, pipes and boilers with asbestos blankets. The disconnect between Wedin's 9-5 job and his evenings and weekends immersed in fine art brought him publicity in the form of a front-page story in the Minneapolis Morning Tribune in 1929. But Wedin actually liked both of his jobs, and, with a wife and two children to support, he never turned down work at the steam plant.
Wedin's early work was mostly in portraiture. But by 1933 he became interested in landscapes, traveling to Sweden and painting fishing villages. Twelve of these paintings were shown in a solo show at the 1933 Minnesota State Fair. Wedin's portraits at this time were becoming more modernist in style, with oval faces and elongated features à la Modigliani.
As a WPA artist, Wedin naturally focused on regionalism, painting street scenes of Minneapolis and depicting small towns and the North Shore of Minnesota. He had two PWAP projects in 1933-1934: a CCC camp in Itasca State Park, and a set of landscapes and cityscapes of the neighborhood around the University of Minnesota, which were painted for the University.
Wedin had a breakthrough in 1936 with a New York showing of 20 of his paintings. While he didn't sell any paintings in New York, he was praised by the New York Times and ARTnews. Over time he had dozens of other one-man shows, including seven in Minneapolis. Wedin completed two Post Office murals, one in Litchfield, MN (1937), and another in Mobridge, SD (1938).
Wedin's style in this period showed landscapes with flattened space, little perspective, minimal sky, and buildings shown as simple angular shapes. An ARTnews review in 1939 heralded him with "American Boiler-worker Builds Well Upon Cézanne."
In the 1940s through the 1960s Wedin's portraits became more Expressionistic, often divided into angular planes of color. Meanwhile his landscapes underwent a sharp transition - from a Cézanne-like style to something more Cubist. The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis put on a solo show of Wedin's work in 1963.
In 1979 Richard Hillstrom put on a 50-year Wedin retrospective. Wedin died in Minneapolis in 1983, the result of his many years of exposure to asbestos.
Critical Analysis
Wedin's style evolved in three distinct phases. First there were portraits and representational landscapes. Second came his "Cézanne" period. And, finally, there were his more abstract, Cubist works. Superficially, one might say he evolved from typical works of the American Scene to a more adventurous and modernist style of painting. But there might be a simpler explanation, rooted in Wedin's spartan lifestyle. Early in his career he did portraits, because he could do them well. But, with the growth of photography, portraiture was becoming less in demand, and a more abstract style of painting was more likely to sell. The same could be said of Wedin's transition to Cubism, and Wedin himself acknowledged that he wanted to make paintings that people wanted to buy.
There is, however, no denying that he really mastered all of these styles and that he was comfortable in producing the paintings he had elected to do at any given time. He was quite productive, despite having decided to keep his job as an insulator. After his death, his family donated some 300 works to the Cambridge (MN) Center for the Arts. His paintings were included in the 1996 show "Pictures for a New Home: Minnesota’s Swedish-American Artists" at the James J. Hill House Gallery in St. Paul, sponsored by the Minnesota Historical Society. And in November 2014 there were two exhibitions of Wedin's work: one at the Minnesota Historical Society and another at the Banfill-Locke Center for the Arts. Both exhibits described Wedin as "Minnesota Modern."
Murals
- Litchfield, Minnesota - Post Office: Street Scene
- Mobridge, South Dakota - Post Office: Return from the Fields
References
- Elof Wedin (askART).
- Elof Wedin (Wikipedia).
- Katherine Goertz, Elof Wedin (1901-1983), Minnesota Historical Society MNopedia June 22 (2016).
- Andrew Hamilton, Elof Wedin, a Swedish American Artist, Counter-Currents Publishing July 8 (2011).