Biography

Elsa Laubach Jemne was born in 1887 in St. Paul, MN. She couldn't afford art school initially, so she took a job with a St. Paul advertising firm, Brown & Bigelow. She found commercial art "stupid, uncongenial, & maddening in its monotony," and enrolled in the St. Paul School of Art as soon as she was financially able to do so. From there she move to the Pannsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (PAFA) in 1912, where her most influential teacher was Violet Oakley, a prominent muralist of that era. Oakley had rocketed to national fame with her murals for Pennsylvania State Capitol. Other teachers at PAFA included Cecilia Beaux, Daniel Garber, Emil Carlsen and Joseph Pearson. Beaux was a portraitist who had been the first woman to teach at PAFA (Oakley being the second); Garber was an Impressionist landscape painter who also did etching; Carlsen did Impressionist still lifes; and Pearson painted portraits and landscapes that showed an influence from Japanese art.

Laubach (as she was still named) won two Cresson Traveling Scholarships for study in Italy, where she developed a strong interest in fresco. But World War I interrupted her plans, and she wasn't able to complete the Scholarship until after the War. She went back to Philadelphia and returned to the Midwest after graduating from PAFA.

Laubach's painting "The Red Haired Girl" won a gold medal at the Second Annual Northwestern Exhibition in 1917. The same year she married the Norwegian-born architect Magnus Jemne and assumed his last name. Elsa Jemne's first mural commission was for the Stearns County Courthouse in St. Cloud, MN (1922). In 1925 she was hired by the Great Northern Railway to paint images of Glacier National Park and portraits of members of the Blackfeet tribe. This preceded by two years Winold Reiss's longterm association with Great Northern.

In 1931 Magnus and Elsa collaborated on the St. Paul Women's City Club, for which he had received the design commission. Elsa provided a mural and designed the Club's terrazzo floors. In 1936 she completed a mural for the Brandon (MN) Auditorium and Fire Hall. And in 1937 she created a mural for the Minneapolis Armory that depicted the state of Minnesota in allegory. A Post Office mural for Ladysmith, WI was later painted over, but three other Post Office murals that Elsa painted survive: Lake Geneva, WI (1940), Ely, MN (1941), and Hutchinson, MN (1942). She had several other mural commissions for sites in Minnesota and Philadelphia.

From 1946-1950 Elsa taught at the Minneapolis School of Art and focused on easel painting. She had two paintings chosen for the Centennial of the Walker Art Center in 1949, and she had three solo shows in the 1950s and early 1960s. The Walker Art Center held a Jemne retrospective show in 1957.

Elsa Jemne illustrated four books in the course of her career (in 1933, 1934, 1941 and 1944). She suffered a stroke in 1962 that limited her ability to paint, and died in St. Paul in 1974.

Critical Analysis

What is most striking about Elsa Jemne's career is her dedication to art. Repeatedly she refused more lucrative options to pursue commercial art in favor of charting and independent path and doing the sort of art she wanted to do. She prefered the relative freedom of painting in Glacier Park in the 1920s to the more comfortable option of seeking portrait clients in the city. And in the 1930s, when her husband's architecture practice was devastated by the Depression, she motored around the Iron Range of Michigan developing material for Post Office murals.

The compositions of these murals are quite interesting. Her "Iron Mines" in Ely, MN and "The Hutchinson Singers" in Hutchinson, MN share a triptych-like design, although the subject matter is very different. This is a successful means of filling the wide space typically allotted for a Post Office mural. This design also permits Jemne to illustrate multiple aspects of a story she's telling. For "Iron Mines," it's the different components of the mining process - work at the face of the mine, transport to and from the face, and machinery to extract the mined ore. For "The Hutchinson Singers," Jemne tries to show simultaneously the musician-founders of the town, the terrified residents during the time of the Dakota War of 1862, and the Native American group besieging the town. Absent from the picture, however, is the deep irony that the Hutchinson Singers were at the forefront of such social issues as slavery and women's suffrage, but ignored completely the plight of Native American peoples, who were largely driven out of Minnesota after 1862.

Jemne's second mural in Ely, "Wilderness" fills the canvas in a different way - by packing it with animals. The result is a very appealing, if totally unrealistic painting. It is extremely unlikely that all of these animals could have coexisted in the space described, but Jemne's composition has considerable visual appeal, even if a few elements of perspective - the flow of the little stream, for example - have been distorted in the interest of the overall look.

Jemne's designs for Ladysmith, WI and Brancon, MN also provide strong visual statements. It is likely that she had absorbed the design sense of her early PAFA teacher, Violet Oakley, whose murals for the Pennsylvania State Capitol are also masterpieces of design.

Murals

• Ely, Minnesota - Post Office: Iron Ore Mines
• Ely, Minnesota - Post Office: Wilderness
• Hutchinson, Minnesota - Post Office: The Hutchinson Singers
• Minneapolis, Minnesota - Minneapolis Armory: Minnesota

References

1. Hilda Betterman, The artist behind historic Brandon mural, Voice of Alexandria September 22 (2018).
2. Elsa Jemne (Wikipedia).
3. Elsa Laubach Jemne (Woodmere Art Museum - The Violet Oakley Experience).
4. Elsa Laubach Jemne: WPA Artist and Artistic Pioneer, Lake Region Arts Council November 21 (2018).
5. Katherine Goertz, Jemne, Elsa Laubach (1887–1974), MNopedia May 4 (2016).