Biography

Stevan Dohanos quit school at 16 to work in the steel mills of Lorain, Ohio and help support his family. He was able to get a white-collar job in the mill office, where he amused himself and earned a little money selling copies of calendar art and magazine covers to his fellow workers. Thinking there might be a future in this sort of work, he took a correspondence course and enrolled in night classes at the Cleveland School of Arts (where art was only a minor part of the curriculum). He then took a job at a commercial studio, where he did lettering for signs, developing a sense of composition that would serve him well in his later career. His next job was in New York, but he took a leave of absence to work on a U.S Treasury Department art project in the Virgin Islands. In this environment his artistic sense blossomed, and he developed a style that combined brilliant colors with exquisite detail. The resulting paintings gained recognition all through the 1930s, and his work was acquired by the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the American Museum of Art, and Dartmouth College. His first magazine cover illustration was published by McCall's in 1938. He did posters for the New Deal and as part of the war effort, and he received commissions for Post Office murals in the Virgin Islands in 1941 and for West Palm Beach, FL in 1942.

Dohanos's career really took off after he moved to Westport, CT, and began to produce cover illustrations for the Saturday Evening Post. Over time, he published over 125 covers for the Post. In 1948, Dohanos, Norman Rockwell and other members of the New York Society of Illustrators founded the Famous Artists School in Westport, a correspondence school that exists to this day. By the 1960s, the Saturday Evening Post had changed its cover style and no longer used art of the sort in which Dohanos excelled. He began instead to focus on art for U.S. Postage Stamps. He received a few commissions for a few specific stamps, and, over time, became chairman of the Citizens' Stamp Advisory Committee, charged with selecting postage stamp art. In this capacity he selected art for over 300 stamps. The Postal Service's Hall of Stamps was dedicated in his honor in 1984.

Critical Analysis

While Dohanos was an admirer of Norman Rockwell in his youth, he took a more nuts and bolts approach to his subject matter, emphasizing realism over sentimentality. This style was a good fit for the look of Saturday Evening Post covers, which, starting in the early 1940s, featured complete scenes with detailed backgrounds, rather than just a cameo in front of a neutral background. His involvement with the Famous Artists School is interesting, since he himself had taken a similar path into the art world.

Murals

• West Palm Beach, Florida - Post Office: Legend of James Edward Hamilton, Mail Carrier
• Charlotte Amalie, Virgin Islands - Emancipation Gardens Post Office: The Virgin Islands, U.S. - The Leisurely Native Tempo
• Charlotte Amalie, Virgin Islands - Emancipation Gardens Post Office: The Virgin Islands, U.S. - The Outer World Significance
• Elkins, West Virginia - U.S. Department of Agriculture Building: Forest Service
• Elkins, West Virginia - U.S. Department of Agriculture Building: Mining Village

References

1. Stevan Dohanos (Wikipedia).
2. Stevan Dohanos (Saturday Evening Post).
3. Stevan Dohanos, 1907-1994 (National Museum of American Illustration).
4. Stevan Dohanos, A Stamp Designer And Illustrator, 87, New York Times July 6 (1994).
5. Barbara Rundback, Stevan Dohanos: Capturing Beauty in the Commonplace, Norman Rockwell Museum May 19 (2020).
6. Donald Pittenger, Stevan Dohanos: Mainstream Mid-Century Illustrator, Art Contrarian January 21 (2013).
7. The U.S. Post Office (The Pop History Dig).