Arts and Letters

Adolf Dehn was ten years younger than I. I first met him in Paris in 1923. He came to my studio with a word of introduction from Boardman Robinson, carrying with him a folder of his drawings. I bought one of them. Thereafter our paths very rarely crossed. There was, however, a community of tastes and sympathies between us that resulted in a life-long friendship and, I hope, a mutual respect.

Adolf Dehn's reputation as a lithographer, a teacher, a water colorist, and a painter is so well known that I shall say little about it. I want to leave with you—more especially with those who never knew him at all or only knew him casually—a portrait of the man, what he seemed to me as a human being: Not just his physical appearance, a little ponderous, moving leisurely, in gait and in speech; his natural dignity, courteous manners, and apparent self-assurance; also his extreme sensitivity, probably his self-doubts, assuredly his stubbornness; his earthiness, enjoyment of good food, good wine, good conversation, and general camaraderie. The sense of fun and also the tender sensibility which sometimes colored his talk and is so apparent in his many later landscape watercolors. For we must not merely think of Adolf Dehn as a satirist, a humorist, but also as a consummate technician in every medium he ever handled. In other moods he was a lyric poet. Perhaps he inherited many of these traits—the earthiness, the sentiment, and the particular quality of his humor—from his German forebears.

Most artists are sedentary by nature and seldom feel the need of travel. Others of us are of the fraternity of globe-wandering gypsies. Is it in the blood, or does it awaken a dormant creative impulse? Pascin and Maurice Sterne and Pop Harte were such. And this is another link of sympathy Adolf and I shared. We seemed for the past forty years to have been chasing each other about the world; to France, Austria, Germany, Italy, our own far west; Haiti, Mexico, South America, India. But, as I remember, we only met once on our travels, in Rome: and he told me how he had spent the previous moonlight night in the shadow of the Colosseum and listened to an owl hooting derisively among the arches of the vast amphitheatre.

I should like to say a good deal more about Adolf's particular quality of fun and humor and satire. It is one of the best ways I know of letting you feel him and understand him. He was a very wholesome man, a very simple man—simple in the sense of being completely natural, unpretentious, and unstudied. But he was a man of moods, deep feelings, and flitting emotions. This is another way of saying that he was very much an artist. And this is one reason why artists are sometimes hard to understand and are not always reasonable in understanding each other.

Adolf's sense of satire could be gently malicious, but rarely caustic, and never bitter or vindictive. He was often deeply distressed about the injustice of people and nations. But he never lashed out in blind anger, as did so many of us artists in the twenties and thirties, when the liberals and Trotskyites and Stalinists among us wrecked the artist organizations; or later in the forties and fifties, when McCarthyism almost wrecked the nation. He never, in Oliver Wendell Holmes's phrase, "took life by the throat," as did Goya, for instance, against the savagery and stupidity of homo sapiens. His satire was closer to that of Daumier in that he sensed that there must be something a little human, and of course quite comic, in the worst of us. But even in this comparison there is a vast difference between his art and that of the great Frenchman. For Adolf had not the pretention of being a reformer. He couldn't be entirely at ease in our "times of trouble." He would have been far happier in those periods of comparative enlightenment of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when he could have gently poked fun at man's foibles.

I have two of Adolf's lithographs which he gave me in commemoration of my marriage to Hélène Sardeau. One represents a group of monstrosities—they could hardly be called human beings—malformed, disordered, and ludicrous images, evoked out of a jolly, fun-loving madman's nightmare. From the darkness of the pit these grotesque evocations are clapping and acclaiming something on the stage which they obviously approve. In the caption below Adolf has scribbled: "Applauding Mr. George Biddle on the 17th of April."

In the other lithograph, obviously from the same series, and emerging from the same dim gloom, slumped about tea tables sit a group of silent, elderly, and obviously unhappy spinsters. Below the caption: "Despair! Just having heard what happened to George on the 17th of April."

Of course these lithographs were not done expressly for the occasion of our marriage. They belong to a series which Adolf executed in the late twenties, printed probably in Paris when he studied under the great lithographer Desjobert. Both prints are technically very beautiful. Any artist, glancing at them, would appreciate the subtle gradations of chiaroscuro and the delicacy and freedom of the surface texture. A more knowledgeable lithographer would linger over them with more discernment and curiosity. How did the artist, technically, obtain these effects?

Just a word about the art of lithography. It was Adolf's early love and he always came back to it. Of all the graphic media it is closest to oil painting in the richness and variety of its surface texture. In other ways it has an affinity to cooking. Every student knows that the old-time printers actually tasted the acid to gauge the strength of its bite on the stone. Good lithographic printing cannot be taught, only acquired by years of practice. Until quite recently there were never more than half a dozen—perhaps even three or four—first-class printers in America. Such is the artist's respect for his master printer that many of us insist on his also signing his name to the print.

Adolf worked almost exclusively in black and white until he was over forty years old. Returning in 1936 from Europe, he decided in his own words "to break the block in color." He determined to teach himself water-color painting. He set himself up some watercolors of Marin and George Grosz, both of whom he admired, to study. He worked steadily for several days. Suddenly he felt the breakthrough. Tears came into his eyes. He felt that he had won the battle. I was told this by his truest friend, his wife.

Painting came to him in the late 1940s, when he was approaching fifty. Almost immediately he acquired the same mastery over this new medium that he had previously with water colors. He never painted on his trips. He always carried sketch books with him. On returning to the studio he would use these notes to develop the lithographs, water colors, or paintings. Of the old masters, he most frequently mentioned Rembrandt with love and veneration.