Lecture for the Danish American Heritage Society

By Dr. Lea Rosson DeLong

Des Moines October 15, 2005

A version of this lecture is published in Danish Culture, Past and Present: The Last Two Hundred Years, Linda M. Chementi and Birgit Flemming Larsen, eds. (Ames, Iowa: The Danish American Heritage Society, 2006), 254-263.

CHRISTIAN PETERSEN (1885-1961)

Christian Petersen was a Danish American artist whose accomplishment and importance in the history of American art is being increasingly understood and recognized. This lecture will acquaint you with his work and weave in aspects of his Danish background.

Petersen was the first artist-in-residence in an American college. John Steuart Curry’s appointment as artist-in-residence at the University of Wisconsin in 1936 is well known, but Petersen’s appointment at what was then called Iowa State College (now University) came two years earlier in 1934. It is important to recognize that this appointment was made in one of the worst years of the Great Depression when the college’s budget had been slashed by nearly a million dollars, or almost 30%, since 1930. For the college to find room to add in a sculptor to its staff leaves a certain favorable impression of both the college and the sculptor.

Today, Iowa State University has the largest collection of public art on campus in America, and Petersen helped to establish this collection and contributed to it more prolifically than any other artist. If you visit the Iowa State campus today, you will find examples of his work throughout it, from small relief plaques and portrait busts to large-scale outdoor installations.

In addition to his significance at Iowa State, certain aspects of Petersen’s art represent a rarity in the art of his time: Regionalist sculpture.

Regionalism is a philosophy and movement best known through the work of Grant Wood, and it holds that artists should respond to their own environments and not go elsewhere for inspiration. It is an approach that comes out the perception, common until after World War II, that America was culturally dependent upon Europe. In the 1930s, many American artists, especially Wood and Petersen, encouraged Americans to examine their own cultures. Like most American artists, Petersen was of course well acquainted with European art and drew from it numerous influences, especially in his early career yet, he also blended those influences into a distinctly American expression.

Petersen was born near Dybbol, in the Schleswig area of Denmark in 1885 on a 160-acre farm. Old photographs in the Christian Petersen Papers in the Special Collections of the Iowa State University Library show a handsome farmhouse and inhabitants whose appearance suggests a certain level of prosperity. The family’s decision to emigrate from Denmark, then, does not seem to have been primarily economic, but rather political. The area near the farm had been the sight of a terrible battle between the Danes and the Prussians in 1864, an event within the memory of his parents. Thereafter, the area was ruled by the Prussians until 1920, and during that time, Danish men were often conscripted into the Prussian military. The oppression of that rule and the concern that their two sons would be drafted was usually given as the reason for the family’s departure for America in 1894.

They journeyed first to a farm near Paxton, Illinois where they had connections with other Danish immigrants. According to August Bang, the editor of a Midwestern Danish American publication, with whom the family had both a personal and a professional relationship, the Petersen’s (especially the mother, Helene) were unhappy being so far from the sea. Therefore, they re-settled themselves in New Jersey where the young artist received his training in the vocational schools of Newark, learning the trade of die-cutting, along with later study in New York and at the Rhode Island School of Design.

It appears that Petersen’s early influences in the development of his style were mainly American sculptors such as Chester Daniel French and Augustus Saint-Gaudens. At some points in his career, it is possible he was inspired to some degree by Bertel Thorwaldsen (1770-1844), a Danish sculptor who was among the major Neo-Classical artists of the late 18^th-early 19^th centuries. The main effect of Petersen’s Danish heritage seems to be in his strong anti-war sentiments. Although not a pacifist–he fully supported the American participation in World Wars I and II–he nearly always expressed the tragedy rather than the victory of war. That position is particularly well seen during World War II when he apparently agonized over the fact that so many of his students were caught in the war effort and the fighting.

As with many other artists, Petersen knew from an early age that he wanted to be an artist. While still a child in Denmark, he recalled how affected he had been by his grandfather’s workshop. “I believe the first tool I ever used was a chisel–even before using a pencil. I could not have been more than five or six when I began using the tools in my grandfather’s workshop. This was in Denmark, after my grandfather retired from active work as a carpenter and pattern maker. In this shop no tools fascinated me more than the chisels. I did not think of them as sculptor’s tools. I did not know then what sculpture was–but I secured pieces of wood, and made boat after boat, then took them down to the seashore, which came right up to our farm. I don’t know which gave me the most joy–making these little boats, sails and all, and copying the rigging of the sailing ships that passed, or sailing them on imaginary voyages. However, the love of carving has been with me ever since.”¹

Like his grandfather, Petersen began as a craftsman. He would have liked to go directly into sculpture, but he married early, began a family, and needed to earn a living. He worked as a die-cutter for several companies, mainly in Massachusetts (Robbins Company) and Rhode Island (Gorham), engraving small, intricate patterns into metal. As time permitted, he furthered his artistic education by taking classes at various art academies while he also entered his fine art sculpture into exhibitions and he sought commissions for portraits, memorials, and similar sculpture. His first major success was his Spanish-American War Memorial for Newport, Rhode Island.

Throughout the first and second of the twentieth century, Petersen worked in the northeast, gradually building up a reputation for his sculpture, most of which was in the academic Beaux-Arts style that was fashionable in American art of the time. He was always a realist sculptor, but the trend of his art was toward greater simplification. Despite his dislike of “ultra-modern” sculptors like Constantin Brancusi or Naum Gabo, it is clear that Petersen was affected by modernism.

In 1928, when he was 43 years old, he abandoned his industrial design jobs, divorced his wife, left the east coast, and moved to Chicago to pursue a career of full-time sculpting. He could not have picked a worse time to embark on a fine arts career since. The following year of 1929, the nation was plunged into the Great Depression, an economic collapse that would endure for the next decade. Needless to say, commissions and the market for sculpture vanished and, Petersen, like nearly all artists of the time, was poverty-stricken and desperate. Help came after the 1932 election of Franklin Roosevelt and the arrival in early 1933 of his New Deal. Roosevelt and his administration recognized that artists played a vital role in a healthy, self-sustaining civilization, and they decided to enlist the talents of the nation’s artists in the alleviation of its economic and cultural woes.

In the early 1920s, Petersen had executed several small commissions, mainly for portraits, for citizens of Des Moines and for the state of Iowa’s Historical, Memorial and Art Department (now the Department of Cultural Affairs). He gradually built up a number of contacts in Iowa and, after the New Deal first art agency, the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP) was established late in 1933, these friends recommended him as an artist worthy of support. Grant Wood, the head of the PWAP in Iowa was notified that Petersen would be an appropriate recipient of assistance, and he wrote to Petersen offering to employ him in the Project’s studio at the University of Iowa. Hired as a fine art sculptor at a salary of about $25.00 per week, an overjoyed Petersen replied quickly to Wood after hearing the news. “Thanks heaps…. You are right. I am broke–else I’d be there today–have to raise a loan for traveling expenses…. Rarin’ to go!”

He was indeed “rarin’ to go,” and he soon began work on a series of sculptures that would be among the most important of his career. The president of Iowa State College, Raymond M. Hughes, wished to have a sculpture for the courtyard of the Dairy Industry building on campus, and Petersen developed not just a single statue, but an entire sculptural installation consisting of a fountain with sculpture, a pool, and a six-panel series of reliefs illustrating the history of dairying from the early times up to the modern practices begun and taught at Iowa State. Unfortunately, after only six months, Congress declined to fund the highly productive PWAP, and Petersen’s grand scheme would have remained unfinished except for the intervention of Hughes, who was determined that the PWAP paintings and sculptures destined for his campus would be completed. He took the extraordinary step in 1934 of bringing Petersen to Ames as an artist-in-residence, the first such position at an American college. Then, as for most of his career, Petersen was the lowest-paid member of the staff, but he had a studio, a creative working environment and opportunities to take on commissions outside the college. At last he had achieved his goal as a full-time, fine art sculptor.

This first major sculpture, The History of Dairying, reflected a change in Petersen’s style that can probably be attributed to his close work with Grant Wood whose simplified, nearly abstract design seems to have influenced him. His design shows a clean, studied, deliberate line; an elimination of much detail; a shallow, flattened concept of space; and overall simplification of form that is nearly geometric in places, and which approaches abstraction. The stability and calmness in these sculptures suggests that, in forging this altered style, Petersen may have recalled the restrained classicism of his fellow Dane, Thorwaldsen.

He continued this style in an equally distinctive and extensive relief sculpture for the Veterinary Medicine school of Iowa State. Both of these large sculptural projects were carried out in the 1930s and show Petersen employing the subject matter embraced by Regionalism: scenes from life in the Midwest, interpreted in a straightforward, realist style. For the rest of his career, he continued to create sculpture for the Iowa State campus, to teach and to carry out other commissions.

As mentioned earlier, some of his most moving works of art were ones that dealt with the subject of war. He sketched and proposed a number of memorials related to World War II, but unfortunately none of them were ever realized. But the sketches he left show how deeply he felt about the catastrophe of the war that had overtaken the world and impacted the lives of his students. He was, however, able to produce two studio sculptures on this theme, Men of Two Wars [Editor’s Note: this sculpture is now called Carry On] and The Price of Victory (Fallen Soldier).

Men of Two Wars [Editor’s Note: This sculpture is now called Carry On] shows a World War II G.I. crouching beside a fallen World War I dough boy, as if to take up again an unfinished cause.

The Price of Victory depicts the moment of death for a combat soldier. The sculpture was displayed in Iowa State’s student union after the war, but it was so affecting to those who experienced war or lost loved ones that it was taken off display. In reaction to that decision, Petersen commented that it was “the greatest compliment ever paid to my work.” In another war theme, Petersen drew a series of illustrations for a wartime story of a wounded veteran which was published in Julegranen, the Danish-language publication serving the Midwestern immigrant communities. He also designed covers for the magazine and his career was followed in its pages.

It is clear that Petersen prized his Danish heritage. He continued his father’s friendship with the Danish-born landscape designer, Jens Jensen, and produced a lively portrait bust of the man who, in addition to his work in the Chicago area, may have also consulted on aspects of the Iowa State campus. As noted already, he enjoyed a long friendship and professional association with August Bang, the editor of Julegranen and a spokesman for the Danish American community.

Among the many anecdotes from his hundreds of students over the years, a number mention his strong connection to his Danish background. One of the most revealing is recorded in Christian Petersen Remembered by Patricia Lounsbury Bliss. A landscape architecture graduate of Iowa State recalled how strong was his professor’s connection to Denmark. Beginning by saying that Petersen could make each student feel special, Glen Jensen remembered, “In my case, the emphasis was on the Danish connection. This began on the first day of class when he looked over the roster and read aloud only three names – Feddersen, Jensen and another obviously Danish name. Then he said, ‘Well, I see we have three ‘A’ students.” Petersen told Jensen that he was from Dybbol – the same town as the famous Jens Jensen. When the man mentioned that it would be helpful if he were related to the successful landscape architect, Petersen told him, “Don’t you know, Glen, that all of us Danes are related?”

Those Danish associations also extended to other faculty members who came from the same background, such as Martin Mortensen, the head of the Dairy Industry Department where Petersen had placed his first major Iowa State sculpture, and Joanne Hansen, head of the Applied Art department in which Petersen taught. These and other aspects suggest that the link to Denmark was never very far from him. The boy who had carved boats in his grandfather’s workshop in Denmark developed into perhaps the most important Regionalist sculptor in America. Certainly, his legacy endures through his sculpture which distinguishes the Iowa State campus. Never a self-marketer, Petersen did not promote his reputation. Over the years, however, the achievement of this Danish American is being increasingly recognized, and the knowledge of and regard for his art is expanding and his place in American art history is being studied and affirmed.

Endnotes

1. Jessie Merrill Dwelle, Iowa Beautiful Land; A History of Iowa, Mason City, Iowa” Klipto Loose Leaf Company, revised edition: Ruth H. Wagner, ed., 1954, 183.