B.J.O. Nordfeldt: American Internationalist

B.J.O. Nordfeldt: American Internationalist

Weisman Art Museum (2021) | Distributed by University of Minnesota Press

160 pages, 250 color plates

9 x 12 in., Hardcover

$39.95

Edited by Gabriel P. Weisberg, with a foreword by Lyndel King

Contributors: Annika Johnson, Paul Kruty, and Janet Whitmore.

B.J. O. Nordfeldt was described by a Minneapolis art critic in 1935 as a “painter’s painter,” and his prolific career evinced constant experimentation with subjects, genres, and media of modernist art. The Swedish emigrant lived throughout the world—from his early training and teaching in Chicago to the dynamic art scenes of Paris and New York to popular American art colonies in Provincetown, Santa Fe, and Lambertville, New Jersey. These various locales encouraged him to engage with new styles and techniques in oil paintings, watercolors, prints, woodcuts, and etchings. His landscapes, portraits, and still lifes showed similarities with the work of Matisse and Cézanne, as well as elements of cubism, and his wood carvings and prints revealed influences from Paul Gauguin and Japanese traditions.

In the 1930s Nordfeldt taught at the Minneapolis School of Art (now the Minneapolis College of Art and Design). In 2022 the Weisman Art Museum at the University of Minnesota is hosting a major exhibition of Nordfeldt’s diverse art. A comprehensive review of this “independent regionalist” and intensely innovative artist, B. J. O. Nordfeldt: American Internationalist also presents the impressive breadth and creative exploration of twentieth-century American modernist art.

This lavishly illustrated catalogue, and the exhibition it accompanies, are the first scholarly assessment of this important American modernist in decades. The related exhibition, organized by Weisman Art Museum, first appeared at Wichita Art Museum, Kansas, from September 25, 2021 through January 16, 2022; this major survey exhibition is on view at Weisman Art Museum at the University of Minnesota from February 11 through July 10, 2022.