Sideline

"It is like being a poet," sighed Adolf Dehn. "You don't make money at it." For 20 years his lithographs of round-bellied priests, frock-coated bankers, mountain landscapes and Midwestern barnyards had been finding their way into museums and the portfolios of connoisseurs. But stocky, Minnesota-born Adolf Dehn wanted a quicker and handsomer welcome from fortune than Ralph Blakelock got (see above).

In 1936 he turned to watercolor, was soon turning out at least one a day. Within four years, he was one of the best-selling as well as one of the fastest water-colorists in the U.S.

The U.S. Navy took him up in a plane to do 17 pictures of the Navy's blimps in action. For weeks, he painted nothing but blimps: in hangars, on submarine patrol, against the sunset. Standard Oil (N.J.) flew him to Venezuela to paint oil wells. The Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad put him on a private car ("You should have seen those huge bedrooms, with big brass beds in them") to picture the West Virginia countryside.

Two years ago, prospering Watercolorist Dehn had a yen to go back to his crayons and litho stone. Last week the 60 lithographs he had finished in his spare moments were on exhibit at a Manhattan gallery. A good many of them were in his old vein: New Yorkerish jibes at solemn nuns, nightclubbers & dilettantes. But most gallerygoers preferred his Minnesota farmyards and Colorado mountain landscapes. In them, Dehn proved once again that he knows how to give black the coolness and weight of real shadows, and how to make white blaze and sparkle the way light does.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.