Inside Sandzen Fall 06

INSIDE SANDZÉN

BIRGER SANDZÉN'S AMERICANISM

Margaret Sandzén Greenough felt she had written well in a letter about her father Birger Sandzén's Americanism. On an unaddressed envelope that preserved a draft of the letter, she wrote, "Pretty good about Papa--in a letter to Mrs. Harrison Mayer." The draft is dated January 26, 1963, and was recently filed as the letters of that year were processed in the Gallery Archives.

. . .Although my father spent the first twenty-three years of his life in Sweden, he spent the remaining sixty in the U.S.A. I don't think any native-born American ever gave more of himself in painting the great landscape forms of our West and Southwest. It is true his work retained a somewhat Scandinavian look about it, but Sweden could never have furnished him with the kind of subject matter he found exciting. I will admit that the pine trees and rocks of Colorado might have echoed those of Sweden, and I would also trace the intense love of nature back to Sweden.

But my father considered himself an American painter painting U.S.A. rocks, U.S.A. water, and bonafide Colorado pines. He even liked Western movies. As a matter of fact, he was lured here by the romance of the West by way of childhood books about Indians, Prescott's A History of the Conquest of Mexico, and founding Bethany College president Carl Swensson's stories about the Smoky Hill Valley. Sometimes I think no one can understand how much he loved this country. His heart belonged to the U.S.A., not Sweden. . .