Birger Sandzen

A Kansas Portrait

It was fortunate for American art and Kansas when a young Swedish artist named Sven Birger Sandzen decided to emigrate to Lindsborg in 1894. Educated in Swedish universities and in Paris he was attracted to Bethany College and at the urging of the Reverend C. A. Swensson, Bethany's founder, he became the school's art department head.

He never left Bethany for any extended period of time although he served as visiting faculty at a number of American universities and art schools. He spent innumerable summers in the Southwest and much of his art reflects his interest in the mountains and their dramatic colors.

He portrayed his adopted state in a variety of ways-lithographs, drawings, watercolors, and oils. Today they hang in galleries and private collections around the world but the subject matter holds a special interest for Kansans and other Westerners.

One art critic wrote: "Birger Sandzen is the poet painter of immense sun-washed spaces, of pine-crowned luminous, gigantic rocks and of color-shifting desert sands. The spectator is amazed at this captured beauty. This dreamer-painter is truly a master."

Sandzen's early paintings have subdued hues but his later works in oil are more vivid. His drawings and prints range from appealing portraits of pioneers to the stone houses, trees, small streams, and broken country of west-central Kansas.

Also a musician, for a number of years Sandzen sang with the oratorio society in its annual presentation of Handel's Messiah. His wife was a Bethany graduate and a member of its music faculty at one time and his daughter, Margaret, pursued a career in art in Lindsborg. Sandzen retired from the faculty in 1946 but he continued to work in his studio almost until his death in 1954.

Sandzen said he never had to get in the mood to work and no matter how busy his schedule he always found time to paint. He said that the most important fundamentals of art were "order" and "a quality of life." Each piece of his work was planned and he was described as having an interest in two pieces of art-the one he was working on and the one he was planning.

Sandzen received a number of honorary degrees and other kinds of recognition including a knighthood, conferred upon him by the King of Sweden in 1940.

The best representation of his works may be found in the gallery that serves as his memorial on the Bethany campus. This man, described some years ago as "the one painter in the United States who by-passed the art movements of the past forty years and reveals himself as a bridge between the impressionists and the so-called abstract expressionists" gave something to art in Kansas that is beyond measure.