B. J. O. Nordfeldt: American Internationalist

This painter’s painter constantly explored the variety of American modernist art, inspired by many locations and artistic styles

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 Cezanne, 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 2021 the Weisman Art Museum at the University of Minnesota will host 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.

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