In January of 1922, nearly thirty years after swapping his native Sweden for the rolling plains of central Kansas, the painter Birger Sandzén received his first one-man show in New York City.
To this day, that exhibition at the Babcock Gallery, which revealed Sandzén at the very pinnacle of his creative powers, is considered the most prestigious show in the artist’s long career.
The audacities of technique and style that he’d absorbed from the European modernists and then applied to the New World landscape of his adopted Midwest — namely, the radical use of impasto, the vivid brushwork, the rippled surfaces, the liberation from strict realism, and, above everything else, the rich coloration — produced a newness of vision that forced the wider art world to take notice of this polite, middle-aged art professor from Lindsborg, Kansas.
Sandzén would likely have come to the attention of the metropolitan tastemakers at some point anyway. He’d staged a successful one-man show in Washington D.C. just two years earlier, and he had a small but devoted band of fans in the New York art world urging the Swedish-American painter to take his rightful seat at the banquet table of Great Art.
And yet it was, at least according to Sandzén’s biographer, on the strength of one painting alone — a painting titled “Autumn, Smoky River, Kansas” (1921) — that the Babcock show was launched.
The painting, a large golden-evening pastoral done in effulgent pinks and blues and greens and violets, in which the paint is applied to the canvas as thickly and lusciously as cake frosting, was owned by a man named Ernest Davis, a world-renowned opera singer living in New York. Davis was a friend of gallery owner Edmund C. Babcock, and it was Babcock who first spotted the Sandzén painting while visiting Davis’s Manhattan home. The gallery owner was immediately impressed, and in a few weeks’ time he’d arranged for Sandzén’s paintings to decorate the walls of his gallery.
The show was a hit. “Birger Sandzén is a solitary who sits on a far-off mountain peak, enveloped in sunshine,” wrote one European reviewer in prose as impastoed as his subject’s paintings. “This dreamer-painter is truly a master.”
The exhibition catalog lists 20 watercolors, 13 woodcuts, 40 lithographs, and 31 oil paintings. The oils range across Sandzén’s career, from a twilit painting of the Grand Canyon in 1915 to the show’s final listing, “Autumn, Smoky River, Kansas” (1921) — “Lent by Mr. Ernest Davis,” the catalog specifies.
IN THE LATE FALL of 1966, more than forty years after the luminescent Babcock show, a letter landed in Ernest Davis’s mailbox. Davis was an old man by then, living in a little plant-crowded bungalow on the St. Lucie River in southeast Florida. The letter was from a Mr. Raymond D. Smith, who identified himself as the school board president in Iola, Kansas.
“Dear Mr. Davis,” the letter began, “Mrs. C.E. Russell of Iola has visited with me recently relative to your willingness and desire to make a most welcome gift to the Board of Education of the Iola school system of a valuable painting by Birger Sandzén….”
Davis, whose singing career ended three decades earlier when disease stole his eyesight, must have had the letter read to him out loud.
Smith continued: “You could not have known about this, but one of the things we have discussed frequently and thought to be an important and necessary addition to the Fine Arts Center is a permanent art collection…. Your donation of a Sandzén will be the first of this collection, and it quite possibly will be the spark that is needed to start an impressive collection of art to be enjoyed and appreciated by the entire community. … It is difficult to convey to you, Mr. Davis, the real expression of gratitude and appreciation the Board of Education feels upon learning of your generous offer.”
Smith went on to extend his gratitude on behalf of all the residents of Iola and the surrounding community, signing himself, “Gratefully Yours, Raymond D. Smith.”
Ernest Davis died five years later, at age 86, and the painting, “Autumn, Smoky River, Kansas,” was, as promised, packaged and shipped to the Bowlus Fine Arts Center, in whose possession it remains.
II. But, listen — you want to hear about the money
