Swedish 1871 - 1954

Born in Bildsberg, Sweden, Sven Birger Sandzen had a long, distinguished career as an art professor at Bethany College in Lindsborg, Kansas, and as an impressionist landscape painter. His work evolved from Pointillism to a very personal style of bold color and masses of paint, akin to that of Vincent Van Gogh and Fauve painters Paul Cezanne and Henri Matisse. 

His early work was Tonalist in style, reminiscent of Scandinavian Romanticism, but after he began taking trips to Colorado, where he created many paintings of the Rocky Mountains, his work became much more Expressionist and Fauve or brightly colored.

He was the son of a Lutheran minister. He received his art education in Europe, graduating in 1890 from the College of Skara in Sweden and then taking further study at the University of Lund.  He was the pupil of Anders Zorn and studied painting at the Artists' League of Stockholm and then with Aman-Jean in Paris.

In 1894, he emigrated to Kansas, where he was a professor at Bethany College and, from 1945 until his death, professor emeritus. Not only did he paint in the West, including Yellowstone National Park in 1930, but he also amassed a personal collection of over 500 Western paintings and drawings. 

At Bethany College, he organized the first exhibition of Swedish-American art at that Swedish institution, which included paintings by himself and his colleagues. He was also active in the Swedish-American Society in Chicago.

In 1916, he first went to Colorado and, in the mid-1920s, taught some classes at the Broadmoor Hotel.  He also taught at Denver College and at Utah State College. From 1918, he became a regular visitor to Santa Fe and Taos, New Mexico, and in 1922, exhibited with the Taos Society of Artists in New York. 

During the Depression, he was a W.P.A. artist and author of a book titled With Brush and Pencil.  "He was also a founding member of the Prairie Printmakers Society. In the 1930s, a handful of intaglio and block print artists from Wichita, Lawrence, and El Dorado, Kansas, met with Sandzen in his studio and, under his direction, created one of America's most successful print societies". (McCraw)


Source:

From the Archives of ASKart
Peggy and Harold Samuels, Encyclopedia of Artists of the American West
Fred McCraw, Art Writer of Kansas City and Researcher