Ejnar Hansen (painter)
For the Danish wrestler, see Ejnar Hansen.
Ejnar Hansen (1884 - September 26, 1965) was a Danish-born American portrait painter and art educator. His achievement is in the remaining collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Laguna Art Museum. He studied at the Royal Academy of Art in Copenhagen and was an fan of Edvard Munch. He vanguard became a allowance of a activity called De Tretten (The Thirteen), modernist painters who rebelled next to academic painting and expressed great interest in Expressionism and Cubism. He arrived in the U.S. in 1914 and since settling in Pasadena in 1924 he lived in Michigan, Wheaton IL, Wisconsin and Minnesota. He taught at Chouinard and Otis Art Institutes, Pomona College, John Muir College, and the Pasadena School of Fine Arts. His paintings continued to be exhibited and winning awards for portraits at the annual exhibitions of the Art Institute of Chicago.
He was particularly rich with portraiture, which he taught at numerous schools along in imitation of figure, landscape, and occasional nevertheless life painting. He as a consequence undertook “Plein air” painting trips in the make public of Maynard Dixon to Taos, New Mexico, Utah, and Denmark.
In his book "On the edge of America" Paul J Karlstorm, West Coast Regional Director of Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution states "Another figure who came to beat in California during the depression years was Ejnar Hansen, who, after having lived in the Midwest past 1914, moved to Pasadena in 1925, where he painted astonishing character studies of suffering or eccentric men and world-weary young person women on the edge of disintegration. These paintings, which appropriate much of the neurotic confrontation of unbiased life, are in the middle of the finest examples of twentieth-century portraiture."
His oeuvre includes nevertheless life's, portraits, landscapes and figure compositions in oil and watercolor. His self portraits of circa 1904 and circa 1930 are notable.
His works won many awards in southern California exhibitions from 1927. All of his California-period paintings proclaim Hansen as a modernist in his take advantage of of form, space, and composition, and the figure paintings also advocate his mastery of characterization.
Member: LA AA; Pasadena Society of Artists. Exh: AIC, 1918, 1945, 1946; LACMA, 1927 (1st prize), 1941, 1954; Painters & Sculptors of LA, 1928; Calif. State
Santa Barbara, Calif., Jorgen Hansen Collection, Ejnar Hansen Papers § Arthur Miller, "Ejnar Hansen Interviewed," American Artist 14 (October 1950): 28–33, 62 § Pasadena (Calif.) Art Museum, Ejnar Hansen: Fifty Years of His Art, exh. cat., 1956, with foundation by Frode N. Dann, chronology, lists of awards, exhibitions, and collections, bibliography § Moure behind Smith 1975, p. 109, with bibliography § Santa Barbara, James M. Hansen, Ejnar Hansen, 1884-1965: Retrospective Exhibition, exh. cat., 1984, with inauguration by James M. Hansen, lists of awards and exhibitions