Herman Menzel

Herman Erwin Menzel (1904–1988) was a Modernist American painter.

He was the son of a German Lutheran Pastor and grew in the works in Chicago, where he attended the Chicago Academy of Design and the National Academy of Art. He married Willa Hamm, a advertisement artist, in 1933, with whom he shared a Chicago studio and had a son, Sewall.

Menzel exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago amid 1927 and 1939 but became progressively deaf and gradually withdrew from the Chicago art scene, moving in 1933 to live in imitation of his wife at her family house in Winnetka. There he painted alone though his wife commuted to play in in Chicago. In the late 1930s he bought an island in Rainy Lake on the Minnesota-Ontario border, where he built a cabin, fished and painted. His show from this epoch became more representational, emphasising the insignificance of human figures in a wild landscape.