Artist

B. J. O. Nordfeldt

born Tullstorp, Sweden 1878-died Henderson, TX 1955
Media - portrait_image_113488.jpg - 90274
Courtesy Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
Also known as
  • Bror Julius Olsson Nordfeldt
  • Bror J. O. Nordfeldt
  • Bror Julius Olsson
Born
Tullstorp, Sweden
Died
Henderson, Texas, United States
Active in
  • Santa Fe, New Mexico, United States
  • Lambertville, New Jersey, United States
  • Chicago, Illinois, United States
  • New York, New York, United States
  • Provincetown, Massachusetts, United States
Biography

Painter, printmaker. Nordfeldt's direct and vigorous brushwork converted landscapes, portraits, and still lifes into powerful formal statements. Born in Sweden, he emigrated in 1891 to Chicago, where he began his art training in 1899 with a year at the Art Institute. Following a decade of painting, printmaking, and study in Chicago and Europe, Nordfeldt moved in 1919 to Santa Fe, where he remained for the next twenty years. While abroad he had absorbed the work of the Fauves and Expressionists. His first New Mexico paintings were Cézannesque renderings of Indian dances. Other etchings, lithographs, and paintings portrayed the simple dignity of Hispanic neighbors or analyzed the rugged topography of the Southwest. Nordfeldt's work in New Mexico represents a marriage of his formal predilections with an aggressive environment. Much of his later abstract painting would proceed from the interactions of these two elements.


References
Nordfeldt. B.O. J. Papers. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.

Coke, Van Deren. Nordfeldt the Painter. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1972.

Hunter, Sam. B.J. O. Nordfeldt: an American Expressionist. Pipersville, Pa.: Richart Stuart Gallery, 1984.

Charles Eldredge, Julie Schimmel, and William H. Truettner Art in New Mexico, 1900–1945: Paths to Taos and Santa Fe (Washington, DC: National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 1986)

Works by this artist (50 items)

Reclining Nude
ink and watercolor on paper
Not on view
The General
lithograph on paper
Not on view
Ivoire
lithograph on paper
Not on view
Walt Kuhn, Historical Painting #368494912413, pen and ink and crayon on paper, Smithsonian American Art Museum, 1982.9
Historical Painting #368494912413
pen and ink and crayon on paper
Not on view