THE MACFARLANE COLLECTION - Key Persons
Howard Cook is considered one of America's best-known print makers, and was also a painter, and illustrator. He was born in Springfield, Massachusetts and completed his formal art training at the Art Students League in New York in 1919 and then traveled extensively in Europe, North Africa, Turkey, Asia, and Central America. In 1926, he took his first trip West, where he married Barbara Latham, a modernist Southwest artist. Cook developed a great fascination for the Santa Fe and Taos areas, where he became a resident.
In 1937, he won the largest mural commission ever given to a Taos artist when the Treasury Department's Section of Painting and Sculpture chose him to paint sixteen fresco murals in the lobby of the main post office in San Antonio, Texas. His frescoes portray a history of Texas from the days of the Spanish conquest to the 1930s. In the 1930s, he earned two Guggenheim Fellowships, during which he painted in Taxco, Mexico and the Deep South, where he painted and created prints depicting Black Americans. These works are now in the Georgia Museum of Art and the J. Frank Dobie Collection at the University of Texas. During World War II, he was an artist and war correspondent in the South Pacific. His illustrations from this time were exhibited at the War department at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. and later circulated as a traveling exhibition.
Maxine Albro was born in Ayrshire, Iowa on January 20, 1893. In 1920, she moved to San Francisco, California where she studied at the California School of Fine Arts from 1923 to 1925. A year later, she enrolled in the Art Students League in New York. In the early 1920s, she lived in Burlingame, California, near San Francisco. In 1927, she studied at Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris, before embarking to Mexico around 1929, where she would make the acquaintance of Mexican painter Diego Rivera, about whom she said "Watching Diego [paint] was very beneficial to me." In 1938 Albro became an assistant to Rivera and studied with Pablo O'Higgins, with whom she painted frescoes.
In the 1930s she worked for the Federal Public Works of Art Project and completed several commissions for the program including murals at Coit Tower in San Francisco and a mosaic at San Francisco State University.
After marrying sculptor Parker Hall in 1938, they settled in Carmel on the Monterey Peninsula. Although she specialized in Spanish and Mexican motifs, her work also includes landscapes and street scenes gleaned from her world travels.
The four "portly Roman sybils" that she executed for a mural at the Ebell Women's Club in Los Angeles offended some of its members; they rescinded approval of her frescoes which, though intended to last "as long as the concrete of the wall lasted," were destroyed in 1935, despite the fact that several prominent art critics, including the young Arthur Miller, rose to her defense. Also destroyed was her mosaic of animals over the entrance to Anderson Hall at the University of California Extension in San Francisco. She created fresco decorations for many private homes, including that of Col. Harold Mack in Monterey. Her easel art was popular in local and national museums.
Sara Kolb Danner was born in New York, NY in 1894. Her father, who was an artist and student of Thomas Eakins, taught her to paint as a child. She later studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts where the Sara Kolb Danner Theatre is named for her. She also studied at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women, the Massachusetts Normal Art School, the California College of Arts and Crafts, at Stanford University and the University of California at Santa Barbara. She also received instruction from George L. Noyes and Henry Snell.
She was a member of the Hoosier Salon, Women Painters of the West, California Water Color Society, California Art Club and the Palo Alto Art Club.
During her years in Indiana she exhibited with the South Bend Artists and at the Hoosier Salon, where, in 1919, she received the prize for the best landscape by a woman. She exhibited with the Philadelphia Art Alliance and at the Woodmere Art Museum in that city.
In California she exhibited with the Women Painters of the West, at the Golden Gate International Exposition of 193940, the California State Fair, Santa Barbara Museum, Stanford Museum and at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. One-person shows of her work were held at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1927 and 1939. She also exhibited at the National Academy of Design in New York.
Sven Birger Sandzén was born February 5, 1871 in Blidsberg, Sweden. Sandzén's formal education began at the Skara School in Skara, Sweden at the age of ten. At Skara, Sandzén studied with Olaf Erlandsson who introduced the young artist to oil painting. After graduation from Skara in 1890, Sandzén studied for a semester at Lund University in Lund, Sweden. The following year the young artist went to Stockholm and studied with Zorn, Richard Bergh, and Per Hasselberg in what was later to become the Artists League.
At this time, Sandzén joined a group of young artists and they rented a studio at Anders Zorn's suggestion. These young artists formed "The Art School of the Artists' League" which played an important part in the development of modern Swedish art. In the summer of 1894 Sandzen read the book "I Sverige" by a young Swedish-American educator, Dr. Carl A. Swensson. Dr. Swensson, a college president, told of his struggles on the plains of Kansas and he challenged other young Swedes to come help him. Sandzén was excited by the proposition and wrote Dr. Swensson a letter asking if he could use a young artist who could sing tenor and teach French. As soon as Sandzén received the cable offering him a job, he accepted and arrived in Lindsborg, Kansas the day college opened in the fall.
Birger soon realized Lindsborg was where he wanted to make his home with the inspiring atmosphere of the new College and energy of the young teachers and president. He built a home, and became active in establishing art clubs, exhibitions, and scholarships for artists in his community. In 1900 he married Augusta Alfrida Leksell, a gifted pianist. They had one daughter, Margaret Elizabeth. In 1922 The Babcock Galleries in New York hosted two large exhibitions of Sandzen's work.
While respected as an educator, Sandzén was equally respected for his work as a painter, illustrator, engraver, and lithographer. His renderings of the Rocky Mountains in block prints, lithographs, and paintings "created a bold Post-Impressionist style," which has been compared to Van Gogh or Cezanne. He is described as starting out as a "tonal landscapist," evolving into a pointilist (ca. 1910), and by 1915, employing great slabs of paint in an "exciting and colorful style." He won a prize for his work at an exhibit of Kansas City artists in 1917, and again in 1922 at WCC. Sandzén was also awarded the Knight of the Swedish Royal Order of the North Star. During his tenure as head of the art department at Bethany College, Sandzén wrote With Brush & Pencil.
He died in his adopted home, Lindsborg, Kansas, on June 19, 1954.