Johann Berthelsen
(1883 - 1972)
Winter: Wall Street & Trinity Church
Oil on panel
10 x 8 inches
Framed dimensions:
14 x 12 inches
Signed
BIOGRAPHY - Johann Berthelsen (1883 - 1972)

Johann Henrik Carl Berthelsen was born in Copenhagen on July 25, 1883. He emigrated with his parents to America at the age of seven. An immigration listing reports his arrival in the United States on September 6, 1890, at the age of seven (not 1889, as has been previously recorded). When he was eighteen years old, Berthelsen entered the Chicago Music College with a full scholarship to study voice. He remained there for four years, graduating in 1905 as a fully trained baritone. After graduation, Berthelsen joined a light opera company and began touring throughout the United States and Canada. He spent five years in the limelight of the theater until 1910, when he returned to his alma mater to join the faculty as a voice instructor. Berthelsen would remain in this position until 1913.
The teaching position at the Chicago Music College allowed Berthelsen to pursue his interests in the visual arts. Art historian Leland G. Howard noted that it was during this time that Berthelsen came into contact with the Norwegian painter Svend Rasmussen Svendsen (1864-1945), who had immigrated to Chicago in 1881 and established a well-respected career.[i] It was through Svendsen that Berthelsen may have been introduced to painting. He relocated to Indianapolis in 1913 to accept a position as the head of the voice department at the Indianapolis Conservatory of Music. There, he began training under the Indiana-born artist Wayman Elbridge Adams (1883-1859), a portraitist who had just returned to Indiana after several years of study in Italy and Spain. In later years, Adams would paint at least three portraits of Berthelsen.[ii]
In 1915, Berthelsen left his position at the Conservatory to open his own studio. There, he offered private voice lessons, produced student performances, and appeared in his own concerts. Additionally, Berthelsen became an active member of the Little Theater Society, where he often had a leading role.
During his tenure in Indianapolis, Berthelsen and Adams became close friends. In 1920, they moved to New York City to be part of the thriving arts community there. At this time, Berthelsen began painting his most recognizable images: those of New York City, with its steel skyscrapers and vibrant city life, shown with a sensitive rendering of changing environmental elements.
Adams commented about his reactions to his friend’s paintings.
It is always a pleasure to see a picture that is not merely technical, but contains the same interest and feeling of an artist for his subject. The intangibly felt nocturnes of Central Park, the romantic streets of New York on a snowy day, or an early spring morning by Mr. Johann Berthelsen, give me great delight. Over many years I have watched the consistent poetic quality of his work and rejoice in his mounting success.[iii]
New York was becoming a major artistic center in the 1920s. The city itself allowed artists to create captivating images of progress and modernization. Urban cityscapes became popular in the wake of the poet Charles Baudelaire’s exhortation to “be of your own time” (Il faut être de son temps) in mid-nineteenth-century France. However, the images produced by American artists adopted an Impressionist palette tinged with a sense of nostalgia in the search for an appropriate method to represent American life.
After arriving in New York City in 1920, Berthelsen again opened his own studio where he gave voice lessons. He also continued painting. Both he and Adams had studios on West 57th Street. Berthelsen experimented with several media during this period, including pastel, watercolor, and oil. He became a member of the American Watercolor Society in 1926. The artist also maintained his ties to Chicago, earning his first official recognition there for a pastel of Central Park. He submitted this work to the Hoosier Salon Exhibition held at the Marshall Field Company galleries in Chicago in 1928.[iv] There, he received the Albert Erskine Prize for Pastel.

1928 was also the year Berthelsen married Helenya Kaschewski, who had studied with him before embarking on a career as a singer, dancer, and entertainer. Ultimately, the couple had three children: two sons and a daughter. Despite the happiness of their early years of marriage, the Berthelsens faced the economic disaster of the 1929 stock market crash and the subsequent shuttering of many Broadway theatres and other performing venues. Music students could no longer afford lessons, and performing jobs grew increasingly rare. Berthelsen turned increasingly to selling smaller format images, which he could sell for lower prices. Gradually, he began to build a reputation as an artist, and particularly as a painter of New York cityscapes. His most popular images were of the city in the snow.
Berthelsen was also fortunate to participate in one of President Roosevelt’s New Deal art projects, the Municipal Art Committee in New York City. He exhibited at the Committee galleries at 62 West 53rd Street with eleven other artists.
His mature style shows the influence of previous American Impressionists such as Childe Hassam but also recalls the lineage of Impressionism in France. While American Impressionists may have adopted the French style, it came with new and fresh interpretations. Art historians Weinberg, Bolger, and Curry identified the issue succinctly in their discussion of American Impressionism:
Like the French, the Americans wished to be of their own time and place, and painters and critics alike saw both the Impressionists and Realists of the United States as helping to reestablish a national artistic voice. Both groups rejected the traditional notion that art must draw its inspiration from myth, religion, history, or other art, inverting the academic emphasis on culture over nature. Like their French predecessors, they recorded the timely moment in contemporary life yet did not renounce a desire to create a timeless art.[v]
Although Berthelsen never studied in France, French Impressionist works were exhibited in America beginning with the Galerie Durand-Ruel show in 1886 in New York. By Berthelsen’s time, French Impressionist art was shown in many galleries across the country. Perhaps more significant for Berthelesen, however, was the extraordinary collection of this work at the Art Institute of Chicago, where it formed the core of the museum collection from its earliest days.

In 1942, with a growing reputation as a painter, some well-known collectors such as William Randolph Hearst and Richard Berlin began purchasing his work. Berthelsen moved his family to rural New Milford, Connecticut. The surrounding countryside provided subject matter for new paintings, and the quiet environment undoubtedly offered a congenial place to raise a family.
After the end of World War II, the US economy returned to non-military production, and collectors began to purchase art again. Berthelsen’s sales increased, and the family returned to New York City in 1950. The 1960s proved to be even more successful as sales continued to grow. As their children left for college, the Berthelsens moved to an apartment on Sutton Place, and later to Greenwich, Connecticut.
Between 1943 and 1960, Berthelsen exhibited often in New York, Indianapolis, and Chicago. Throughout his career, he exhibited in Chicago at the Hoosier Salon and Thurbers Gallery; in Indianapolis at the Hoosier Salon; and in New York City at the American Watercolor Society, Barbizon-Plaza Galleries, Galleries of the Municipal Art Committee, Gatterdam Gallery, and Jean Bohne Gallery. He was additionally a member of the Allied Artists of America, American Watercolor Society, and Salmagundi Club.
In 1971, while visiting New York City, the artist was hit by a passing car, which brought about a rapid decline in his health. He continued to paint until his death on Easter Sunday, 1972.
Selected Museums
Eskenazi Museum of Art, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana
Hickory Museum of Art, Hickory, North Carolina
Indiana State Museum, Indianapolis
Museum of Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas
Sheldon Swope Art Museum, Terre Haute, Indiana
[i] Leland G. Howard, Johann Berthelsen: An American Master Painter (Terre Haute, IN: Sheldon Swope Art museum, 1988) 5.
[ii] Judith H. Bonner and Estill Curtis Pennington, eds. The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture: Volume 21: Art and Architecture. (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2013). 203-204.
[iii] Howard, Johann Berthelsen: An American Master Painter, 6.
[iv] The Hoosier Salon in Chicago was organized the Daughters of Indiana, a group of women who had been raised in Indiana but lived in Chicago. The annual Salon was held at the Marshall Field Galleries in Chicago from 1925-1942, when it moved to Indianapolis. See Gaar Williams, When the Hoosier Settin' Room couldn't hold all their Art, they Invaded Chicago. Courtesy of Indiana Historical Society. http://indianahistorylibrary.worldcat.org/title/when-the-hoosier-settin-room-couldnt-hold-all-their-art-they-invaded-chicago/oclc/869841953&referer=brief_results
[v] Barbara Weinberg, Doreen Bolger, & David Park Curry, American Impressionism and Realism: The Painting of Modern Life, 1885-1915, (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1994) 5.
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