In the Studio of DanishAmerican Artists Emil and Dines Carlsen

by Leslie Anne Anderson, Director of Collections, Exhibitions, and Programs

THE MUSEUM’S LARGEST acquisition of art occurred in 2020. The Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields gifted nearly one thousand works by artist Dines Carlsen (1901–66), son of famed Danish-born American painter (Søren) Emil Carlsen (1848–1932), to the National Nordic Museum. Along with the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art, the Museum has become the primary repository for materials related to the artistic family. The new collection had long been familiar to this article’s author, who researched the works extensively at Indianapolis from 2014 until 2015. While the senior Carlsen was well known at the time, it soon became apparent through this research that the accomplished and prolific junior Carlsen merits more attention than scholars previously paid him.

In spring 1916, fifteen-year-old artist Dines Carlsen exhibited a still life painting at the National Academy of Design, a New York City institution committed to the instruction and exhibition of its members. There, the painting caught the eye of American artist and tastemaker William Merritt Chase (1849–1916), who purchased it. After Chase acquired the painting, The American Magazine of Art predicted that “a future of great brilliancy” awaited the teenage painter. In 1920, Dines’s painting The Jade Bowl (1919; fig. 1) received the Academy’s prestigious Hallgarten Prize. The Friends of American Art for the collection of the John Herron Art Institute (now the Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields) acquired the painting shortly thereafter. At the age of twenty-one, Dines became the youngest Associate inducted into the National Academy of Design, a record that remains unbroken in 2021. Another Hallgarten Prize followed for a painting titled The Flemish Tapestry (1923) Yet, despite this early success, Dines’s star would soon fade in the absence of his mentor.

Dines’s father, Emil Carlsen (fig. 2), rose to prominence as a skilled painter of still lifes, seascapes, landscapes, and portraits. Emil provided his precocious son with private instruction, and later the opportunity to exhibit their paintings together. In 1929, for example, the Macbeth Gallery in New York City organized a show of the pair’s works. Because they shared the spotlight, critics rightly focused on their relationship with each other. They cited pictorial evidence of the Carlsens’ familial bond in the similarity of their styles and their selection of subject matter. The artistic identities of father and son blurred in subsequent, but scant scholarship. A deeper, more nuanced examination of their shared artistic phi- losophy can be found by exploring a single work: Studio

Dines painted Studio in 1931 (fig. 3). This painting, held in the collection of the Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields since 1981, reveals much about Dines’s ideology at the pivotal time of its execution. Studio, which was finished shortly before Emil’s death on January 2, 1932, may be understood as a tribute to the artist’s father and instructor, a modern Freundschaftsbild (the German term for a “friendship picture,” which memorializes shared beliefs). Careful of analysis of the painting and a trove of material—including letters exchanged between the Carlsens and fellow artist Helen Elizabeth Keep (1868–1959) from 1930 until 1957—support this interpretation.

Dines displayed Studio at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia in 1932 and at the National Academy of Design in 1934. Confirmed by exhibition records, the title—Studio—suggests that the painting was an interior scene first and a self-portrait second. This follows the instructions Emil had given to colleague Helen Elizabeth Keep, who had solicited the senior artist’s advice. On July 3, 1930, Emil offered the following opinion: in the most celebrated interiors . . . a figure or two were generally the telling center, as you know . . . A still life should not have life in it, a landscape does not need life, but an Interior, I think, needs life in some form dogs or cats might do. This is an individual opinion, might be wrong.

Taking his father’s direction, Dines selected himself as Studio’s central figure. However, the true subject of the painting is the artistic work conducted in the space. Dines includes a sampling of the artists’ tools—paintbox, palette, brushes, and canvas resting on an easel—to underscore the room’s important function.

Emil and Dines shared two studios; one was in an urban setting at 43 East 59th Street in Manhattan and the other in rural Falls Village, Connecticut. The contents of the Manhattan studio shown here reveal their shared artistic practice in several ways. For example, two Florentine plaques installed above the doorway and underneath the skylight also appear in other still life paintings executed by father and son. Tacked on the wall is a source of mutual artistic inspiration, a small reproduction of seventeenth century Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer’s Young Woman with a Water Pitcher (ca. 1662; fig. 4). Vermeer’s original painting has been a highlight of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection since 1889 and hung on its walls only twenty-three blocks north of the Carlsens’ studio. After the death of Emil, Dines described the influence of Vermeer’s paintings on his father and by implication himself in a 1932 letter to Keep.

Another lesson from the senior Carlsen reveals itself in Studio if we consider the painting as a self-portrait. Dines depicts himself with a painting currently underway. Though he denies the audience access to its imagery, we can speculate that it is the very painting we are studying. The artist’s self-surveillance in a mirror located beyond the easel is obvious. The artist’s gaze does not meet the viewer’s because he is examining his own reflection. Moreover, the right-handed Dines appears to be a lefty. He holds his palette and brushes in his right, while his left composes the scene. Further evidence is found in the intimately-scaled Vermeer print, which has been reversed. We can assume this painting is a faithful representation: in an April 1935 letter to Keep, Dines shared Emil’s adherence to nature, remaining faithful to subject matter depicted. He agreed with his late father stating, “the pure abstractions evolved by thought without any relation to visual phenomena are entirely beyond my grasp and I must keep my hands off.”

Deviating from his father’s lessons, the canvas of Studio itself, called the “support,” may reveal the younger Carlsen’s intentions for the painting. He executed Studio on a coarsely-woven canvas. The Depression-era date of the work may suggest financial hardship; however, the Carlsens’ letters reveal no need to economize. Emil had encouraged the use of fine materials in works for public display. In a letter to Keep dated July 3, 1930, Emil offered the following appraisal and recommendation: “your picture[s] have quality, your color is deep and rich, —but in color on a well-made canvas would carry your works further.” Studio may have been conceived initially as an intimate gift, a “friendship picture” for Emil, and perhaps had not been intended for public display.

Studio represents the culmination of Dines’s artistic mentorship with the proposed recipient. When Emil passed away in 1932, Dines submitted the recentlycompleted work for display, paying tribute to his father’s legacy.

Research for this article was conducted at the Indianapolis Museum of Art at New elds, where the author studied paintings and drawings by Dines Carlsen in 2014 and 2015, as well as the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art in Washington, DC, the National Academy of Design in New York, and the Falls Village—Canaan Historical Society in Connecticut. Findings were subsequently presented at the annual meeting of the Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Study in May 2015.