Red Tulips, Paris

Signed lower right. Illustrated in "New Hope for American Art".

B. J. O. Nordfeldt (1878-1955)

Bror Julius Olsson was born in Tullstrop, Sweden in 1878. He immigrated to the United States in 1891 later adopting his mother’s maiden name of Nordfeldt. He began his studies in art at the Art Institute of Chicago where he was chosen to assist artist, Albert Herter, in a large mural project for the McCormick Harvester Company. In 1900 he was sent to Paris by McCormick to help set up the completed mural at the Paris Exposition. While there he studied briefly at the Academie Julian before traveling to England to study woodblock printing under F. Morley Fletcher. Returning to Chicago in 1903, Nordfeldt would spend the next ten years painting mainly figurative works in an academic style similar to that of the Old Masters. By the mid-teens, Nordfeldt had developed a bold, dramatic modernist style and divided his time between New York and Provincetown, Massachusetts. There, he invented the “Provincetown Print”, a form of woodblock printing producing a multicolored print with a single impression.

In 1919, Nordfeldt moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico where he built a home, and although he continued to make woodblocks and etchings, he primarily concentrated on painting. Nordfeldt spent 1933 teaching at the Minneapolis School of Art where he met a woman who would become his future wife, Emily Abbott, also an artist. For the next several years he would teach at the Wichita Art Association in Kansas, until finally settling in Lambertville, New Jersey in 1937. In the early 1940’s, Nordfeldt was a guest professor at the University of Texas, and upon returning to Lambertville he would marry Emily Abbott in 1944. Nordfeldt was most prolific during the 1930’s and 1940’s creating some of his best work. His paintings are highly sought after by collectors of both western as well as New Jersey and Pennsylvania modernist art.

He exhibited at the Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco (1915 silver medal), Art Institute of Chicago (1926 medal), Sesquicentennial Exposition in Philadelphia (1926 medal), Corcoran Gallery biennials, the Smithsonian Institute, the Arts Club of Chicago, Denver Art Museum (1937 prize), the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Carnegie Institute, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art among others. Nordfeldt's work is in the permanent collections of over thirty five museums internationally.

Sources: New Hope for American Art by James M. Alterman
Sam Hunter, B.J.O.Nordfeldt: An American Expressionist. Pipersvile, PA:
Richard Stuart, 1984. Fe: Gerald Peters Gallery, 1981.
B.J.O.Nordfeldt, -New Hope Modernists. Pedersen,1991