Biography from The Columbus Museum-Georgia:
| At a time when many American artists were heavily influenced by European abstraction, A. Henry Nordhausen was one of a handful of painters whose work from the mid-twentieth century reflects a deliberate choice to follow the “realist” tradition.(1)
August Henry Nordhausen was born in Hoboken, New Jersey, in 1901. His parents, German immigrants who came to the United States in the late 1880s, were originally from the historic medieval town of Nordhausen in Lower Saxony. There were five siblings in the Nordhausen household, but Henry’s twin died at an early age. His family eventually moved across the Hudson River to the Bronx and then finally to Lake Huntington in the Catskill Mountains of New York. There they ran a successful boarding house for summer residents.
Nordhausen’s formal education began in a one-room schoolhouse in Lake Huntington and continued in the public schools of the Bronx, before he dropped out of school to go to work and assist with his family’s financial needs.
In 1917 he went back to school at Stuyvesant Technical High School where he developed a major interest in art thanks to the efforts of his art teacher Henry Fritz. He was a very good student, winning art competitions and becoming art editor of the school annual.
In 1920 Nordhausen won a scholarship to the New York School of Fine and Applied Arts (now Parsons School of Design). His faculty included Harry Baker, Howard Giles, Guido Rosa and Frank Fiore. Frank A. Parsons taught art history.
In 1922 he left the United States to further his studies in Munich, Germany. After two days of preliminary examinations involving drawing from the figure, he was accepted at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, studying painting under the realist Hugo Freiherr von Habermann and Wilhelm Heinrich Funk, a successful portrait painter. Nordhausen also took evening classes in drawing from Hans Hofmann. When money to live abroad ran out, he returned to New York in 1925. He lived in Greenwich Village in an apartment that he shared with Alexander Calder. He existed by doing commercial work while he continued to develop his painting. A portrait was included in a 1926 exhibition at the Maryland Institute of Arts and was favorably reviewed. The next year he was elected to the Salmagundi Club.(2)
In 1928 Nordhausen returned to Munich after receiving a fellowship from the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation.
When Nordhausen returned to the United States in 1929, he set up a studio in New York. Here he often painted “colorful characters and bums” that he encountered in the neighborhood.(3) Throughout this time he entered his work in the most competitive exhibitions. Besides the Tiffany grant in 1928, he received a Spencer Trask Foundation (Yaddo) grant in 1932 and the McDowell Colony Fellowships in 1933 and 1934. In 1930 Nordhausen had a major one-person exhibition at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, which included more than fifty of his paintings, watercolors, drawings and prints.
Nordhausen developed a fascination with the circus world and painted it while traveling with them for a time. Another group he enjoyed painting was the ballerinas. Nordhausen said, “It gives me so much pleasure to paint a ballerina. It is like painting a flower.”(4)
Whether it was a circus clown, a ballet dancer, a burlesque dancer or a distinguished person, Nordhausen was first and foremost a figure painter.(5) He painted from the model and especially favored nudes. “Nothing is more beautiful than a woman’s body. If you can paint a nude you can paint anything.”(6)
Nordhausen maintained his studio in New York for many years but finally established a studio in Columbus, Georgia in 1960. He received many commissions and had a successful career in portrait painting.(7)
Former Secretary of State, Dean Rusk and Jean Renoir, French film director and son of the master Auguste Renoir, are included in his list of prominent portraits.
In 1978 he married Ethel Chandler Williams, a member of the Columbus Museum’s board of directors. Nordhausen died in 1993 and is buried beside his wife in Columbus, Georgia.
Footnotes:
1. Much of the biographical material for this entry has been culled from Laurence E Schmeckebier, The Art of A. Henry Nordhausen (Canaan, New Hampshire: Phoenix Publishing, 1980). Additional information has come from interviews with Mrs. Frank D. Foley, Jr. (Sally), the artist’s stepdaughter and longtime Museum trustee.
2. Nordhausen presided over the prestigious Salmagundi Club, the oldest arts club in America, from 1959 until 1963. Its members have included John la Farge, Albert P. Ryder, George Inness, William Merritt Chase, Louis C. Tiffany, Stanford White and Thomas Moran, among others.
3. Interview with Mrs. Foley, January 16, 2002.
4. Notes from videotape of Mr. Nordhausen’s gallery walk at Columbus Museum, September 10, 1989.
5. Schmeckebier, vii.
6. Videotape of Mr. Nordhausen’s gallery walk at Columbus Museum, September 10, 1989.
7. Interview with Mrs. Foley, January 16, 2002.
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Biography from AskART:
| Active in New York City as an oil painter, watercolorist, teacher and lecturer, August Nordhausen was known for his portrait painting. He has commissioned works at the Pentagon in Washington DC, Syracuse University, the Royal Crown Cola Company in Columbus, Georgia and Long Island University.
He was a lecturer at the Museum of Modern Art and the Brooklyn Museum of Art and did demonstrations at Columbia University. He was Instructor of Portraits at Roerrich Museum and an art instructor in New York City high schools.
Memberships included the American Watercolor Society, which he served as President from 1959 to 1963; Allied Artists of American and the Audubon Society. He exhibited paintings at the Pennsylvania Academy, National Academy of Design, Art Institute of Chicago and Audubon Artists.
Source:
Peter Falk, "Who Was Who in American Art" |
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August Nordhausen is also mentioned in these AskART essays:
Painters of Nudes
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