When the Swedish artist Birger Sandzén arrived in the wheat belt of central Kansas in the early 1890s, the painter saw a vast, untapped subject full of potential. His sweeping landscapes, rendered in thick brushstrokes and vivid color, redefined how people around the country viewed the Great Plains.
“Sandzén had an enormous influence on the entire art and culture of the Midwest,” says Cori Sherman North, curator of the Birger Sandzén Memorial Gallery. “He came to America to explore, and he was so excited to be out here in Kansas.”
Sandzén’s neatly-appointed studio is a short walk from the gallery. Well-worn brushes fill ceramic crocks, tubes of paint are nestled in wooden boxes and an easel is set up in a corner. Hanging high on a wall is one of Sandzén’s colorful murals, painted with thick, rhythmic brushstrokes. There’s a quartet of horses, a pond and tall cottonwood trees swaying in the wind.
“As an early student he focused on botany and geology and the sciences, and I think that comes through his work,” North says. “Even though his paintings are abstracted from nature, you can tell a pine tree from a cedar tree.”
Museums from Denver to Stockholm showcase Sandzén’s works, and many of his paintings sell at auction for tens of thousands of dollars apiece. But the world’s largest collection of his paintings, prints, and drawings is here in Lindsborg. About 8,000 people trek to this small, central Kansas town each year to take in Sandzén’s expressive, post-impressionistic style.
Hundreds of pieces of his art show the hours Sandzén spent sketching the gentle hills, groves of cottonwoods, and prairie grasslands around Lindsborg. Sandzén painted traditional farm scenes and the Smoky Hills region covered by native sumac, yucca and sandhill plums.
And as his fame grew, his paintings introduced the Kansas landscape to a broader audience.
An artistic adventurer
Sandzén was born in Blidsberg, Sweden, in 1871, and trained as a painter in Europe. In 1894, he crossed the Atlantic to teach art and modern languages at Bethany College in Lindsborg, a few hours west of Kansas City. The town is known today as “Little Sweden” thanks to the many immigrants who settled here in the 1860s.
“It was very Swedish back then when he arrived,” North says. “Everybody spoke Swedish, so he was very comfortable here.”
Sandzén spent more than five decades teaching at the college. When he wasn’t teaching, he was busy making art.
“He was adventurous,” says North. “He really wanted to go to Mexico, he wanted to go to the Grand Canyon and see all the fabulous spots in the Southwest.”
Sketchbook in hand, the artist traveled extensively to some of the most dramatic scenery in the U.S., like Zion Canyon in Utah, the Grand Canyon in Arizona and Garden of the Gods in Colorado.
"My gift to America is to make one realize how beautiful the simplest landscape is and how alive, vigorous and changing our trees and rocks are. The gift of understanding beauty is the greatest anyone can make to another human being," Sandzén once wrote to a friend in a letter. The Sandzén Gallery’s collection includes more than 10,000 of them, written in English and Swedish.
Gallery Director Ron Michael also cares for more than 100 sketch books that Sandzén filled with drawings for future paintings and prints.
“He generally did very rough contour sketches of whatever he was looking at,” Michael says, leafing through a 1923 notebook that gives visitors an idea about how the artist worked. “Then, he would have the colors written in Swedish that he wanted to apply in those specific areas.”
During his lifetime, Sandzén produced 2,800 oil paintings, 500 watercolors and 33,000 prints. When someone asked him in 1954 if he still painted, the Wichita Eagle reported Sandzén said, “You might as well have asked me if I’m still breathing.”
When he died in June later that year, The Kansas City Times quoted Paris art critic Guiseppe Pelletieri.
“Birger Sandzén is the poet painter of immense, sun-washed spaces, of pine crowned luminous, gigantic rocks and color-shifting desert sands,” Pelletieri was quoted as saying. “The spectator is amazed at this captured beauty. This dreamer painter is truly a master.”
A resurgence of interest
The market for Sandzén's work has generally been strong.
Dirk Soulis, the owner of Midwest fine art auction house Soulis Auctions, regularly offers Sandzén paintings, prints, and watercolors from his Lone Jack, Missouri, showroom.
"Depending on the subject of the work, on the national market Sandzén's oil paintings sell for around $25,000 to $200,000," Soulis says. "But the artist’s auction record is $670,000."
Soulis says the value of the artist's works have increased over the decades. A 1910 painting purchased for $10,000 from a gallery in the 1960s sold in one of his auctions last year for double the original price.
The ease of online bidding, kick-started by the pandemic, also changed the way many collectors purchase art, Soulis says.
"We'll have an auction preview and 35 people will come out (in person),” Soulis says. “Then our sales light up with 100 invoices for local people who bid online and see it for the first time when they pick it up."
The swell in popularity comes after decades of lagging interest, says Michael.
"Sandzén's work was very popular in the ‘20s, ‘30s, and ‘40s — and really even into the early ‘50s,” Michael says. “But obviously with abstract expressionism and some of the newer movements in art, his work fell out of style.”
“Now we kind of see that there's a real resurgence, especially in the prices for paintings that were created in the teens and ‘20s,” he says.
A Kansas City connection
The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City was the recipient of one of Sandzén's oil paintings in 1938.
Kansas City art patron Ethel Massey Holmes commissioned the artist to paint Longs Peak, in Colorado. The result, titled “The Great Peak,” is still on view in the museum. The undulating scene in muted lavender, blue and green shows the majesty of the mountains of the west.
Sandzén attended the painting’s opening reception himself, along with noted regionalists John Steuart Curry, Grant Wood, and Thomas Hart Benton, whose art also depicts familiar scenes from the rural Midwest.
Visitors in Kansas City and Lindsborg often compare Sandzén’s style to Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh, and Michael says the two studied art in Europe around the same time. But their styles developed independently.
“They both kind of came out of some of the same schools and developed their own techniques,” Michael says. “So there's certainly a little, maybe, overlap there. But story has it Sandzén really never saw Van Gogh painting in person until 1924, which was well after his style was established.”
North says Sandzén used a very limited number of colors and he completely stopped using black entirely in 1907.
“He would generally squish the paint onto his pallet and then just pick it up with the brushes,” North says. “He didn’t mix on the palette.”
“What's really amazing is when you look at the paintings up close, they almost look like cake frosting. But when you back away, your eye optically blends the colors together and they just become very dramatic,” Michael says.
For an artist as talented as Sandzén, opportunities outside of Kansas always beckoned, and friends often encouraged him to leave. But he never did.
“Everybody in New York told him, ‘If you really want to make it, you need to move to New York,’” says Michael. “He said, ‘I'm not going to do that because I have all the things I need out in the prairie to paint. The light is wonderful, you have plenty of space to do things, you have time to make work.’ And I think that's really what he wanted to do.”
This article was reported during a weeklong artist-in-residence program hosted by the Raymer Society, which preserves the Red Barn Studio in Lindsborg as a museum and provides cultural programming.
Soulis Auctions is a financial supporter of KCUR. Our journalism is editorially independent of funders.
