VERSO
Label, Trotter Galleries, Carmel, California

Hansen biographer Dr. Scott A. Shields explored the artist’s maritime subjects and their central role in his art: “Although Hansen rendered lush still lifes, spirited rodeo scenes, and painterly landscapes, his signature subjects were of fisherfolk and the sea. Within these, he sought to capture the raw power and vitality of the Pacific and those who sailed and earned their living from it, rather than the beauty of the ocean’s light and colour for its own sake. Often described as Impressionist, Hansen’s art departed from the calm beauty that typified the style, even though it consisted of bold colours and, at times, broken brushstrokes. For the most part, Hansen rejected Impressionism’s gentility, focusing instead on humanity’s symbiotic relationship with nature. He did so with broad masses of colour, dynamic compositions, and the elimination of superfluous detail.

“Hansen began his art studies under his father, Herman Wendelborg Hansen, a renowned painter of the Old West. The elder Hansen was born in Germany to a father who was a draftsman. At age twenty-three – and inspired by stories of the American frontier – Herman Hansen immigrated to the United States and eventually made such subjects his own. He instilled in his son an appreciation for adventure and for narrative painting.

“In the fall of 1906, Hansen went to Europe, studying in Germany under the maritime painter Carlos Grethe at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stuttgart. He would then spend four years in Belgium, painting marines, village views, and fishing scenes around Nieuwpoort – all the while working as deckhand on North Sea trawlers, gaining firsthand knowledge of life on the seas. In late 1912, he returned to San Francisco with 100 new canvases.

“The following spring, Hansen made his first documented appearance in Monterey, and it was not long before he started painting the Peninsula’s growing fishing community and fleet. But Hansen did not immediately find the sort of aesthetic possibilities that he had hoped for. Accustomed to Belgium’s enormous fishing fleets with hundreds of boats and picturesque, colourfully dressed fishermen, he was disappointed in the town’s ‘jerk-water wharf,’ which had only one building at the end of it and just a few fishing vessels.… It was not until a friend took him to Point Lobos that he realized the region had aesthetic potential.

“Hansen’s depictions of Monterey’s fishing industry often reference humanity’s smallness in the face of nature, but they also suggest the ability of humankind to confront and rival the harshest forces of wind and waves. In some scenes, Hansen’s subjects became nature’s heroic equal, as reviewer Eleanor Minturn James acknowledged in the Carmel Pine Cone on August 14, 1931, when she wrote that Hansen’s fishermen ‘both serve the sea and make it serve them.’ For Hansen, portraying man’s contests with the environment came naturally. He had grown up admiring such scenes in his father’s Western paintings and had experienced such challenges firsthand during his tenure on European fishing boats.

“In a San Francisco Examiner obituary published April 25, 1957, two days after Hansen’s death, the artist was quoted as saying, ‘Every move I have made and everything I have done, has always been to go back to the sea and to the men who give it its romance. I love them all.’”

PROVENANCE
Trotter Galleries, Carmel, California, 2011
Private collection, Wyoming