Adolf Dehn

Adolf Dehn was born in Waterville, MN on November 22, 1895. Attended the Minneapolis School of Art in 1914. He was then drafted into the Army to fight in WWI on July 29, 1918. He declared himself a conscientious objector and did not fight. Dehn spent 8 years in Europe acquiring the feel for great civilizations and earning a livelihood by selling his drawings to magazines. In1927 he found his own expressive idiom in lithography. He found his first wife, Mura Ziperovitch, in Paris. She was an exotic dancer and he brought her back to America in 1929. They divorced in 1932 but remained close for years afterwards. In 1943, Dehn met his second wife, Virginia Engleman, a sale girl at the Associated American Artists Gallery. The two were inseparable, two artists working side by side. In 1961 Dehn was elected into the National Academy of Design. He then died on May 19, 1968.