B. J. O. Nordfeldt

1878-1955

The Bridge

color woodblock print; self-carved, self-printed, signed numbered and dated in pencil at lower right (in his typical scrawl), Bror J. Olsson Nordfelft, no. 79, 1906

8 1/8 by 10 1/2 in., 20.7 by 26.7 cm

Born in Sweden, at the age of thirteen Nordfeldt moved to Chicago where he found work as a young man as a printer's devil and compositor for a local Swedish-language paper. In 1899 he enrolled at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he was selected by his instructor Albert Herter (1871-1950) to assist with a project for the Paris Exposition Universelle which allowed Nordfeldt to travel to Paris in 1900 for the installation. While in Paris he attended the Academie Julian briefly before finding his own studio. From Paris he went to England for a year, followed by a year in Sweden living in a seaside cottage. During his time in England, he learned woodblock carving and printing from Frank Morley Fletcher (1866-1949) who worked in collaboration with John Dickson Batten (1860-1932), a printer who is credited with introducing Japanese style color woodblock printing in England.

Nordfeldt returned to Chicago in 1903 where he found a studio in a vacant storefront in a neighborhood near the site of the 1893 World's Fair which had evolved into a small artist's community known as the Jackson Park art colony. His earliest woodblock prints are dated 1903 and display influence from Henri Riviere (1864-1951) and August-Louis Lepere (1849-1918) as much as from their original source of inspiration by Japanese print artists such as Utagawa Hiroshige (1797-1858) and Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849). At the time, Nordfledt was well aware that he was one of the first Americans artists to produce color woodblock prints utilizing Japanese techniques. In an undated draft of a letter found in the artist's papers Nordfeldt asserts as much himself, adding, "Indeed, the only person that was then using that method in this country was Arthur Dow." (Donovan, p. 28). Over a four-year period, Nordfeldt produced approximately fifteen color woodblock prints, the majority of which are dated 1906, the same year as Frank Lloyd Wright's landmark exhibition of Hiroshige prints at the Art Institute of Chicago. This 1906 print was surely inspired by works Nordfeldt would have seen at the Institute during that time. In January of 1908 ten of his woodblock prints were on view at the AIC Print Room in an exhibition of his printed works which was accompanied by a catalogue listing the print titles and a detailed description on the printing process (Donovan, p. 56, note #8).

While his foray into color woodblock printing was relatively brief, as he is more well-known for his etchings and expressionist oil paintings, Nordfeldt did revisit block printing over a series of summers spent on Cape Cod in Massachusetts between 1914 and 1917, where he was part of the famed circle of Provincetown printmakers. Remarkably, it was Nordfeldt's apparent fatigue with the intense labor required by Japanese woodblock printmaking that prompted his innovation of a simplified 'white-line' color woodblock print technique embraced by his fellow Provincetown printmakers.

References:
Etchings and Dry Points and Color Prints from Wood Blocks by B. J. Olsson-Nordfeldt, Art Institute of Chicago, January 1908 (exhibition catalog)
Julia Meech & Gabriel P. Weisberg, Japonisme Comes to America, 1990, pp. 200-212, no. 171
Fiona Donovan, The Woodblock Prints of B.J.O. Nordfeldt: A Catalogue Raisonne, 1991, cat. 9, fig. 27
Gabriel P. Weisberg, B. J. O. Nordfeldt: American Internationalist, 2021, p 71, no. 4
Minneapolis Institute of Art, accession no. 2017.74

(inv. no. 10-4953)

price: $2,200