In January of 1922, nearly thirty years after swapping his native Sweden for the rolling plains of central Kansas, the painter Birger Sandzén received his first one-man show in New York City.
To this day, that exhibition at the Babcock Gallery, which revealed Sandzén at the very pinnacle of his creative powers, is considered the most prestigious show in the artists long career.
The audacities of technique and style that hed absorbed from the European modernists and then applied to the New World landscape of his adopted Midwest namely, the radical use of impasto, the vivid brushwork, the rippled surfaces, the liberation from strict realism, and, above everything else, the rich coloration produced a newness of vision that forced the wider art world to take notice of this polite, middle-aged art professor from Lindsborg, Kansas.
