Armin Hansen

(1886-1957)

Storm at Sea 25 x 30in framed 29 1/2 x 34 1/2in

Footnotes

Provenance
Private estate, Carmel, California.

Armin Hansen first became acquainted with seafaring culture in his early twenties working on a trawler off the Belgian Coast. Becoming a part of the fishing community in Nieuwpoort not only fulfilled a childhood dream for Hansen but was the catalyst for his maritime body of work—'I began life with two main intentions. One was to paint, the other, to battle the waves. Getting acquainted with salts, young and old, up there on the sea coast I asked a lot of leading questions and soon figured out a way to combine my two desires.' ¹

Upon returning to his hometown of San Francisco in 1912, Hansen began exhibiting his paintings of Belgian fisherfolk, which were well-received by the art press and public. Yearning for the maritime culture that he experienced abroad, in 1913, Hansen traveled to Monterey aboard the lumber schooner Eureka.² Over the next few years, Hansen explored the growing aesthetic possibilities of Monterey. It was not until the fall of 1916, after spending considerable time there, that he began to focus on the fishing culture of the Monterey Peninsula as his chosen subject. By the following summer, his Monterey fishing subjects were quite popular critically and commercially. By 1918, he established a year-round residence in Monterey, and by 1922, he fully settled there. ³

Hansen's mythic persona preceded him, with much attention paid to his robust stature, Danish Viking heritage, and pedigree as the son of the pioneering Western artist Herman Wendelborg Hansen. Once he started producing a body of work focused on the Monterey fishing industry, his critics enthusiastically embraced him for having the perfect attributes for the ruggedness of his chosen subject—'Hansen is a bold painter who, having lived so long with the fishermen, seems to have the sun, fog, salt and spray of their daily life in his very blood.' ⁴

Hansen's scenes of Monterey's fishermen brought visibility to their livelihood while elevating them as worthy of artistic expression. Unlike his predecessors who romanticized the early California fishing trade, he chose to depict it as it was, reflecting the diversity of its workers, the bustle of a growing commercial fishing port, and modern advancements to the trade. Like George Luks of his time, he was praised by critics for putting his finger on the pulse of modern everyday life—'What is apt to be the true art of any epoch or era? It is quite sure to be the best expression of the life of that epoch or era. That is exactly what [Armin] Hansen seems to be doing. He finds an inspiration in strong men of action rather than in cherubs or angels; he finds drama in the 'Lumber Carriers' and the 'Coal Dock,' and he reveals poetry in the movement of ships going 'Seaward.' ⁵

Like Winslow Homer before him, Hansen lived the seafaring life of his subjects to reveal their deeper humanity. Hansen's 'depictions often reference humanity's smallness in the face of nature but also suggest the ability of humankind to confront and rival the harshest forces of wind and waves.' ⁶ In the present work, the existential question of man's relationship to his environment—a question also grappled with by modernists such as Piet Mondrian—is the underlying drama, masterfully created through dynamic ordering of the compositional space, color and textural contrast, and perspective.

Within this composition, there are two main characters—the man and the sea. The sea is dramatically spot lit, capturing its turbulent, cresting waves and rendered in bravura brushwork. Through the use of shared tonal values, the fisherman is depicted as an extension of his fishing vessel, both in contrast to the sea. His face is intentionally obscured in a side-back profile so that his figure stands in as a universal type. The bell and rope, emphasized with bright highlights, serve as reminders of the senses. The bell not only represents man's attempts to order time and control his environment, but it makes the viewer aware of the phenomenology of the moment—the fisherman experiencing the spray, staring down the high pitch of the bow, and hearing the roar the waves as they approach. At the same time, Hansen's genius use of rigging as a compositional 'barrier' ensures that while we can try our best to imagine what the fisherman is experiencing, our subjectivity has limits. Hansen's deliberate placement of perpendicular rigging behind the fisherman's body can be interpreted very broadly as a struggle of opposing forces—the mind over body, man over his environment, and the figure over the landscape. Despite the great familiarity that Hansen had with maritime culture, the dynamic rigging places the artist in the same vantage point as the viewer. The man and the sea are both depicted as formidable—his fishermen 'both serve the sea and make it serve them.' <sup>7

1</sup> I. Newberry, "A Bit of Biography—Armin Hansen, A.N.A.," Carmel Pine Cone, June 24, 1938.
² S. A. Shields, Armin Hansen: The Artful Voyage, Portland, Pomegranate Communications, Inc., 2015, p. 75.
³ Ibid, p. 17.
⁴ Ibid, p. 31.
⁵ Ibid, p. 98.
⁶ Ibid, p. 24.
⁷ Ibid.