Above: Full view of oil on stretched canvas painting

Above: The artist’s signature and date

An unusual mid-century modern impressionist oil on canvas dated 1954 by well listed Minnesota painter and WPA muralist Dewey Albinson. A colorful view of a colorful space in the town Cocula, Jalisco, Mexico (where the artist lived for a time) titled “The Yellow House.” Painted in a dramatic and well realized impasto technique with wildly executed colors and a strong sense of composition and harmony. In original painted wide profile WPA aesthetic rough wood frame with exhibition tag on verso pine stretchers.

Above: Framed view in WPA period painted wood frame

Above: Detail

Above: Detail of impasto technique

Dewey Albinson brought an expressionist approach of bold brushstrokes and strong colors to upper Midwestern subjects like farmsteads, towns and cities, Native American life, and the North Shore region of Lake Superior. He studied at the Minneapolis School of Art (today the Minneapolis College of Art and Design), the Art Students League in New York City, and in France and Italy.

Above: The artist’s title on verso pine stretcher

Above: Verso view

Above: Partial verso exhibit label

Following several years painting in France and Italy, Albinson directed the St. Paul School of Art back in Minnesota. During the Depression he painted Minneapolis and University of Minnesota scenes for the Public Works of Art Project; painted for, and directed the Education Division of, the WPA Federal Art Project in Minnesota; and painted murals for the post offices of Cloquet, Minnesota and Marquette, Michigan.

Albinson spent his final years in Mexico, where he painted a series of canvases based on Miguel Cervantes’s story of Don Quixote. Albinson’s typescript memoirs are in the Minnesota Historical Society library.