THE AMERICAN-SCANDINAVIAN REVIEW 
237 
<4 T WILL lilt up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my 
I strength”—with these words, Christian Brinton, in his foreword 
to the catalogue of the Sandzen exhibition, strikes the keynote of 
the quality in the work of this Kansas artist which has most strongly 
impressed the New York critics. The American Art News edited by 
Peyton Boswell strikes the same note, saying: “The appeal of these 
elements of breath of space and brilliancy of hue is irresistible, and 
they lift the spectator up and out into a world austerely empty of 
human life, but filled with warm airs and vivid sunshine.” In The New 
York American J Mr. Boswell calls Sandzen “an artist of real magni¬ 
tude” and commends on “the vigor of his technique, the ‘rightness’ 
of his compositions, and the gorgeousness of the color schemes that 
burn as brightly as the face of those many-hued lands.” Hamilton 
Easter Field, writing in The Brooklyn Eagle, also pays tribute to the 
bigness of his work which he says is “as near to being great art as any 
living American often gets.” At the same time he notes a certain un¬ 
evenness. Royal Cortissoz in The New Yoi'k Tribune tempers praise 
with rather severe criticism. “There is no denying the largeness that 
he manages to communicate to his impressions,” says Mr. Cortissoz, 
“but, unfortunately, he deals in a harsh and dry impasto and fairly 
brutalizes the surfaces of his canvases. They are esthetically repellent 
even in the moment when they touch the imagination through their ro¬ 
bust veracity. ... It is the familiar crudity of the Scandinavian school 
that robs his sincere, sweeping paintings of the beauty that so strong a 
temperament ought to secure.” On the other hand, the correspondent of 
The Christian Science Monitor writes that “his pictorial display has 
startled New York like the banners of his ancestral vikings. Here 
without mistake is the wild Nordic impulse, transplanted and re¬ 
charged with the old vigor in the atmosphere of Western America. 
It has brought a breeze from the West that has not been felt here 
before.” 
