The Artwork of Bernard Steffen
Born in Neodesha, Kansas, in 1907, Bernard Steffen was a lithographer and painter noted for his considerable output of work as a participant in the Works Progress Administration’s program for the arts. Besides his lithographic work, he produced many murals, depicting local histories, in United States Post Offices from 1934 to 1941.
Bernard Steffen graduated from Neodesha High School circa 1925; he then attended the Kansas City Art Institute on a scholarship. In 1928 Steffen received a scholarship to the Colorado Springs Art Institute, where he and Thomas Hart Benton roomed together. An early member of the Regionalist art movement. Benton became a lifelong friend and mentor to Steffen, whose style and preference for rural subject matter was influenced by Benton.
Steffen became a member of the American Artist’s Congress, a group established in New York City in 1935 to endorse government support for art unions and to promote a social-realist style in American painting. He worked as a staff artist for the Resettlement Administration, and painted murals for the Works Progress Administration (WPA), including one in 1938 for the US Post Office in Neodesha, Kansas. Steffen was a teacher and treasurer for the National Serigraph Society, and worked comfortably in the varied mediums of oil, tempera, lithography and screen printing.
The strong influence of Thomas Hart Benton’s style is seen in Bernard Steffen’s work. There is a strong contrast in the dark and light tones of his works, and his figures are broad and simplified, intended as representations of types rather than individuals.. Steffen was sympathetically drawn to the rural workers who appear in his prints and paintings of the 1930s; and he frequently emphasized agricultural themes. His subject matter, however, does not derive entirely from Benton’s influence, but also from his own experiences while growing up in Kansas.
Steffen also studied with Stanton McDonald Wright, the American modernist painter, who, along with Morgan Russell and Patrick Henry Bruck, were the only American artists to define a common aesthetic philosophy and issue a manifesto. The influence of Wright’s style can be seen in the emphasis Steffen applied towards underlying compositional structure. Like other artists of the 1930s, Steffen produced works which provided a connection between the artist and his worker subjects.
After his work with the WPA, Bernard Steffen relocated his residence to Woodstock, New York, where he set up a studio. In 1977 he was diagnosed with ALS; however, he continued to produce art by holding a brush in his stiff hand and stippling the canvas. He married painter Eleanor Lipkins in June of 1978. Two years later, Bernard Steffen passed away, with his wife by his side, on July 10, 1980 at the age of seventy-two. He is buried at the Artists Cemetery in Woodstock, Ulster County, New York.
His lithography and silk screen prints are in the collections of The Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas, University of Michigan Art Museum, Dallas Museum of Art, and the Block Museum at Northwestern University. Many of his prints are part of the Library of Congress collection.
Note: A devastating fire in 1977 destroyed Bernard Steffen’s Woodstock, New York, home and studio, along with all of his artwork. What survives today are works previously sold or in galleries and museums at that time.
Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, Bernard Steffen at Gallery Showing, Date Unknown
Middle Insert Image: Bernard Steffen, “Pulling Corn (Fodder Chopper)”, Date Unknown, Serigraph in Color,, 27.9 x 35.2 cm, Private Collection
Bottom Insert Image: Bernard Steffen, “S Curve”, 1940, Lithograph on Paper, 24.1 x 21 cm, Private Collection