Seifert painted Wisconsin landscapes with distinctive bird’s-eye views.
A delightful Wisconsin artist has been rediscovered by Joe Kapler, lead curator at the Wisconsin Historical Society. His new book, Wisconsin in Watercolor: The Life and Legend of Folk Artist Paul Seifert (Wisconsin Historical Society Press), showcases the work of a German immigrant who settled in southwest Wisconsin in 1867.
“He’s labeled a ‘folk’ artist because of the lack of formal training, but the connotation of that word sells short his visionary capacity,” says Kapler. “His work is important because his farm paintings represent an artist’s vision of the land around him during a time of major settlement.”
Seifert is something of a mystery. The artist apparently told tales about his Saxony origins,“but, with 21st century access to information, they tend not to hold up,” admits Kapler.
“Paul Seifert is elusive, and I think he wanted it that way,” he says. “His descendants have letters that his mother wrote to him, and they don’t add much into his back story. My feeling is that, as an only child, he was escaping compulsory military service, given the frequent warring in that part of Europe prior to the unification of Germany.”
Kapler curated the Historical Society’s 2014 exhibition on Seifert’s art, Wisconsin in Watercolor: The Farmscapes of Paul Seifert.
“I discovered his work and story because of the generosity of a former Wisconsinite and her family,” he says, explaining that a former Sauk County resident, Peggy Luetscher Romenesko, called one day in 2004 and asked if the Historical Society had interest in her family’s farm painting, which is now the book’s cover image. ”Months of conversation led to a donation of the painting, and that started the ball rolling,” says Kapler.
Outsider art? Folk art? Regionalist? Kapler is more interested in Seifert’s interpretation than categorizing his work. “His distinctive bird’s-eye views do not exist in nature,” says Kapler. “There are no hills opposite each farm, from which he merely sketched what he saw with his eyes. He made images that only existed in his mind.”
With watercolor thick to the point of gouache, Seifert presents nearly-antiseptic houses
Paul Seifert
and barns anchoring seasonal scenes with gamboling life. Over it all hang fleecy, red-rimmed clouds.
“The clouds I feel would have been done last to give some life to the top third of the paper,” says Kapler. “They have a certain charm to them — almost like they’re ‘jitterbugging’ across the scene. No book or website can capture the beautiful iridescence of where he used metallic paints for clouds and sun. Some of those scenes shimmer.”
The paintings capture agriculture and the natural landscape together. “In his idealized scenes, both thrive simultaneously,” says Kapler. “When you travel the Driftless Area today, especially ‘Seifert country’ of Richland, Sauk and Iowa counties, you can see that coexistence present on the land to a healthy degree.”
There will be a book talk and signing for Wisconsin in Watercolor on Feb. 5 at the Wisconsin Historical Museum, 30 N. Carroll St., at 12:15 p.m.
