B. J. O. Nordfeldt (1878-1955)
Cambridge to Boston
1936
Oil on canvas, 31 1/2 x 52 inches. Signed and dated, lower right: "Nordfeldt / 36"
Exhibitions:
The Art Institute of Chicago, American Paintings and Sculpture Forty-Seventh Annual Exhibition, October 22-December 6, 1936, no. 139; San Francisco Museum of Art (now San Francisco Museum of Modern Art), January, 1937 (a selection of works from the aforementioned exhibition).
References:
Wilson, Bess M., “Artists Have a Grand Time, Bess Wilson Says Wistfully, And Then Gives Reasons Why,” The Minneapolis Journal, January 31, 1937, p. 29; Coke, Van Deren, Nordfeldt the Painter (University of New Mexico Press, 1972); Weisberg, Gabriel P., B.J.O. Nordfeldt: American Internationalist (exhibition catalogue, Weisman Art Museum, 2020).
Provenance:
Acquired in 1979 for the collection of the Los Angeles Athletic Club; consigned by the foregoing to Bonham's Sale of American Art, New York, NY, November 18, 2025, from which acquired (lot 70).
Notes:
Unlined. A thin piece of masonite sits between the interior of the stretchers and the reverse of the canvas, obscuring the latter. Partially stamped and partially inscribed on masonite backing: "COLL. B.J.O. NORDFELDT / TITLE: From Cambridge to Boston / DATE: 1936 / NO. 168 / 32 x 52" Typewritten label on exterior cardboard backing reads: "79-9 / B.J.O. Nordfeldt: CAMBRIDGE TO BOSTON / THE LOS ANGELES ATHLETIC CLUB COLLECTION". Heavy, 3-inch wood frame (possibly mahogany) under plexiglass.
Emigrating as a teen from the modest hamlet of Tullstorp at the southern tip of Sweden to the burgeoning community of Swedish immigrants in Chicago in 1891, Bror Julius Olsson Nordfeldt (1878-1955) proceeded to craft a solid reputation in the United States as a painter, printmaker and teacher over the succeeding six decades. Nordfeldt’s formal art education began at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1899. Over the next several years, he assisted Albert Herter in New York and Paris on a mural project for the Exposition Universelle of 1900 and studied woodblock printmaking with Frank Morley Fletcher at University College in Reading, England.
After returning to Chicago in 1903, Nordfeldt pursued parallel careers in painting, printmaking and teaching, embarking upon a peripatetic existence that would intersperse national and international travel with residencies in Chicago, New York, Massachusetts, Utah, Minneapolis, Wichita, New Mexico (where he spent two decades immersed in the thriving art community of Santa Fe) and finally Lambertville, New Jersey. Nordfeldt exhibited extensively, both domestically and internationally, and is credited with the development of the “white-line” woodcut, an innovative hybrid printmaking and painting technique facilitating the application of multiple colors from a single woodblock.
Nordfeldt’s work evolved from a wide variety of influences, from Post-Impressionism and Japanese aesthetics to near-abstraction, although he never totally abandoned representation. A Modernist at heart, his later work evinces a strong expressionist flavor, with flattened forms and spatial distortion employed in service of a wide range of subject matter including landscapes, marines, still lifes and portraiture.
Nordfeldt spent the summer of 1936 in Newburyport, Massachusetts, converting the floor above an empty storefront into a studio.* Titles of the works he produced (e.g., Pine Forest, Maine and Faneuil Hall, Boston Market) evidence occasional excursions beyond the confines of that coastal town. A number of these works were exhibited at Lilienfeld Galleries in New York in March of 1937 to positive reviews. “Vigorous brushwork and a forthright emotional appeal characterize the paintings of B. J. O. Nordfeldt in his one-man show,” wrote a reviewer for The New York Times. “Mr. Nordfeldt has devoted himself to the American scene with whole-hearted enthusiasm,” he continued, noting “a certain roughness of textures which lends force to his comment.”**
Whether he completed Cambridge to Boston during his Newburyport visit or, as was often his wont, following his return to Santa Fe, is not known. Either way, the subject matter of this ambitious painting places it squarely within the American Scene movement. Relating stylistically to several of Nordfeldt’s portraits from the mid-1930s, it constitutes a bit of an outlier in the artist’s oeuvre. In very few of his paintings (other than commissioned family portraits) are multiple figures given so prominent a role. Its large format suggests that it was intended as an exhibition picture, an assumption borne out by its inclusion in the prestigious annual exhibition of paintings and sculpture at The Art Institute of Chicago in the fall of 1936. And while the four figures are highly individualized, the painting is clearly not portraiture. Nordfeldt shows himself to be a keen observer of human interaction—or the absence thereof—capturing an ordinary moment in which four apparently unrelated travelers deliberately disengage themselves from one another, lost in their respective thoughts and diversions as they endure an unremarkable commute on a trolley bound from Cambridge to Boston on a chilly winter evening. “Nordfeldt’s Cambridge to Boston,” one reviewer commented, is “one of the nicest of his I’ve seen.”***
The subject of a major recent retrospective emphasizing the international nature of his roots and influences,**** B. J. O. Nordfeldt deserves even greater attention for the high quality and variety of his work beyond the Santa Fe subjects for which he is best known.
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*Coke, Van Deren, Nordfeldt the Painter (University of New Mexico Press, 1972), pp. 88, 136.
**Devree, Howard, “A Reviewers Notebook: New Shows,” The New York Times, March 14, 1937, p. 216.
***Wilson, Bess M., “Artists Have a Grand Time, Bess Wilson Says Wistfully, And Then Gives Reasons Why,” The Minneapolis Journal, January 31, 1937, p. 29.
****"B. J. O. Nordfeldt: American Internationalist," Weisman Art Museum, University of Minnesota, June 18 - September 5, 2021 and Wichita Art Museum, September 25, 2021 – January 16, 2022.
Recollections
There are times in the development of one’s collection that karma seems to exert an outsized influence. On October 13, 2024, my wife and I attended a ‘celebration of life’ for her brother (and my college fraternity brother) who, sadly, had passed away a few weeks earlier. The event was held at the toney Los Angeles Athletic Club, where he had been a longtime member. Established in 1880, the venerable institution was teeming with fine examples of historic and largely American works of art, one of which quickly caught my eye: a charming, large painting of four commuters on what appeared to be a trolley. Colorful and painterly, it was signed indistinctly but dated ’36; there was no plaque to identify the title or artist. I immediately took photos, hoping to decipher the signature sometime later, if only to satisfy my curiosity.
Fast forward about a year, when I was stunned to see the very same picture resurface in an online catalogue for an upcoming November 18, 2025 American Art auction at Bonham’s in New York City. The Los Angeles Athletic Club had apparently elected to deaccession a considerable portion of its American art collection through auction sales in California and New York. And while the listing resolved the mystery of the artist’s identity, the title was an unexpected bonus: Cambridge to Boston was a trip with which I was intimately familiar, having taken it frequently some fifty years earlier while a law student living in Cambridge.
My continued infatuation with the painting encountered two formidable obstacles. First, the work was immense, 31 ½ by 52 inches. With a number of large paintings already populating our collection, we were hardly in need of another. Second, the auction estimate was astronomical. While Nordfeldt's paintings of Santa Fe subjects often yield significant prices, I felt this work was enough of an outlier to temper such lofty expectations.
After several weeks of rumination, I finally decided to place a “low-ball” bid, slightly less than half the low estimate. It was a decided longshot, particularly because the “reserve” (the predetermined but undisclosed amount below which the work would not be sold) is rarely less than half the low estimate.
The day of the auction arrived and, as I suspected, the painting failed to sell, my low-ball bid notwithstanding. Prepared for the possibility, I contacted the auction specialist immediately thereafter and renewed my low-ball offer in the hope that the institutional seller would rather close the deal modestly than not at all. Within a matter of hours, my bid was accepted. It seemed somehow preordained. A month later, B.J.O. Nordfeldt’s monumental Cambridge to Boston—all 100+ pounds of it—assumed its rightful place of honor on the only wall in the house that would accommodate it.