Amund Dietzel

Amund Dietzel (28 February 1891 – 9 February 1974) was an early American tattoo artist who tattooed tens of thousands of people in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, between 1913 and 1967. He developed a substantial amount of flash art, influenced many other tattoo artists, and helped to define the American traditional tattoo style. He was known as the "Master of Milwaukee" and "Master in Milwaukee".

He learned to tattoo as a young Norwegian sailor, but after a shipwreck in Canada, he decided to immigrate to the United States. He became a traveling performer as a tattooed man, then settled in Milwaukee as a professional tattoo artist.

Early life Dietzel was born on 28 February 1891, in Kristiania, Norway. After his father died, Dietzel joined the Norwegian merchant fleet at the age of 14. Scandinavia had a maritime tattooing tradition, and Dietzel soon received his first tattoo. Dietzel may have been mentored by a Norwegian ship's carpenter and tattoo artist named Johan Fredrik Knudsen. While working on a ship that transported timber between Canada and England, he began to tattoo his shipmates using a needle tool that he made. In New Haven, he took some art classes at Yale University while working as a tattoo artist at night. He wanted to be a fine-art painter, but he could not afford to continue studying art at Yale, so he became a full-time tattoo artist instead.

Milwaukee

In 1913, Dietzel arrived in Milwaukee and found that nobody was tattooing there. He decided to stay and set up shop in an arcade. Many of his customers were soldiers and sailors who served in World War I and World War II. He said that the Navy was discouraging tattoos of naked women, so he was often asked to add clothes to existing tattoos.

He became known as the region's leading tattoo artist. He developed a large quantity of flash art — at one point, he said that he had developed more than 5,000 designs He was called the "Master in Milwaukee", "Master of Milwaukee", and "Rembrandt of the rind".

Dietzel also painted landscapes and birds, and he took classes at Layton School of Art in Milwaukee. In February 1967, Thomas said that he and Dietzel had "covered more people for exhibition than any two people in the United States", but that few people wanted to become tattooed sideshow performers anymore; most of their recent customers were sailors or businessmen. Dietzel and Thomas continued to tattoo together until the Milwaukee city council banned tattooing on 1 July 1967.

Dietzel died of leukemia on 9 February 1974.

Legacy Samuel Steward, who had learned from Dietzel and kept some of Dietzel's flash in his shop, trained Don Ed Hardy. Reiter started collecting flash art by Dietzel and got in contact with Dietzel's grandsons, who shared boxes of memorabilia and photos with him. He wrote two books about Dietzel and worked with the Milwaukee Art Museum to hold an exhibit of Dietzel's art in 2013.