Christian Petersen

Christian Petersen (25 February 1885 – 4 April 1961) was a Danish-born American sculptor and university teacher. He was the first permanent artist in residence at a U.S. college or university, and he is noted for the large body of sculpture associated with a single place, Iowa State College, now Iowa State University.

Petersen's sculpture is predominantly Neoclassical and beaux arts in style, and he virulently denounced modernism. He especially admired Augustus Saint-Gaudens' reliefs and war memorials. But he also included some gestures toward modernism in his relief sculptures, perhaps under the influence of Grant Wood. Other of his works are collected in the Christian Petersen Museum, in the restored Morrill Building on the campus.

Personal life Christian Petersen was born on 25 February 1885 in Dybbol, Denmark. He emigrated to the United States in 1894 with his parents, Peter and Helene Lorensen Petersen. The initially settled near Paxton, Illinois, before moving to Newark, New Jersey.

He was married to Emma L. Hoenicke from 1908 to 1928, with whom he had three children, Helene Petersen Male (1909–2000), Lawrence (1912–1981), and Ruth Eleanor Sollenberger (1915–1987). He married Charlotte Garvey (died 1985), a secretary for Dodge and Ascher, in 1931. Their daughter, Mary Charlotte, was born 24 November 1936. and continued to sculpt, gaining commissions for works in the East and Midwest through Kitson's connections.

In 1917, his sculpture, Josiah Everett Draper, accepted at annual exhibition of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. The first known critical notice on his sculpture appeared in an article in the Boston Transcript in 1918. The following year, he was commissioned to create his first known public sculpture, the Nurses Memorial, for the city of Attleboro. By 1920, Petersen maintained a studio in Boston and had become associated with other sculptors in the city, namely Henry Hudson Kitson and Theo Alice Ruggles Kitson. The fountain on the east side of the Dairy Industry Building's courtyard at Iowa State. One of nine terracotta sculpture panels in Petersen's History of Dairying, 1935. Sculpture in the main stair hall of the Dairy Industry Building, part of Petersen's History of Dairying, 1935. At the start of the Great Depression he moved to the Midwest, and eventually took a job working for Grant Wood in the Public Works of Art Project headquartered in Iowa City, Iowa. Through a WPA commission to create relief sculptures for the Dairy Industry Building at Iowa State College in Ames, Iowa, he became acquainted with the college president, who appointed him Sculptor in Residence in 1935. This was the first known instance of an artist in residence at a US university. He installed a seven-panel relief mural, The History of Dairying, in April 1935; it was the first of many public sculptures at the college. In addition to his sculptural work, Petersent illustrated Cha-Ki-Shi (1936), a children's book on the Meskwaki people of Tama County. In 1936 he completed the Three Athletes for the State Gym and Reclining Nudes for Roberts Hall. He created the Veterinary Medicine Mural and The Gentle Doctor in 1938. That same year, he was offered a permanent studio space by Dean Charles Murray—a studio which he occupied for the rest of his career. He was eventually appointed associate professor at the college.

Quotations "An artist is one of you. Very much one of you. He must be in your hearts, and you in his." "A number of years ago, I had the feeling that the center of culture would eventually find itself in the Middlewest. I felt the east has so much conscious culture that it was subject to spells of indigestion-and it was taking to 'isms' as some folks take to patent medicines." "Here in the midwest, I felt folks would be more natural, and I have found it to be so in the main...So judge for yourself. Create an American art, here in the rich soil of the middlewest, where America has its roots. Here shall be the soil and the seed and the strength of art."