Patrick DesJarlait (1921–1972)

Red Lake Fishermen, 1946

Watercolor on paper

14 x 18 inches

Acquisition Purchase Fund, 95.01

Essay by Peter Spooner
Tweed Museum of Art, University of Minnesota Duluth

            His life was played out over a short fifty-one years, but Patrick Robert DesJarlait’s career traveled on a long aesthetic continuum.  At one end was illustration and commercial advertising work, including animated films for the Navy and iconic advertising images like the Hamm’s beer bear and the Land-O-Lakes Indian maiden.  At the other were meticulously crafted, modernist-influenced watercolors featuring scenes of Ojibwe life.  In between were portraits and realistic narrative paintings that belie a more traditional art training.  Collected by the late Richard Nelson, Red Lake Pow-wow (see illustration) is one of the few surviving examples of this very early style.  In retrospect, we can read in its dance circle a motif that came to define all of the artist’s work.

            DesJarlait’s legacy is located in a small but powerful body of tightly designed images created between 1942 and 1971, focusing on the people, work, seasonal activities, and traditions of his home, Red Lake, Minnesota.  If anyone, Native or non-Native, can rightfully be called a “Minnesota modernist,” it is Patrick DesJarlait.  His later work is enhanced by an appreciation and understanding of the simplification and massing of form—results of his attention to cubism, and to the abstracted style and culture-specific themes of Mexican artists like Diego Rivera and Clemente Orozco.

            By the time DesJarlait had his first solo exhibitions in 1945 and 1946, he had developed a signature style that set his work apart from the illustrative southwest “studio style” of Native artists like Quincy Tahoma and Oscar Howe.  The difference in DesJarlait’s approach is clear in Red Lake Fishermen.  It depicts two Ojibwe men in a boat, completely surrounded by the waters of Red Lake.  Stylized waves, the boat’s prow, and the fishermen’s arms form echoing, arched curves.  Over a basic sketch, he built the painting’s forms from short, parallel strokes of opaque watercolor.  This quasi-pointillist method was not a modernist attempt at optical color mixing, but rather a graphic drawing method that allowed DesJarlait to repeat and reinforce both the painting’s larger composition and the smooth contours of individual figures and objects.  In areas of lighter value an underpainting modulates light and shade, while the same tiny strokes float on top.  It is interesting to note that Ojibwe beadwork is distinguished from that of other tribes by a similar characteristic.  In a beaded leaf, for example, an Ojibwe maker spot-stitches lines of beads so that they echo the contour of the leaf shape, from its outside edge to its center.

            Given his commitment to a specific technical method, DesJarlait’s works tend to be quite small.  At a modest eighteen inches wide, Red Lake Fishermen is still one of his larger works.  The painting has been noted as an early pivotal work, one that underscores what the artist’s son Robert said about his father:  “He was, in essence, like a traditional artist-historian, who, through the language of a tribal-centric visual art, depicted, documented, and defined the lifestyles of the Ojibwe people.  Yet it is the Red Lake people, and the Lake itself, that form the main imagery in his work."[1]

            Red Lake Fisherman was most likely exhibited in the artist’s 1946 solo show at the Saint Paul Art Center (now the Minnesota Museum of American Art).  Along with other Red Lake seasonal scenes DesJarlait painted that year, including Making Wild Rice and Maple Sugar Time, Red Lake Fisherman established DesJarlait as an important artist who could address both modernist painting style and traditional Ojibwe lifeways without missing a beat.  Common to his mature works are rounded forms, which are actually accumulations of Desjarlait’s signature curved strokes of color.  Trees and branches, bodies, clothing, water, grasses, dancers, figure groups—all present themselves on the same curves.  DesJarlait’s forms are arranged within oval or circular compositions.  Arcs are simply sections of circles, and on the circle DesJarlait united everything he painted.  Among Minnesota Ojibwe artists, DesJarlait was the first to present an individual contemporary style that was strong and consistent enough to challenge the ubiquitous and repetitious Southwest studio style.  In 1961 he re-dated Red Lake Fisherman and entered it in a competitive exhibition in Scottsdale, Arizona, where it was awarded first place.

            DesJarlait had a lasting impact on Ojibwe culture and the arts that resonates far beyond Minnesota’s Red Lake but always points to it.  In the later stages of his career, he dedicated himself to education, traveling throughout the state and presenting his art and its Ojibwe subject matter directly to students.  His works embody aesthetic qualities of precisely distilled form, coupled with narratives of human activity that, despite their cultural specificity, render them ahistorical and relevant even today.

[1] William R. Hegeman, Robert DesJarlait, and Katherine Van Tassel, Patrick DesJarlait and the Ojibwe Tradition (St. Paul, Minn.: Minnesota Museum of American Art, 1995), 12.