Herman Menzel
American painter (1904–1988)
Herman Erwin Menzel (1904–1988) was a Modernist American painter.
He was the son of a German Lutheran Pastor and grew up in Chicago, where he attended the Chicago Academy of Design and the National Academy of Art. He married Willa Hamm, a commercial artist, in 1933, with whom he shared a Chicago studio and had a son, Sewall.
Menzel exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago between 1927 and 1939 but became progressively deaf and gradually withdrew from the Chicago art scene, moving in 1933 to live with his wife at her family home in Winnetka. There he painted alone while his wife commuted to work in Chicago. In the late 1930s he bought an island in Rainy Lake on the Minnesota-Ontario border, where he built a cabin, fished and painted. His work from this period became more representational, emphasising the insignificance of human figures in a wild landscape.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 16, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q21809605. VIAF identifies the subject as 32805730. The Library of Congress control number is nr94034792. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1904, 1988, 1933 and 1927.
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This entry incorporates text from “Herman Menzel” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.