Artist Biography & Facts

James Lee Hansen

JAMES LEE HANSEN by Steven L. Grafe

During a career that has spanned more than sixty years, Battle Ground, Washington, artist James Lee Hansen has produced more than seven hundred sculptures ranging in size from small studies to monumental works of public art. Working primarily in bronze, Hansen’s sculptural series relate to his ideas about human origins, existence, identity, and reality.

Hansen was born in Tacoma, Washington, in 1925. In 1936, at the height of the
Great Depression, he moved south to Vancouver with his parents and brother. He spent most of his teenage years raising racing pigeons and hunting, fishing, and horseback riding in the surrounding countryside. World War II broke out while he was attending Vancouver High School, and right after graduation in 1943 he went to the Marine recruiting office in downtown Portland. Finding it closed for lunch, the impatient young man went next door and enlisted in the Navy.

For three years, Hansen was a sailor and served in the South Pacific on the destroyer USS Preston (DD-795). This was a defining time for him. The fact that his life was spared time after time, often in unusual ways, made a lasting impression on him.

Shortly after he returned to the States in March 1946, Hansen met Annabelle Hair, whose family had moved from Missouri to Vancouver during the war so her father could work at the Alcoa aluminum plant.

Conscious that he had “always been an artist,” Hansen enrolled at the Portland Art Museum School (now Pacific Northwest College of Art). Following the advent of the G.I. Bill, the Museum Art School was providing studio art instruction to both its own pupils and to students who were registered at other Portland-area institutions. All of the school’s applicants—including veterans— were required to submit portfolios of their work in order to qualify for enrollment.

After their wedding, Annie continued working, eventually finding employment on the swing shift at the phone company. This was an ideal situation for Hansen as it allowed him to attend school and to build their home, an adjacent studio, and a foundry on a site northeast of downtown Vancouver. He named the studio Burnt Bridge Studio after nearby Burnt Bridge Creek. During the evenings he also cared for a daughter, Valinda (b. 1949), while Annie worked. After a second daughter, Yauna (b. 1956), was born, Annie quit working outside the home and tended the girls while helping in the foundry and elsewhere.

Hansen graduated from the Portland Art Museum School in 1950, and with a foundry at his disposal, he soon became a West Coast pioneer and recognized master of lost-wax bronze casting. On a visit to Portland in 1951, Cubist sculptor Jacques Lipchitz (1891–1973) asked Hansen to become an assistant at his suburban New York City studio. Recalling another young sculptor’s remark that “nothing can grow under the shade of a big tree,” Hansen declined the honor. He was already firmly rooted in the place he called home—the Pacific Northwest—and its sustaining confluence of cultures. That same year, American Cubist painter Max Weber (1881–1961) saw Hansen’s work at the Portland Art Museum’s “Artists of Oregon” exhibition and remarked to Louis Bunce (1907–1983), painter and Art Museum School instructor, “Now there is a young man who knows what sculpture is all about.”

Hansen’s early exhibition successes affirmed the positive assessments of his work. In 1952, a bronze, The Huntress, was acquired as a first purchase award by the San Francisco Art Museum (now San Francisco Museum of Modern Art) during its “71st Annual Painting and Sculpture Exhibition.

Another bronze, The Call, was acquired that same year by the Seattle Art Museum during its “38th Annual Exhibition of Northwest Artists.”

In the late 1950s, Hansen was instrumental in recording many prehistoric petroglyphs in the eastern Columbia River Gorge. As The Dalles Dam and John Day Dam neared completion, rising water levels threatened these ancient images. To save them for posterity, Hansen made wax molds of the rock art in situ and later made cast stone facsimiles for public display. In completing the project, he had the help of his wife, Annie, James Haseltine, and Dr. Carl Heller. Hansen gifted copies of many of the images to the Oregon Museum of Science and History in Portland. He gave additional casts and the accompanying field notes to Maryhill Museum of Art in 2011.

During the same decade, Norbert Sorger (1917–1995), a Vancouver resident whose company created church interiors, asked Hansen Studios to produce sculptural works and art objects—tabernacles, baptismal fonts and candelabras—for liturgical use. Hansen recruited a talented group of friends to work with him on an ever-increasing number of projects.

Although the collaborative was a heady experience—a local newspaper referred to these projects and the artists themselves, as “Hansen’s Art Gang”—it ceased functioning after the comple-tion of the two large endeavors. Hansen did not wish to forego his individual artistic activity to become a project manager.

With his bronze-casting skills and a functioning foundry, Hansen was often called upon to attend to historic works in need of repair. One of his more prominent projects was restoring Alexander Phimister Proctor’s (1860–1950) The Circuit Rider. Dedicated in 1924, the over-life-size statue was a casualty of the 1962 Columbus Day Storm. After it was taken to Vancouver from its location near the Oregon State Capitol in Salem, Hansen restored the rider’s crushed head and split torso. During the 1960s, he also repaired and restored some of downtown Portland’s Benson Bubblers. Commissioned by Portland businessman Simon Benson (1852–1942) in 1912, a half-century of use had left some of the iconic bronze drinking fountains in a sad state of disrepair.

In 1977, the State of Washington began constructing the recently rerouted State Route 500, a highway designed to be a major east-west arterial through east Vancouver. Since the Hansen home and Burnt Bridge Studio stood squarely in its path, the Hansens had to sell their property to the State. At the time, Hansen was working on two major commissions: Crescent Probe, an eighteen- foot-tall stainless steel fountain for Salem’s Civic Plaza, and Stempost, an eighteen by twenty-foot stainless steel sculpture for the Stadium Plaza at Washington State University in Pullman.

It was imperative that Hansen find another place to live and work, and fortunately, Annabelle saw an ad in the local newspaper for a property near Battle Ground. The land already had a house on it, but Hansen needed to build another studio in order to complete the two commissions. He purchased the property immediately and then bought back his former house and studio from the state so he could use the salvaged materials to build a new studio. He christened the completed facility “Daybreak Studio.”

In his 1966 book, Art Treasures in the West, William Wyatt Davenport described James Lee Hansen as “one of the most talented of Pacific Northwest sculptors” and suggested that “his abstract work in metal reflects the influence of Chinese bronzes and totemic Indian sculpture.” While this formal assessment of Hansen’s work is true, the philosophical underpinning of the work is much deeper and more complex than Davenport suggests. The artist’s sculpture explores ideas related to humanity’s response to the environment and to the archetypes and mythological symbology inspired by this interaction.

Of his work, Hansen himself wrote: After my return from WWII, I started to read a great deal of philosophy and art history, many texts and authors. The war and this exploration into philosophy brought into question the numerous dichotomies of human nature and humankind’s fascination with war and its consequences on the history of civilizations.

In general, my sculpture work is about the phenomena of cultures and the forces that impel them. Some of my sculptures reflect in part the primitive force of will, germinal religion, and conflicting and questioning consciousness that creates civilization. In this respect all my sculpture series have a common thread . . . I am inclined to view humanity as an epoch in a cosmic petri dish. With the end and the beginning the principle components in a ritual of celebration and its continuing cycle of regeneration; life is the resulting treasure—a wonder beyond comprehension.


Source:
Website of Mary Hill Museum of Art, 2019