Jemne, Elsa Laubach (1887–1974)

Elsa Laubach Jemne was a Minnesota artist active from the 1910s to the 1960s. Though skilled as an easel painter, she is better known for the murals she created for public buildings, including post offices and courthouses.

Jemne was born Elsa Laubach on July 7, 1887, in St. Paul. While she was able to attend classes at the St. Paul School of Art beginning in 1910, financial circumstances forced her to work as a commercial artist—a job that she resented for its creative monotony. By 1912, she had saved enough money to go to Philadelphia to attend the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, one of most prestigious art schools in the country.

In 1914, Jemne won a fellowship that allowed her to travel and work in Europe. It was Italy that truly impressed and influenced her. In viewing the country’s monasteries and churches, she became interested in the techniques and aesthetics of the fresco.

Jemne stayed in Europe for only part of her planned trip. In July 1914 came the outbreak of World War I. Trying to get home ahead of the war, she was stuck in Switzerland for three weeks and later made it to Paris in time to see enemy aircraft attack the city. Back in Philadelphia a few months later, Jemne began her third year at the Academy. Further travel had to wait until the war ended.

After graduating, Jemne came home to Minnesota. In 1917 came her first major recognition as an artist: a gold medal at the Second Annual Northwestern Exhibition for the painting The Red Haired Girl. An untitled painting done a few years later shows the same characteristics of Girl: a distinctive, flat, dreamlike style and the matte fresco-inspired technique that is a Jemne signature.

In 1925, Jemne was hired by the Great Northern Railway to paint images of Glacier National Park and members of the Blackfeet tribe. These portraits and images of pristine landscapes were intended to be part tourist advertisement, part historical record, and part Wild West fantasy. The paintings illustrate Jemne’s attention to detail and accuracy and were painted from life, as seen in a 1926 photograph. The style of these paintings is less painterly than many of her other works, but a slightly wistful feeling is still evident.

Jemne is well known as a muralist. Her first major work came in 1922, at the Stearns County Courthouse. The Art Deco-styled mural shows two figures riding in an idyllic landscape and is meant to be an imagining of Minnesota before Europeans arrived. Beginning in the 1930s, Jemne was commissioned to paint several murals under the Treasury Department’s Section of Fine Arts. A mural called Wilderness, installed in the Ely post office, shows a scene of Minnesota wildlife in the northwoods.

In order to accurately portray the iron ore industry in the other Ely post office mural, Jemne traveled to the Pioneer Mine in Ely and descended to the thirteenth level in the miners’ cage. Another mural, in the Minneapolis Armory, was funded by the Works Progress Administration. Done in 1937 and titled Minnesota, it depicts an allegorical figure of Minnesota surrounded by the people and symbols of the state. Jemne’s characteristic style is evident, as well as the influence of famous muralists like Violet Oakley and Diego Rivera. Her last major mural, a Scandinavian-inspired work for the American Swedish Institute, was completed in 1954.

Jemne was the wife and sometime collaborator of architect Magnus Jemne. One collaboration, the St. Paul Women’s City Club, was designed by the Jemnes in 1931 in the Art Moderne style. Now on the National Register of Historic Places, the building boasts decorative elements designed by Jemne. It was intended not only as a social club for elite urban women but as an intellectual gathering place for all Minnesota women.

Until 1962, when Jemne suffered a stroke, she consistently worked and exhibited. She taught at the Minneapolis School of Art and returned to easel painting in the 1940s and 1950s. The Walker Art Center’s 1949 centennial exhibition of Minnesota art included two of her paintings. Three solo shows of her work were held in the late 1950s and early 1960s, including a retrospective at the Walker Art Center in 1957.

Jemne died in St. Paul on June 26, 1974.