Carl Oscar Borg was born in Sweden on March 3, 1879. As soon as he could hold a pencil he started copying pictures from books. Borg apprenticed to a house painter at age 15, then moved to London and became an assistant to portrait and marine painter George Johansen.
In 1901, he sailed for the U.S. and worked as a house and furniture painter in the East. It was not the life he had dreamt about thus he headed west to California.
Under the patronage of Phoebe Hearst, who recognized Borg's talent, he was able to return to Europe to study art. It was also Mrs. Hearst who made arrangements with the Department of the Interior for Borg to live with the Native Americans. Borg wrote: "The inhabitants of these great solitudes, these limitless horizons, this wilderness of color and form, are marked by an Arcadian simplicity, by a dignity and reserve that I am sure would be hard to find among any other living peoples" And every summer, while residing in California, Borg would return to the desert to spend time with his many intimate friends among the Indians.
He made three trips back to Sweden in the 1930s and when the war broke out in Europe he was forced to stay there for the duration of the war. While in Sweden he had considerable fame and financial success in selling his paintings of Indians and desert scenes to art collectors. He returned to Santa Barbara in September of 1945.
Borg succeeded in preserving America's cultural heritage by documenting the customs and religious ceremonies of the Native Americans that had been shared with him. He felt a kinship with the West and the people who introduced him to it. He used paint, canvas and brushes to express the unique qualities he found in New Mexico, Arizona and California. He captured the grandeur of this unusual scenery, which is emphasized by atmosphere, light, color and expanse. His subjects included Hopi and Navajo Indians, cowboys, historical scenes, California landscapes, seascapes, and missions.
Member: Associate member of the National Academy of Design, 1938; California Art Club; Salmagundi Club; International Society of Arts & Letters; San Francisco Society of Artists; San Francisco Society of Etchers; California Watercolor Society; California Printmakers; Painters of the West; Laguna Beach Art Association; Academy of Fine Arts.
Exhibited: St. Louis Exposition, 1904 (gold medal); Ruskin Art Club, Los Angeles, 1905 (solo); Steckel Galleries, Los Angeles, 1906 (solo); Helgesen Gallery, San Francisco, 1910; Salmagundi Club, 1914; Painters Club, Los Angeles, 1909 (prize); Vichy, 1913 (prize); Versailles, 1914 (medal); Pan.-Pacific Exposition, San Francisco, 1915 (medal); San Diego, 1916 (gold); Phoenix, 1916 (prize); California Art Club, 1918 (prize), 1920 (prize), 1923 (prize); Societe francais, 1920 (medal); Art Institute of Chicago; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 1922, 1927; California Watercolor Society, 1923 (prize); Painters of the West, 1924 (medal), 1928 (gold); Pacific Southwest Exposition, Long Beach, 1928, (medal, prize); Sacramento (prize); Ebell Club, Los Angeles, 1930 (prize); Laguna Beach Art Association, 1935 (prize); Academy Western Painters, 1936 (prize).
Works held: University of California, Berkeley; Municipal Collection, Phoenix; de Young Memorial Museum; Hearst Free Library, Anaconda, MT; California State Library, Sacramento; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Los Angeles Public Library; Milwaukee Art Institute; Montclair (NJ) Art Museum; Mills College; Oakland Art Gallery; Seattle Art Museum; Library of Congress; Göteborg Museum, University Lund, both in Sweden Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris.
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