Theodore Milton Wassmer

Theodore Milton Wassmer was born 23 February 1910 in Salt Lake City, the eldest of eight children. He was educated in Utah and worked at engrav￾ing and wholesale hardware companies from 1923 to 1942. He began to paint in 1927, his interest sparked when he watched Frank Zimbeaux paint a picture of the old Salt Lake Theatre. During the Depression, though he supported his family of ten for two years, he still managed to sell enough of his paintings for five dollars apiece to finance a trip to the 1934 Chicago World’s Fair. There he felt challenged by the old masters to pursue art. He studied five years with Professor Florence E. Ware at the University of Utah, posing and helping paint in the back￾grounds of the Kingsbury Hall murals. v Pearl Harbor interrupted his career. At Sheppard Field, Texas, he found ways to continue his art, painting large murals for the Air Force during his ofLduty hours. A freak accident in 1944 paralyzed his painting arm. Year￾long therapy at Bushnell Hospital in Brigham City helped him regain partial use of the arm; while there, he painted a mural with his left arm. In 1945 he married Utah artist Judy Lund in New York City, where he studied for four years at the Art Student’s League and for two years with Raphael Soyer. He painted portraits for two years in a Carnegie Hall Studio and moved to Woodstock, New York in 1952, where he lived and worked for thirty-three years. He returned to Utah in 1985. Over two thousand of his works may be found in museums, universities, schools, and private collections. In 1990 the Springville Museum of Art celebrated his eightieth year with a sixty-year retrospective, 1930-1990. Wassmer says about his work, “My art can be no better than I myself as a person and no deeper than my understanding of life.”