Getting the arts early can be so powerful

Let me tell you a little about Robert Larsen, and more about Dale Jansen, two Iowa farm kids. Inspired early themselves, they inspired many of the rest of us for decades.

DES MOINES, Iowa – The lives of two western Iowa farm boys whom many of us came to know are reminders of how early exposure to the arts can be powerfully transformative.

You may know the story of how Robert Larsen, who grew up in the 1930s and ’40s on a farm just outside the town of Walnut, “by age 10…had become obsessed with the Saturday afternoon radio broadcasts from the Metropolitan Opera in New York City,” his obituary in March of 2021 told us. He once told me he would sprawl on the living room floor of the farmhouse, riveted to the wondrous singing he was hearing from a big console radio. Larsen went on to become the founder and artistic director of the Des Moines Metro Opera and a 60-year professor of music at Simpson College in Indianola. He was one of Iowa’s real cultural icons.

And there was Dale Jansen, growing up on a small farm northwest of Manning. In his junior high and high school years, when his parents were taking livestock to the stockyards in Omaha, “they’d drop off Dale at the Joslyn Art Museum,” his brother Curt Jansen recalls. “He’d spend the day there, and they’d pick him up on the way home.” Dale, who became a pediatric dentist in Des Moines, also turned into a lifelong art lover and collector. He died in early 2024. In his estate, he detailed how he wanted to divide a “world-class print collection of modern and contemporary art,” as it was described later, between the Des Moines Art Center and the University of Iowa’s Stanley Museum of Art. There are a total of 158 prints by more than 100 internationally-known artists.

Dr. Dale Jansen, at the Des Moines Art Museum in 2015. (Photo by Amy N. Worthen)

I started thinking about all this after attending a June 1 lecture by our friend Amy Namowitz Worthen at the Des Moines Art Center, where Dale Jansen’s prints are on display thru this summer. Worthen spoke as Dale’s friend of nearly 50 years, and also as the art center’s “Curator of Prints and Drawings Emerita.” She is an artist herself, a printmaker and teacher, dividing time between Des Moines and Venice, Italy.

When I talked to her afterward about the early exposure to quality art that both Larsen and Jansen had, she said, “That’s certainly the case with both those guys. It can change lives.”

It’s Dale Jansen I want to tell you more about here today, since the exhibit of his prints has just opened at the Des Moines Art Center.

He was the oldest of five children of Harry and Irene Jansen, raised on a 164-acre diversified farm with cattle, hogs, corn, soybeans and more.

Apparently inspired by what he saw at the Joslyn in Omaha, young Dale decided to try painting himself and ordered his paints, brushes and other supplies from the Montgomery Ward and Sears, Roebuck & Co. catalogs, according to his brother Curt Jansen, a wildlife photographer and video maker now retired in Laramie, Wyoming.

“Dale was the only one of us who was interested in art, but we all respected his interests and the painting he started doing,” Curt Jansen said. “In fact, we all thought he was pretty good. He did a lot of landscapes and a lot of religious pieces. He’d give those paintings to extended family, and they’d have them hanging on their walls.”

Warren Puck, retired in Manning after a career as a John Deere farm equipment dealer, was a 1957 Manning High School classmate of Dale Jansen, and a longtime friend.

“Even though Dale was born and raised on a farm, he wasn’t the kind of farm boy you usually think about,” Puck said. “His interests were more refined. He played in the dance band and jazz band. He sang in the choir, and in our church choir, too. He was in the school plays. But he was also a pretty good football player – a starter as a ‘pulling guard’ on the old single-wing offense.”

Doing yoga while on a trip to Grenada. In his obituary, he boasted of being able to stand on his head until he was approaching 80. (Photo from Dale Jansen estate.)

Both Curt Jansen and Warren Puck recalled that when Dale enrolled at the University of Iowa, his knowledge and interest in art really grew.

“He took some art appreciation classes at the university,” brother Curt said. “When he saw the paintings of other students, I think he realized they were a lot better than he was.”

In a 2012 interview with Des Moines Homestyle Magazine writer Kelly Roberson, Dale Jansen recalled that long-ago realization of his own artistic limitations, saying he discovered he “had appreciation, but not talent.”

Professionally, he decided on dentistry and earned his degree from the U of I in 1965. He did a two-year residency in Hawaii, then returned to the university for a master’s in pediatric dentistry in 1969. He practiced in Des Moines until his retirement in 2000.

By the late 1970s, Dale Jansen became a regular at programs and exhibits at the Des Moines Art Center. He also became a close friend of artist Amy Worthen and her late husband Tom Worthen, who taught art history at Drake University. “He wasn’t family with us,” Amy said recently, “but he was definitely in our family of friends.

“Dale became an incredibly active volunteer at the art museum, He was never just a member. He helped put on all kinds of programs. He’d host visiting artists at his home, and he’d served as their driver when they were in the city. He gave his time and effort – willingly, effortlessly and joyfully.”

He served on the museum’s board of trustees from 2009 to 2017.

She said Dale bought his first print in about 1980 or ’81, starting his collection.

“He started collecting in an era when printmaking as an art was being revolutionized,” said Worthen, a New York City native and Smith College graduate who learned her own printmaking in graduate school at the University of Iowa from the legendary Mauricio Lasansky.

Amy N. Worthen.

Worthen patiently explained it to me, since my knowledge of it is thin.

“Let’s start with what a print is not,” she began. “It’s not a reproduction. It’s an original work of art used by an artist to create a new original, using a printing process and not a photomechanical one. But the work can be printed many times.”

It can be “in relief,” like carving or cutting a plank of wood. It can be an “etching or engraving,” cut into metal. It can be “lithography,” drawn in a grease-based solution on limestone. Or it can be “stencil printing” or “screen printing” – the process you may know from T-shirt shops.

All of that caught Dale Jansen’s imagination, although in his own collections and trips for art experiences, he went beyond just printmaking.

His modest home at 317 Fifty-ninth Street in Des Moines was filled with art of all kinds, Worthen recalled. He even added a well-lighted and temperature-controlled gallery room in later years, and he frequently rotated his favorite pieces to new arrangements on the walls.

Twice he took month-long trips to volunteer with the famous “environmental artists” known as “Christo and Jeanne-Claude” on two of their huge installations – usually featuring colorful fabrics. Formally, they were Christo Vladimirov Javacheff, of Bulgaria, and Jeanne-Claude Denat de Guillebon, of Morocco, now both deceased. They married and began working together in Paris, but later based in New York City.

You may remember them for “wrapping an island” and wrapped the German Reichstag in a silver fabric. The two “Cristo and Jeanne-Claude” installations that Jansen worked on were the giant bright-yellow “Umbrellas” in the mountains outside Los Angeles in the late 1980s, and the 7,503 bright orange “Gates” they positioned throughout Central Park in New York City in 2005.

Amy and Tom Worthen visited Jansen in New York City during that “Gates” installation, and Tom described their friend as being “so completely in his element, so radiant with happiness.”

Dr. Dale Jansen at the “Gates” installation in New York City’s Central Park. (Photo by Amy N. Worthen)

How valuable is his collection that we can all now enjoy at the two museums?

“Well, he bought works on a pediatric dentist’s income, a modest, professional-level salary,” Amy Worthen said. “But he bought one or two things a year, and they’re good. He had an eye, a vision and curiosity. He created a very personal collection that was revelatory, uplifting and exciting. He was living in that art. It will have scholarly uses and it will be inspiring personally for people, too.”

Bottom line, Dale Jansen “was such a good human being,” she said.

And how about this snapshot of him in one delightful passage from his obituary?

“Dale was an earnest friend with a staid, disarming demeanor and a delightfully dry wit,” he said. “He was a late devotee of yoga and, until five years ago, was impressed with his ability to stand on his head. He thoroughly enjoyed hosting friends in his home, cooking, attending theater events, tending his collection of exotic houseplants, and telling a joke or two. He was an excellent storyteller and enjoyed recounting his experiences at home and abroad with others. He was grateful to have been able to travel to Italy twice in his final year. Despite extensive traveling and worldly experiences, Dale remained a fine example of a quintessentially charming Iowan who enjoyed working in the dirt and baking fresh cherry pies.”

Cancer finally took him, at 85, but what a life.

The Des Moines Art Center’s current exhibit of prints from the collection of Dale Jansen.

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