Highlights from the Sandzén-Greenough Family Collection features (55) examples of etchings,
engravings, mezzotints, lithographs, and color woodcuts in the Sandzén Gallery’s permanent collection of about
8,000 works on paper. Selections on display cover an astonishing international range: Japanese color woodcuts,
French revival landscape etchings, early German “Little Masters” and Albrecht Dürer woodcuts, Dutch old
masters such as Rembrandt etchings, exquisite European portrait engravings, Swedish etchings of Anders Zorn,
B.J.O. Nordfeldt white-line woodcuts, American Regional lithographs by Grant Wood and Thomas Hart
Benton, and more. Birger Sandzén was actively involved in most of the print societies around the country,
including the Chicago Society of Etchers (1910), the Print Makers of California (1914), and the Brooklyn
Society of Etchers (1915) which went through several name changes to become what is now SAGA (Society of
American Graphic Artists), before organizing the Prairie Print Makers at his home studio in December of 1930. He was
invited to be a charter member of Kansas City’s Woodcut Society in 1932, and collected all that Society’s
presentation prints issued twice-yearly through 1947. Sandzén also joined the Society of Print Connoisseurs in
1945, as a collecting member to add commissioned prints such as Gene Kloss’ 1948 drypoint, Processional-
Taos (in this exhibition), to his personal collection.
Once Sandzén was firmly settled in central Kansas and teaching at Bethany College from 1894, he
began his own collection of original prints. When his daughter Margaret married Charles Pelham Greenough 3rd
in 1942, Sandzén found a kindred spirit as his son-in-law's print collection was as varied and deep as his own.
The family collection was eventually inherited by the Greenoughs, who opened the Birger Sandzén Memorial
Gallery in 1957 to host contemporary guest artists and to share their paintings, prints, and sculpture with a wider
audience.