Carl Oscar Borg – Skilled Painter Of The Vanishing Life Of Southwestern Indians

By Author: Harris Symonds
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Carl Oscar Borg (1879-1947) was born into a poor family in Sweden. At the age of 15, he went to London to assist portrait and marine artist George Johansen. In 1901 he arrived In the United States. Carl Oscar Borg was drawn to South Western United States, especially Arizona and New Mexico. He worked in many mediums including water colors, oils, etchings and woodblocks. He won a commission to paint posters for the railway company ,Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway. His posters were displayed in the Railway Sales Offices. Carl Oscar Borg was very well known for his portrayals of the Grand Canyon.

In 1903 he signed on a ship and sailed for California. Earning his way as an able-bodied seaman, he arrived in Santa Monica at the end of September and few days later jumped ship in San Francisco. With no money, Carl walked back to Los Angeles where he found work decorating buildings and doing odd jobs . Borg became partner in a photography and sign company and began getting to know some of the painters who were active in the Los Angeles art scene. He began. exhibiting his own paintings in 1905. The next year he met Charles ...
... Lummis, founder of the Southwest Museum. Borg became lifelong friends with Lummis and his wife Eva. Eva introduced Borg to William Wendt, Mary Gibson, and Phoebe Apperson Hearst. Carl Borg accompanied Wendt on sketching trips and this enabled him to improve his painting skills and grow as an artist. Mary Gibson was a leader of the famous Friday Morning Club, and took him on a trip to the Honduras and was able to get fellow collectors to buy his pictures. Phoebe Hearst was an eager patron of Carl Borg and sponsored his trips to Europe and North Africa, and later to the Southwest.

Carl Borg’s first entry into the Southwest was through the University of California and the United States Bureau of Ethnology. These institutions through paintings and photographs document the vanishing life of the Southwest Indians. Borg held his first exhibitions of South-western paintings in San Francisco in 1917, and Indian subjects were paramount. He endeared himself to the Hopi Snake Clan, and this allowed him access to sacred ceremonies never witnessed by outsiders. Carl Borg married in 1918 and settled down in Santa Barbra. In Santa Barbara he taught painting . He moved back to Los Angeles in 1925.and worked in the motion picture industry. However, every spring he would return to the Southwest. With the Great Depression, the art market vanished and his wife left him. Cal Borg had a small amount of success as a printmaker. He was very restless and visited Sweden a number of times, and on one of these trips he remarried and settled down for some time in Gothenburg. Borg was honoured for his artistic contribution and donated his large collection of South-western Indian artifacts to the National Ethnological Museum in Sweden along with a collection of his water colours and etchings.

Samples of his art are on display at Brigham Young University, Harvard University, Smithsonian Art Museum and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. The outbreak of World War II, found Carl Borg trapped in neutral Sweden. He was longing to be back in California. After the war, he was able to return to Santa Barbara, where he died in 1947.

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