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Theodore Milton Wassmer

Salt Lake City, UT, 1910 -

BiographyTheodore Wassmer (b. 1910) became interested in painting at age 17, when he was given his first set of oil paints. By selling his artwork, he saved enough money to go to the Chicago World’s Fair of 1934, where he was greatly impressed by displays of Old Masters and Impressionists. For the next five years, Wassmer worked days in a hardware store, while studying landscape and mural painting at night, and on weekends with mural painter Florence E. Ware. He also worked as a model and background painter for Ms. Ware, who painted the University of Utah’s Kingsbury Hall murals under a WPA project grant, which was headed in Utah at the time by Wassmer's future wife Judy Farnsworth Lund. After their marriage, the two studied painting at the Art Student's League in New York City and Woodstock. The couple purchased an old stone house in the rural setting of Bearsville, New York, in 1952. Here they continued to live for the next 30 years, where she worked on portraits, and he worked on exhibiting across the country. Many of his paintings are centered on dance and theater. The stone house was sold in 1985, and the couple returned to Salt Lake City.

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