Janice Sachse:
A Retrospective

About The Artist

Raised in Baton Rouge, Janice Rubenstein Sachse created artwork that reflected the social conditions of Louisiana during the mid-twentieth century.

Louisiana-Treasures-Artist-Janice Sachse

Early Life & Work

She studied art at Louisiana State University and Sophie Newcomb College. In 1925 at the LSU Art Department, she began working with the renowned muralist Conrad Albrizio, who encouraged her to explore and experiment, an attitude that Sachse retained throughout her 70-year painting career.

Although she did not adhere to any one technique or subject matter, Sachse most often painted the people and places of Louisiana, even traveling along the state’s newly built interstate in the early 1970s to create a series of paintings that detailed the landscape. She exhibited widely in Louisiana and was represented by Helen Seger’s La Boetie Gallery on New York’s Upper East Side.

Her Legacy

In 1999, a year after her death, the Janice R. Sachse Visiting Artist Series (now the Janice R. Sachse School of Art Support Fund) was endowed and established at Louisiana State University in her honor.

For more information regarding the artist and her works, check out Janice Sachse: A Retrospective, the first book in the Louisiana Treasures series.

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“Sachse was an untiring experimenter. The multitude of techniques and styles she incorporated in her work reveals a preoccupation with constantly improving and challenging oneself.”

Janice Sachse was a regional painter who felt deeply connected to the landscapes and people of Louisiana. Inspired by her surroundings, she recorded scenes from her home state with expressionist brushstrokes and a distinctly modern sensibility. Her portraits of loved ones and views of the marshlands afforded her opportunities for always dynamic experimentations with artistic techniques, a quest which she kept pursuing throughout her artistic life. Janice’s career as an artist started in the 1930s, but it was not until the 1960s and 1970s that her work gained national recognition. Her subjects combined regional themes with a modernist approach to figurative compositions, still lifes, and landscapes.

Sachse was an untiring experimenter. The multitude of techniques and styles she incorporated in her work reveals a preoccupation with constantly improving and challenging oneself. She warned others to “avoid the tyranny of the technique,” claiming that artists who are recognized by their style have their potential impaired by conventions.48 In her opinion, experimentation led to an “expansion of technique,” which she considered a precondition for being a great artist. The pursuit of these free-spirited experiments and their application to local subject matter, such as scenes from daily life and views of the Louisiana landscape, destined Janice Sachse to become a modernist pioneer and one of the great artists of the South.

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