Frede Vidar

Frede Jensen Vidar was born in Denmark on June 6, 1911, and came to the United States at the age of 12, which is when he began painting. He attended the High School of Commerce in San Francisco, and then spent six years as a student at CSFA and then in 1933 studied in Paris under Raoul Dufy and Henri Matisse. After working on Coit Tower, he returned to Paris on an art prize, coming back to the U.S. at the outbreak of WWII, during which he was a combat artist with the Army Corps of Engineers in the Pacific Theater. During his long career he was a painter, a muralist, a journalist, and from 1950 until his death on January 11, 1967, a professor of art at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.

Works at Coit Tower:

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