Woman with Red Hair

Milton H. Hoehn

With a nod to the German Expressionists Milt Hoehn created a striking portrait of an intense woman with bright orange hair. Her eyes are surrounded with dark eyeliner, or the result of violence, and adds a aura of fear, pleading, and anger to the drama of the composition.

Milton H. Hoehn, educator, printmaker and environmentalist, was born in Carlinville, Illinois on October 1, 1915. In 1933, he enrolled at Blackburn College in his hometown where he studied for two years. After commencement, he began his career as a truck driver and heavy equipment operator.

Hoehn joined the US Army Air Force in 1941 and he was a crewman of a plane shot down over the Ruhr region in Germany. Upon his capture he became a prisoner of war for two years in the notorious Stalag 17. The memories of this experience haunted him the rest of his days.

After the war he attended the University of California Berkeley earning his MA in Math. Hoehn took summer and sabbatical courses at the University of California Davis, the University of London, and London's Imperial College. His math career began in 1948 as a teaching assistant at UC Berkeley, followed by two-year positions at the University of Idaho and the University of New Mexico. In 1956 Hoehn joined the faculty of the Santa Rosa Junior College where he taught in the math department until his retirement in 1985.

Hoehn kept busy in his retirement by taking computer and art classes at the Santa Rosa Junior College. He explored the techniques of woodcut and linocut in portraying the people he saw at music festivals and many of his heavy-line portraits depict musicians and their instruments. His work is in the collections of Georgetown University and the Portland Art Museum.

Hoehn passed away in Santa Rosa, California on March 10, 2002.