Finding Viggo

Sometimes cemetery research can leave you feeling a little...lifeless. The endless hours spent photographing headstones, entering information often garnered from said headstones, hours searching the internet “working on mysteries without any clues” can be a long, tedious process. But sometimes you stumble across something at 1:00 a.m. and feel like you’ve found “buried” treasure.

I’ve been documenting Doniphan Oak Ridge (City) Cemetery for several weeks. One sleepless night I came across a photo of a plain, large block headstone. It had a name, birth and death date, and the word “Artist” in quotation marks. The name Viggo Holm-Madsen sounded vaguely familiar and I was intrigued with the one-word description, so I Googled him.

Viggo Holm-Madsen was born in Denmark. His family immigrated to the U.S. to Connecticut when he was five. His high school art teacher encouraged him to be an artist but warned him that he should stay away from Truman Capote, who was in the same art class. He eventually ended up in New York State where he received his education and taught art at the high school and college levels.

While teaching, he remained a prolific professional artist, showing in over 200 solo exhibitions in the United States and Europe.

Madsen worked in mixed media, including jewelry, leatherwork, batiks, sculpture, oil painting, and watercolors. An award-winning artist, his work is represented in museum, university, and corporate collections, including the Smithsonian Traveling Exhibition.

He received glowing reviews from The New York Times for his mixed media work and paintings that were shown in The Village (NYC).

Madsen’s work has been described as being critical to the history of 20th-century art, and at the center of activity during the transformative decades of the 1940s-1990s.

Mr. Madsen continued to hone his skills through study and travel, including Mexico and his homeland of Denmark. He found new inspiration during family travels to Pennsylvania and Southeast Missouri.

Southeast Missouri?

While still an art student he met the love of his life and Ripley County native, Lois Featherston. They were married in 1949 and lived most of their married life in New York State. In their later years, they returned to Lois’ hometown. According to his obituary, printed in the New York Times, Viggo died after a long illness, possibly brought on by all the solvents, acids, and toxic chemicals he worked with throughout his career.

Viggo and Lois are buried side-by-side in Doniphan Oak Ridge Cemetery.