Evert Lundquist

Studio interiorEvert Ernst Erland Olof Lundquist (17 July 1904 – 4 November 1994) was a Swedish painter and graphic artist. He was born in Stockholm, the son of a railway official, Ernst Lundquist and Olga Eugenia Maria Charlotta Lundquist (born Björck). Lundquist, byway of his mother's family, was a relative of famed singer Johanna Maria "Jenny" Lind and the painter Oscar Björck. He was the youngest of the three children; his brother Edvard was born in 1898 and sister Elsa in 1902. The family home was located in Stockholm at 9 Tegnérgatan. His early life has been described as middle class, proper and calm.

Lundquist had bouts of depression and illness which caused delays in his education. His depression was often exacerbated by the long and dark months of autumn in Sweden. Lundquist had experienced feelings of "gloom" as early as 1920. These personal adversities were generally unknown to the public as Lundquist created a public narrative that presented him in a style that he favored. His desire to obscure and hide the unpleasant and uncontrolled aspects of his life has led to suggestions of a parallel/corollary to his artwork.

He lived and worked in , on the outskirts of Stockholm. Here during the late 1940s and early 1950s, Evert Lundquist along with his wife and fellow artist Ebba Reutercrona, joined artists Roland Kempe and in living together at Olle Nyman's family home in Saltsjö-Duvnäs. This grouping of artists began to be identified as the "Saltsjö-Duvnäs Group". The group was rather loosely based and followed no set ideology or philosophical premise. They were, however, centered on an exploration of the material nature of painting, "from the small perspective, with the point of departure in the poetry of rural everyday life."

In 1984, Lundquist published his autobiography, From the Life of a Painter (in Swedish ).

Education/educator in the arts Lundquist remembered creating his first painting at age fourteen in 1918. The work was a man with red hair which he created using his mother's porcelain paints. As a private student, Lundquist studied for and received his bachelor's degree in 1923; he then felt free to pursue his interest in painting. Beginning on 15 January 1924, Lundquist formally began his education in the arts at Carl Wilhelmson's painting school in Stockholm. Later in May 1924, Lundquist traveled to Wimereux, France to study plaster under artist Jean Cottenet, and to learn French. While in Wimereux, Lundquist lived at "La Ruche", a villa owned by the Cottenet family. During the summer, he painted his first landscape during a car trip to Les Neyrolles, France. Lundquist recalled the period well and claimed this was how he acquired the "French Spirit" which he felt never left him. While studying with Wilhelmson, a young Lundquist was advised by another student to find his own style instead of trying to imitate Leonardo da Vinci. Wilhelmson, overhearing the conversation, rejected the student's advice. He felt in Lundquist's quest to become self-realized, it was important to "love something higher (and to) study the masters." Lundquist recalled that Wilhelmson was one of the few people, if not the only, who believed in his abilities. Nonetheless, Lundquist applied and was accepted into the school's decorative department where Olle Hjortzberg was his teacher. Lundquist felt this "experiment' was unsuccessful and "bore meager fruit." This attention was followed by increased public recognition for Lundquist.

According to friend and fellow artist Cliff Holden, Lundquist enjoyed holding a retrospective every ten years or so at the Stockholm Academy of Art. The retrospective in 1957 generated a level of admiration that had "not been seen even in Sweden for a long time."

In the late 1950s and early 1960s he participated in exhibitions in Paris, London and Milan.

Lundquist was chosen to represent Sweden at the IV Bienal do Museu de Arte Moderna in São Paulo, Brazil in 1957. Artworks that were selected for inclusion, including works by Lundquist, were destroyed by fire aboard the transport ship carrying them. While Cliff Holden states that all of Lundquist's works for the Bienal were lost in this fire, The Renaissance Society of Chicago hosts a Lundquist Exhibition from 13 to 31 May 1961.

The Museum of Modern Art's Committee on the Museum's Collections (serving at the request of MOMA's chairman James Thrall Soby) voted to acquire and to add Lundquist's Pottery Number Nine, oil on canvas, to its collection in 1961.

In 1964, Lundquist was presented the Guggenheim award. During the same year he served as the representative for Sweden at the Venice Biennale in 1964.

Lundquist's artwork was presented in exhibitions at the Dunn International. The Tate Gallery included Lundquist in their 1964 exhibition "54–64, Paintings & Sculpture of a Decade".

In 1974, a Lundquist retrospective was held at Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Sweden. In the late 1950s Lundquist's fellow artist and supporter Cliff Holden, who had long believed that Lundquist was one of only two artists who could legitimately represent Sweden internationally, began a campaign to encourage the Tate to accept Lundquist's work into its collection. Woman in Red, a work from the collection of Nils Tesch, was accepted into the collection. Previous to this acquisition, the only other Swedish painter to be collected by the Tate was Edvard Munch. The work titled Woman in Red has been part of the Tate collection since that time. Lundquist's method seems to have allowed the paint a certain freedom to suggest the initial form. Once the work developed, the final and generally delicate last layer of paint would function to save the work from any "potential chaos." The final work was neither a full abstraction nor a figuration when finished. In a sense, Lundquist had bridged the conflict between those who favored abstraction and those who felt as strongly against it. Given his artistic ability to paint in these styles, and his innovative ability to make them his own without imitation, it would have been natural to assume that he would continue to do so. However, in the mid-1930s, he began to alter his style of painting. Lundquist himself felt that he had now reached a level of his own maturity as an artist, and that his works of this period reflected this. He described his new stylistic developments as a, "solid, monumentally simplified and architecturally closed form and a synthesizing color form; the basic element of my artistic attitude." Jardin du Luxembourg (1933–1934), which was included in Lundquist's debut exhibition in 1934, is a relevant example of his early works. In this present example, the artist has moved away from a rather straightforward attempt at portraying landscapes or still life which he had done earlier in his career. The painting demonstrates the "simplified architecture" and "synthesis of color" that Lundquist cited as part of his artistic process of the period. Brushstrokes in Jardin du Luxembourg are heavy, clearly defined and visible. While they do function to create the final image, they are not logical in relation to the subject matter. As they create the image, they do not support it by subjecting themselves individually to it. The brushstrokes become "individuals" that Lundquist has "applied to describe themselves." This "conflict" of brushstroke, as irrational and independent from subject, would continue to be developed and used by Lundquist during this time and in later works. While the paintings have elements which evoke the styles of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and James Ensor, they also have stylistic elements which were Lundquist's own innovations and which will become his hallmarks. Art critic Olle Granath believed that works like Jardin du Luxembourg were harbingers of what would eventually come to be Lundquist's style for the next fifty years. For Granath, to look at a Lundquist painting was to be "drenched by giant waves or refreshed by a bubbling spring, to be dazzled by the fire of the sun and guided by the burning light..." the viewer is facing the dramatic conflict between day and night. As the sun's rays dissipate into darkness, the sky blazes and illuminates the landscape in its hot, but final, light. Branches of a tree and a lone and simple farmer's plow stand in opposition to the dramatics/transitions of the moment. In the fleeting marriage between the contradictions of day and night, the viewer can grasp the fragility of the moment itself while the simplest elements, that of the farmer's plow and tree branches, remain the constants. It is an example of what Brunius notes as Lundquist's use of a restricted color register. The work is homogeneous yet still creates an atmosphere that is intense, "the surface of the canvas like fire and embers". In 1962, Lundquist created Det vita bordet (Bordet). In this painting, Lundquist allows the objects portrayed to be "born by the light". The light from the painting radiates to the viewer, inviting the viewer into an intimate and self-illuminating world. Each object portrayed in Det vita bordet seems ready to reveal its inner mystery to the viewer, one by one, each object having its own independent and equal value. By 1964, Lundquist had reached a peak in his technical and artistic ability as demonstrated in his 1964 work Hatten. In this example, the simplicity of the motif belies the complex and diverse synthesis of light, color and textural form which Lundquist has created using the powerful brushstrokes of a mature abstract expressionist. Still, for all the dynamics of Lundquist's painted surfaces, what was ostensibly to become the subject matter of the painting would often remain a singular, simple "everyday object". Another recurring motif was the humble coffee cup. Museum curator and art critic Ulf Linde stated that Lundquist "found" the cup during a trip by car in Northern France. Lundquist envisioned the simple object as animate, alive. He viewed its whiteness as a "world of color" that was both celestial and earthly, this earthiness reinforced by its primitive design. Moderna Museet's curator Fredrik Liew views Lundquist's work as a "union of opposites, most frequently between what is fixed and monumental on the one hand, and delicate and transient on the other[...]"

Lundquist was discovering the complex inner virtues of the most mundane of objects. He was using the hues of his impasto, his motifs and brushstrokes to create a rich and complex pictorial language of conflict/resolution between "monumentality" and that of dissipation and fragility. To some, his "violent" potent brushstrokes and his use of color drew comparisons to de Kooning and Dubuffet, though Lundquist was recognized as being "independent" from them. (A black and white image of Urn can be seen on page fifty-eight at citation. Wall Street Journal writer J. S. Marcus wrote, succinctly if not profoundly, that Lundquist was a "near-abstract artist" who was able to produce works that tantalized byway of tensions created through the rich textured impasto backgrounds and the motifs. The work Urn or Urnan in Swedish was later shown at the Lars Bohman Gallery after Lundquist's death. In the catalog for the exhibition, with text by Olle Granath, the same painting is shown on page thirty-three in a different orientation than is shown in the Guggenheim catalog of 1964. Additionally, a slight variation in the stated size is noted and the date of the work is given as 1960. The date given by the Guggenheim is 1961. Fredrik Liew notes other works had been shown not only in different orientations but also with other names, he cites Torso (1961) as one such example. Torso was also called Stilleben. In many ways, Lundquist and other European artist were developing similar approaches to art independently of other artists. Artist Cliff Holden made such an observations when he first saw Lundquist's works. He found the works to be quite a revelation. He felt Lundquist and his mentor, artist David Bloomberg, had been creating similar works; The artists were paralleling the "philosophy, theory and practice" of the other. The artists had begun to create images "in mass" as opposed to images which used detail for narration. Bloomberg, at the Borough Polytechnic, would later teach artists Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff. Auerbach and Kossoff are often referenced as having stylistically similarities with Lundquist.

That two or more artists may follow a similar trajectory while unknown to each other, and unaware of the esthetics of the other artist, is familiar. An example can be found in the early beginnings of pop art. A baffled (and somewhat suspicious) Andy Warhol could not account for the similarity of his work and the work of Roy Lichtenstein, the most obvious differences being that Lichtenstein continued to rely more on the painterly process while Warhol had already begun to apply the concept of commercial appeal and early ideas of mass-production to his art.

Significance to contemporaries and current artists Lundquist is recognized today as a key artist in modern Swedish art and its development.

Torsten Andersson felt that Lundquist had created a new type of visual language, and that the canvases after the late 1930s had broken away and come to life. He noticed a correlation between the weight (of impasto) and the deeper (and heavier) meanings of the paintings.

Georg Baselitz claimed that after seeing an "axe" painting (an important motif in Lundquist's oeuvre) he questioned whether he himself should begin again as an artist. The painting continued to inspire this question in him some 46 years after seeing it.

Sigrid Sandström traveled to Vaxholm to visit the painting Kvinna vid den vita muren (Woman by the White Wall) by Lundquist. She commented not only on how she could see the influence on later artists such as Peter Doig but also noticed references to Arnold Böcklin (1827–1901) and Ivan Aguéli (1869–1917). The paint's color/impasto portrayed the light so that it seemed hot and exotic. She says, "I was struck by the way the febrile brushwork seemed to have a life of its own independently of the subject matter[...]lacking in rhythm[...] it covers the surface, demanding attention. Those areas that appeared to be transparent turn out to be very thickly painted." She felt that the motif chosen by Lundquist was something of a ruse, just a hint at the true message. (During the interview Forge misidentifies the name of Lundquist's Painting at the Tate calling it Girl at a Window. The name of the painting is Woman in Red.) In 2015, Emilia Ström arranged and described the various volumes Lundquist donated to the archive along with material already in their possession, making them available byway of the online Visual Arkiv system. Much of the archive retains the "disorder" that is part of Lundquist's "method" in describing and sorting his own notes and additions. Ström and the Nationalmuseum Archives made the decision to maintain this "disorder" so that the archive would reflect, "the context of the documents. The archive – like Lundquist's own art – thus becomes an expression of self-reflection and introspection."

In reading the extensive notes that Lundquist left, Frederick Liew had the perception that Lundquist may have actually restricted the deeper understanding of his work. Lundquist was the artwork's creator, and given this, his words had been presented and often received as absolutes. Liew felt that Lundquist's great efforts to define not only his work but his personal life (which was not described entirely factually) served to conceal rather than reveal his works and his life. Art critic and cultural commentator Björn Widegren premised that Lundquist felt if he could keep his demons locked in the basement, "in some way they would remain silent." Even Lundquist's ordered and neatly arranged studio was in opposition to his true nature. Ulf Linde, while visiting Lundquist at his studio, had commented to Lundquist about the studio's organization. Lundquist, without a trace of whimsy, stated that it had to be that way because "I am a chaos." He was at times pictured with a jaunty hat perched on his head. His appearance in photographs made him look more like a university academic than an artist. His career and ability were presented as duly secured over time in a precise fashion. His work had made him into the respected patriarch of Swedish modern painting, and he sought to portray himself as living the comfortable bourgeois life which he had acquired by virtue of this work. Lundquist did, at least initially, endeavor to promote and garner recognition of his artwork. He sought to promote his artwork beyond the borders of Sweden by ensuring they were included in international exhibitions. He was successful in the effort, and his works reached Europe, North and South America and were recognized as major achievements. What was now exciting to art patrons, whether the style of art or the personality/image of the artist, was in a state of change. Mary Gabriel wrote in her book Ninth Street Woman about her belief that anyone could easily see that public interests in art had changed and that works of art prior to 1940 had lost their vogue. The works, and the style of the works, no longer could describe the psyche of the public after World War II. Gabriel writes that she understood and agreed with the words of poet Adrienne Rich who wrote of the period, "radical change in human sensibility required radical changes in artistic style". The world had changed and art was chaining with it. It would follow that the personalities of the artist would mimic the change. Among the twenty eight were: Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, Mark Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb, Barnett Newman, Clyfford Still and Jackson Pollock; all who would go on to become iconic in the American Abstract Art Movement. A photographer for Life Magazine took a picture of fifteen of these artists and named them "The Irascibles", thus codifying their individualism into a common identity. The press portrayed them as tough, angry New York-based artists who were impoverished, hard-boiled and living in the cold water flats of New York, while fighting "the system" for recognition of their art. The "Irascibles" were the antithesis of the bourgeoisie, the personal motif that Lundquist identified with and promoted himself as representing. The image of the "Irascibles" contrasted greatly with the projected image of the agreeable-tempered Lundquist who painted in his Art Nouveau studio nestled in the tranquil park-lands of King Gustav's palace and there carefully put his finished masterful art into ornate golden frames. Lundquist had actually been confronted by such a biased perception. Fellow artist and friend Cliff Holden relates that he had requested Lawrence Alloway, who was then the head of London's Institute of Contemporary Art, to take on Lundquist. Alloway, familiar with Lundquist's reputation refused on the ground that he appeared as too "provincial". Eventually, Alloway did see Lundquist's artwork at a private exhibition at the Beaux Arts Gallery. Impressed, Alloway "profusely" apologized to Holden saying that "he now considered Lundquist was a major artist on the international scene."

Withdrawal from broader art world Ironically, Lawrence Alloway would also contribute, indirectly, to Lundquist removing himself from pursuing even more international recognition. While Lundquist may have inadvertently given his persona a less interesting "image", he would go on to make another direct choice which seems to have caused a greater long-term harm to his career. Alloway, in his role as curator of the Guggenheim Museum, had culled the world of art to select a small number of artists to be exhibited and to receive an award in the 1964 Guggenheim Foundation Exhibition. The President of the Guggenheim Foundation, Harry F. Guggenheim, explained the award was created to represent "preeminent national and international prestige". The London Times had criticized British artists who were working in a similar style to Lundquist, calling them "apprentices" to Lundquist. Art critic R.V. Gindertael who, during Lundquist's 1960 Paris exhibition, wrote about the great number of artist's that appear in Paris attempting to achieve recognition; these artist show their work and are sent off into the "obscurity from which they emerged". The sentiment was exacerbated in the artistic community of Sweden by the unprecedented world-wide recognition and continued dominance of New York artists which heightened the ongoing tensions within Sweden's art community. Much of the recognition of the New York artists had come about due to the extraordinary and complex interactions between international museums, gallery owners and mass publicity afforded by modern media; New York based artists were the prime beneficiaries of this synergy. Turning the tables on claims of provincialism by those who had directed such criticisms against Swedish artists, artist Per Olof Ultvedt along with four other writers, published a letter criticizing efforts by a Swedish museum to acquire a "New York collection of art". Ultvedt claimed it was New York that was provincial, given its limits of geography and art content. Ultvedt, along with four other authors, would continue their criticism of "The New York collection" as being part of a collaboration between artists and engineers which, at least in the premise presented by the authors, represented "American military technology used in Vietnam". The net result of these sentiments, on the art community, might best be expressed by painter and curator Philip von Schantz who stated he was not interested in internationalism as a directive for museums. While not criticizing specific artists, he openly questioned the homogenization of both the art world and museum collections/exhibitions. International artists, namely American artists, diminished significantly in Sweden during this period. Lundquist was primarily his own marketer. Money's interrelation and/or influence on art, indeed even the metrics of such, continues to be studied academically; the subject is a broad and lively one. To add context to the degrees of change since Lundquist's observations, and to establish how factual his concerns may have been, the researcher can look to the prices which art patrons were paying for the works of art created by recognized artists during the 1950s–1960s, as compared to prices currently paid. In the 1950s, Jackson Pollock's twenty two-inch square painting Number 16 was purchased for $306. A similar scale work (20 x 24-inch) by Lundquist was sold during the 1959 Beaux Arts Exhibition. The work titled The Pink Rock* was created circa 1959 and sold for £60 (US$110). Adjusting for inflation, that amount would be approximately £1,157.00 in 2020. Currently, the average price for a 'modern artwork' has been reported to be $27,600, with some sources reporting a high of $42,635. Capital investment into the art market continues to rise. During the period of 2000–2019, the contemporary art market had grown by 1,800%; including the year 2020 is expected to increase the figure to 2,100%. So called 'blue chip' artists, namely those who are heavily sought after and collected, have exceeded the S&P 500 by 250%. The Pink Rock was first exhibited during a Lundquist exhibition in Paris at the Galerie Rive Gauche in February 1960. Galerie Rive Gauche (1950–1970) had been established by collector and art historian Heinz Berggruen. The gallery had gained prominence in the 1950s when its director Rudolphe Augustinci and Berggruen had shown artists such as Max Ernst, Yves Tanguy and Rene Magritte. In the gallery's Lundquist catalogue, The Pink Rock appears along with eleven other paintings on an addendum page that was likely to have been added after the initial printing of the catalogue. The exhibition featured forty-two paintings, twenty-five of which were available for sale. The Pink Rock was next shown and purchased in London at the Beaux Arts Gallery during Lundquist's exhibition. This exhibition took place from 18 October – 16 November 1960. As with any developing artist, art critics may initially have varying interpretations of the artist's work. Methodology in developing an interpretation of art can vary, but would generally depend on the freedom to explore and exchange of ideas, which at times may be apart from the direct input of the works creator. Some interpretations may not be in complete agreement with the stated intention of the artist. With Lundquist, it may have been initially easier, and tempting, for contemporary critics to describe his work's by "intentionalism/intentism". Lundquist, as an established and respected artist, was directly describing to the causal viewer and to the scholar what his work meant and equally importantly what meaning(s) they did not have. During the Retrospective, even the outer elements of Lundquist's artistic control were removed; the gold frames encasing the artwork, often put on by the artist himself as a further metaphor of the "bourgeois", were stripped away. The paintings, nearly bare, were displayed so that they were the focus and the emphasis. Lundquist remains a key central figure in Swedish Modern Art. Lundquist said that he considered his art and his wife Ebba to be the most important things in his life. He often wrote Ebba love letters on which he would make small drawings for her. Lundquist said that he wrote such letters on the last day of the month, a practice he continued "from our wedding to our death". He, like his father, experienced depression "and treated himself with a combination of Valium, psychotropic drugs and alcohol". These disappearances remain the only unsolved case of a "mass disappearance" in Sweden. Further complicating the case, was the possibility that the disappearances may have been connected to the oddest bank robbery in Gothenburg's history. The theft, at the Scandinavian Bank at Gamlestadstorget, took place on the same day as the disappearances. The robbery, in which one of the male robbers dressed as a woman and wildly began to shoot into the crowd, led to a short lived escape attempt. The robbers, in wet suits which they had concealed under their clothing, attempt to escape into the Säveån River. One of the group, nicknamed "the brain" by the Swedish press, had accidentally shot himself in the leg which prevented his escape. After several hours underwater, "the Brain" emerged to the surface only to be arrested. His confession to the police led to the arrest of the other robbers. On the same day as the robbery and the other disappearances, a hitchhiking Hübner had mailed a postcard to his family from Gothenburg, it simply stated "All is well, don't worry." He then vanished without a trace. Lundquist, ever conscious of his public persona and reluctant to write about negativity, made one singular entry about his son's disappearance, "A great sorrow, but that is life after all. There are times of light, times of darkness, and of sorrow and of joy". She is buried alongside her son Manne at Lovö Church. In securing the location as his studio, Lundquist had the help of the Drottningholm Palace architect Ivar Tengbom. paid a private visit to the studio. The King, clearly enjoying the visit, began to admire one of Lundquist's artworks on display. As it was evening the studio was not brightly lit, nonetheless the King stood alongside Lundquist admiring the painting Staffliet. The King remarked, "It shines so dramatically in the dim light." Lundquist's wife Ebba, however, was growing anxious about the length of the royal visit. Sensing this, Lundquist began to play "Eine kleine Nachtmusik" on a music box as a subtle hint that the night was drawing to a close. The King, either not realizing that he was being given a hint to depart or choosing to ignore it, continued to remain and enjoy his visit. Finally, a prior engagement forced the royals to take their leave. As the King left, he thanked Lundquist for the gift of the studio and promised to take care of it.