If you want to know more about the Swedish art history, be sure to drop by at
Kurt Svensson Konsthandel at Vasterlånggatan 76 in the Old Town of Stockholm.
The gallerist has over 50 years of experience in selling Swedish art, from the 1800s up to now. You would think that roughly all the big names would be at museums and auction houses right now, but surprisingly he knows where to find them, and how to sell them, and he is also very friendly and keen on telling you all about the artists.
He has quite a big selection of classic and
orientalist (which means that the artist went to the Orient and painted very idyllic but nowadays stereotypical and often racist scenes) paintings, among others by Frans Wilhelm Odelmark. He also has a lot of modern art, for example by the in Scandinavia well known
Cobra artist
Bengt Lindström. We know Cobra off course from artists such as
Karel Appel,
Constant Nieuwenhuis, and the Danish
Asger Jorn, but there were many artists, in different fields, who were a member of this art movement.
Kurt Svensson’s has also has some very surprising things, such as a drawing by
Ilon Wikland, whom I deeply admire as the illustrator of many Astrid Lindgren books. He also has Pop Art prints by
Hans Arnold, which can be best described as politically engaged and somewhat eerie drawings that strongly remind of the great illustrations by
Alan Aldridge (you know, the Beatles illustrator).
One artist of this day, whom the gallerist claims to have made famous himself, is the Chinese Realist artist
Zhao Kailin. Whether you like the recent Realism movement or not, these portraits are very intense and go further than depicting physical reality. Not only because of the size (why do Realist paintings have to be big, to remind of the
original Realist paintings? It would be the only resemblance then), but also because of the character of the portrayed, that gets a lot of attention.
Overall I can say that this is a very interesting gallery with a mishmash of styles and periods, but wit good quality.
*I am sorry to say that some of the links in this text are in Swedish. This is because in the rest of Europe, a lot of important European artists are mentioned in art history books, but very little Scandinavian ones. These artists, though great, are therefore only known in Scandinavia.
