AGNES CLEVE. Southern landscape.

Oil on paper on cardboard, 24 x 31 cm. Frame dimensions 34 x 41 cm. Signed A. Cleve.

Agnes Cleve is considered one of the pioneers of Swedish modernism. The auction's painting bears typical features of the art that came into being during the transformative decade of the 1910s - bold colours with inspiration from Henri Matisse and a painting bordering on Expressionism and Cubism. The crowns of trees are rendered in a stylized form that becomes the building blocks of the modernist composition.

The landscape is reminiscent of the views of Cagnes, one of many places throughout Europe where Agnes Cleve stayed and painted.

During her time studying at Valand's art school, Agnes Cleve met her future husband, the artist John Jon-And, and in 1913 the couple travelled to Paris. In the French capital, Agnes Cleve studied for the master Henri Le Fauconnier at the Académie de la Palette and for André Denuyer. But equally significant were the numerous visits to exhibitions and museums in Paris where the radical contemporary art of the time was displayed.

In 1915 Agnes Cleve married John Jon-And and the couple settled after the marriage in Stockholm and later in Bohuslän. The summer fun of Källviken by the Gullmarsfjorden became a meeting place for artists of the time and Agnes and John were often visited by the Russian-German couple Wassily Kandinsky and Gabriele Münter who were both attached to Der Blaue Reiter. It was a group representing Cubism and German Modernism and had a clear influence on Agnes Cleves's painting in the latter half of the 1910s.

During the 1910s and 20s Agnes and John travelled between Berlin, Paris and New York which were then central meeting places for the artistic avant-garde but she and her husband also painted in Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain and Turkey. In France, they found inspiration even far from Paris as, for example, in Cagnes.

Agnes Cleve had her debut exhibition in 1917 at Gummesons Konstgalerie in Stockholm and later she would participate in numerous exhibitions in Europe in, for example, Paris, Amsterdam and Copenhagen.

Her exhibition together with Sigrid Hjertén in Paris in 1937 was also mentioned.