ISAAC GRÜNEWALD. “The Blue Boat”.

Oil on canvas, 84 x 102 cm, including frame 100 x 120 cm. Signed Grünewald.

PROVENANCE
Swedish Club, Paris. Gift from the artist in 1929.

Isaac Grünewald grew up in Stockholm as the son of a farm dealer and antiques buyer. Despite the simple origins, he received a structured schooling and showed early artistic talent. Already at the age of sixteen he had his first exhibition — in the breakfast room of the Southern Latin School — where he showed both oil paintings and drawings. In the same year he joined the School of the Artists' Association, where Karl Nordström taught. After three years of study, in 1908 he went with his friend Einar Jolin to Paris, where he studied for three winters at the newly founded Académie Matisse. He spent his summers in Sweden.

The meeting with Henri Matisse was decisive. Matisse's sense of colour and stylistic courage made a strong impression on the young Grünewald and soon eclipsed the earlier influence of Cézanne. In 1909 he met Sigrid Hjertén, who was also studying for Matisse, and they married shortly afterwards. In the years leading up to the end of World War I, Grünewald worked in his studio in Stockholm. A return visit to Paris in 1913 led to a meeting with Pablo Picasso — yet another encounter with the history of art.

Grünewald was an early driving force in the breakthrough of Swedish modernism. In 1912 he published a high-profile talk in which he pleaded for simplification and clarity in the visual arts — an expressivism in which the essential would be crystallized by reduction. He did not paint the immediate moment, but what remained in the memory. It could take several years before a visual impression was refined into a finished painting.

By the time Grünewald returned to Paris in 1921, where he maintained an atelier until the beginning of World War II, the art scene had changed. The new objectivity — marked by clear form and restrained colour — had become influential, and Grünewald also adapted his painting. The previous rainbow-colored palette was replaced by more earthy tones and volume. It was during this period, after a trip to Toulon in the south of France, that Club's painting The Blue Boat was added.

Together with Sigrid Hjertén, Grünewald travelled frequently in the south of France and Italy, now by car — something that attracted attention in artist circles. When they eventually returned to Sweden, he became both a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts, a member of the Academy of Fine Arts and started his own painting school in the spirit of Matisse.

In The Blue Boat, as in many of Grünewald's foremost works, the landscape serves as a stage image. A diagonal composition balances warm and cold colors: the warm ones for activity, the cold ones for rest — like actors on a theater stage. Scenic thinking reappeared in his life; he performed several scenographic commissions in Stockholm during the 1920s and 30s.

Grünewald was also a well-known and appreciated guest of the Club. He designed the label for the punch of Karl XII of the Club — a detail which can still be seen today on Hallin's portrait of “Swiss Théodore “, restaurateur on Rue de la Chaussée-d'Antin. Another imprint from his Paris days is the decorated pillar in the bar at La Coupole — a reminder of Grünewald's role in the centre furrow of the international avant-garde.

All lots in this themed auction sold without reserve.