185. HILDING LINNQVIST. “Summer flowers against china screen”.

Oil on panel, 72 x 53 cm. Monogram signed GOHL.

PROVENANCE
Bukowskis Auctions May 2001, cat. no. I'm 64.

EXHIBITED
Colour and Form, 20 Sept. - Oct 7. in 1969.

Hilding Linnqvist went her own way early on. He sought his way towards the intimate and the human, and was inspired by the naïve unschooled. Using a refined colorite and other formal merits, he and his generational peers lifted the naivist painting to a higher plane. They created a painting with great heart, tenderness and warmth of feeling that was at the same time playful, factual and unpredictable.

Hilding Linnqvist was born in Stockholm in 1891, the only son of two folk school teachers. During the 1910s he developed, together with fellow painters such as Eric Hallström and Axel Nilsson, a special poetic and quietly romantic style within Swedish painting, which later became known as naivism. One of the naivists' hallmarks was to portray the unstructured reality just as it was. They saw the world with new eyes, were inspired by the unspoiled and found new beauty values where no one else had seen them before. At the same time as the different modernist genres replaced each other on the continent, a trend flourished in Sweden that came to be one of our country's most genuine and appreciated art. Today, about a hundred years after the breakthrough of naivism, we clearly see its special place in the history of European art.

From the beginning of the 1930s Linnqvist was one of the leading artists in the group Colour and Form, and thereafter exhibited regularly at the gallery of the same name until his passing in 1984. At the same time as Linnqvist was a great Stockholm lover, he was also an avid world traveler, and the long trips abroad helped shape him as a person as well as an artist.

Developing a motif attracts many artists, and this was particularly true of Linnqvist. During his long and highly productive career, he came to revisit several themes and topics. In the auction's two paintings “Summer flowers against the Chinese screen” and “Summer, Gröndal” we find two of the artist's beloved motifs; one a showy floral still life, and the area around his studio on Sjöbjörnsvägen in Gröndal, where he was active from the 1950s.

Among the Swedish naivists, Hilding Linnqvist is the most complicated and the most literary. He developed into an artist of surprises with a special ability to see beauty where no one else saw it. But sometimes beauty can be immediate, emotion-filled, and swarming. It is difficult not to be struck by those feelings when faced with the two paintings in the auction, which together capture the image of Swedish summer.