Edvard Andersson - Works on Paper

After three highly successful auctions featuring works by Edvard Andersson, Stockholms Auktionsverk now presents yet another long-awaited collection from the artist’s estate. The auction comprises around twenty carefully selected works on paper, created over several different decades.
Edvard Andersson (1891–1967) lived at the very heart of modernism’s birth, breakthrough, and development. With an open mind and a deep interest in art, he closely followed the international art scene and continuously allowed himself to be inspired by new expressions. The result is a powerful oeuvre by a confident, curious, and experimental modernist.
Raised in the working-class districts of Helsingborg, Andersson showed a clear talent for drawing at an early age. His parents, who ran a tobacconist’s shop, managed to save enough for him to travel to Stockholm in 1916, where he trained as a drawing teacher at the Higher School of Industrial Art (today’s Konstfack). Already in 1918, at the age of 27, he held his first exhibition at Killbergs Konstsalong in Helsingborg. After graduating, he worked as a drawing teacher—a profession he maintained alongside his artistic practice. Having a permanent position gave him a freer, less financially pressured relationship to painting and enabled an independent and deeply personal artistic expression.
During the 1920s and 1930s, Andersson worked with a Cubist visual language. In the 1940s, he immersed himself in abstract painting, and during the 1950s he carried it forward with great confidence: vibrant compositions, decorative linear forms, and increasingly larger formats. Figurative elements often appear—stylised women or suggestive movements—that lend the works pulse and presence. While it is difficult to point to a single source of inspiration, clear parallels can be drawn to the art of Gösta Adrian-Nilsson and, more broadly, to the international avant-garde that Andersson actively followed.
In 1956, around 500 works by Andersson were shown in a major solo exhibition at the prestigious Den Frie Udstilling in Copenhagen. Skåne was and remained his home region: Helsingborg was his hometown, the dramatic cliffs of Hovs Hallar housed his summer studio, and in the fishing village of Knäbäck on Österlen he formed close ties with fellow artists and cultural figures. Andersson was one of those who quite literally lived with a pen in hand—according to his family, he drew both during Sunday dinners and while out walking. This relentless creativity bears witness to a strong inner drive, born equally of calling and curiosity. He was also deeply interested in philosophy, mathematics, and the people around him, lending his imagery a particular depth.

For a broader audience, Edvard Andersson long remained a relatively unknown figure in Sweden. In addition to exhibitions in, among other places, Stockholm and Malmö, his work was also recognised posthumously in Paris and Florida—and in several instances received greater attention abroad than at home, including coverage in leading publications such as La Quotidienne, Le Peintre, Nouveaux Jours, and La Revue.

This auction offers a rare opportunity to acquire works of strong provenance and clear art-historical resonance—sheets that reflect an entire life of searching, precision, and modernist freedom.