Otto G. Carlsund

Sweden's pioneer of Concrete art.

Otto G. Carlsund worked with Léger in Paris and was a member of the Art Concret group. In 1930 he organised a major exhibition of modern art in Stockholm.

Otto G. Carlsund was born in 1897 in St Petersburg into a Swedish family. He studied painting in several places in Europe and came to Paris in 1924. There he became a pupil of Fernand Léger. From Léger he learned to build pictures from pure, clearly defined forms, and he became one of the first Swedes to turn entirely to non-figurative painting.

In 1930 he was a member of the small international group Art Concret in Paris, together with Theo van Doesburg and Jean Hélion, among others. The group wanted to create an art that represented nothing and consisted solely of lines, planes and colours, constructed almost mathematically. The term Concrete art, which later became important in Sweden, comes from here.

That same year Carlsund organised a large exhibition of French and international avant-garde art in connection with the Stockholm Exhibition of 1930. It included works by Léger, Mondrian and Le Corbusier, among others. The exhibition was a heavy financial setback and was mostly ridiculed in the press. Carlsund struggled with the debts for many years and painted less thereafter.

Instead he made his living as an art critic and writer and worked to spread knowledge of modern art. He died in 1948. His early Concrete painting became important for the post-war generation, and he is now seen as a pioneer of Swedish abstract art.