Nils Dardel
The decadent dandy.
Nils Dardel was a man of the world in Paris who painted elegant, refined and often macabre scenes. The Dying Dandy is his best-known picture.
Nils Dardel was born in 1888 at Bettna in Södermanland into a noble family. His grandfather Fritz von Dardel was a draughtsman and courtier. He studied briefly at the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm but left in 1910 for Paris, which became his base for much of his life. He exhibited with the Young Ones (De unga) but early on pursued a distinctive, more refined line of his own.
His style is elegant and clearly drawn, with flat areas of colour, thin lines and often stylised, almost doll-like figures. He drew on Japanese woodcuts, Persian miniatures and French fashion illustration. Beneath the surface there is often something menacing, ironic or macabre, such as murder, jealousy and death.
The Dying Dandy of 1918 is his best-known painting. A pale young man lies stretched out in a woman's lap, surrounded by grieving friends in pastel colours. The picture has been interpreted as a depiction of forbidden love and of life in bohemian circles. When it was sold at auction in 2012, it became the most expensive Swedish painting up to that time. Crime passionnel of 1921, a scene of jealousy, is in the Moderna Museet.
Dardel was close to the art collector Rolf de Maré, who founded the Ballets Suédois in Paris, and he designed the sets and costumes for the ballet Maison de fous (The Madhouse) in 1920. In 1921 he married Thora Klinckowström. He travelled widely, to Asia among other places and later to Latin America, drawing and painting on his journeys. He led a hectic life of parties and heavy drinking, and his health was poor.
He died in New York in 1943. For a long time he was seen as a charming but somewhat superficial decorator, but today he is regarded as one of the most original Swedish modernists, an artist who combined elegance with darkness and alienation.