Isaac Grünewald

Isaac Grünewald
BENKOL, Public domain

The leader of the Young Ones.

Isaac Grünewald studied under Matisse and was the driving force of Swedish Expressionism. He was a professor at the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts and married to Sigrid Hjertén.

Isaac Grünewald was born in 1889 in Stockholm into a Jewish family of modest means. He studied at the Artists' Association school and in 1908 travelled to Paris. There he became a pupil at Henri Matisse's newly opened painting school, as did several other young Swedes. The encounter with Matisse and Fauvism was decisive for all his art.

As early as 1909 he was exhibiting with the Young Ones (De unga) in Stockholm, and he quickly became the group's most visible and combative member. He wrote, debated and provoked, and he was subjected to both ridicule and antisemitic attacks in the press. His painting is built on pure, strong colours, rhythmic outlines and simplified forms. His subjects are often Stockholm, portraits, interiors and landscapes, and the pictures have a decorative, almost musical movement. The Singing Tree of 1915 is one of the best-known examples.

In 1911 he married the painter Sigrid Hjertén, and the same year their son Iván, who also became an artist, was born. In 1915 the couple exhibited at the renowned Der Sturm gallery in Berlin together with Einar Jolin. In the 1920s the family lived in Paris again. The marriage ended in the 1930s, and Hjertén's last years were marked by mental illness.

Grünewald also worked in monumental painting, stage design and book illustration, and he wrote about art. In 1932 he became a professor at the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts, something that ten years earlier would have seemed unthinkable for the old rebel. There he influenced a whole generation of young painters.

He was killed in a plane crash near Oslo in 1946. Grünewald is regarded as the person who, more than anyone else, brought French modernism to Sweden and made Expressionism a force in Swedish art. He is represented in the Moderna Museet and the Nationalmuseum, among other collections.