Bror Hjorth

The modernist of folk art.

Bror Hjorth drew inspiration from Dalecarlian painting and folk art and made sculptures and reliefs in wood. His home in Uppsala is a museum.

Bror Hjorth was born in 1894 in Marma in Uppland and grew up in the countryside. The farming community of his childhood, with its fiddle music, legends and folk art, became the foundation of all his art. He started out as a woodcarver and trained in Stockholm and Copenhagen. In the 1920s he studied in Paris under the sculptor Antoine Bourdelle.

He worked as both sculptor and painter. His figures are sturdy and simplified, often in painted wood or in relief, and the colours are bright and inspired by folk art, akin to Dalecarlian painting and kurbits. His subjects are fiddlers, dancing couples, lovers, the Näck water spirit, children and mothers. Everything is charged with joie de vivre and eroticism, but also with seriousness.

Hjorth made many public works. Among the best known is the altarpiece in Jukkasjärvi Church in Lapland of 1958, a large, colourful relief that depicts, among other things, the revivalist preacher Lars Levi Laestadius. He also made sculptures and reliefs for parks, schools and hospitals. From 1949 to 1959 he was a professor at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm.

Hjorth died in 1968. His home and studio in Uppsala is now a museum, Bror Hjorths Hus. He is regarded as one of the best-loved Swedish artists of the 20th century and as the one who most clearly united modernism with Swedish folk tradition.

• The interwar years
• The 1930s: colourists and Surrealists