Karl Nordström
Landscape painter of the Varberg school.
Karl Nordström was one of the Opponents and led the Varberg school in the 1890s. His landscapes of Halland are simple and charged.
Karl Nordström was born in 1855 on Tjörn in Bohuslän. He studied in Stockholm and travelled to France in 1881. There he came to the artists’ colony in Grez-sur-Loing and learned Impressionist plein-air painting together with other young Swedish painters.
After returning home he became one of the driving forces of the Opponents and later of the Artists’ Association, which he chaired for many years. He was among the artists most determined to create a new Swedish landscape art, based on their own observation of Swedish nature.
From 1893 to 1896 he lived in Varberg together with Richard Bergh and Nils Kreuger. There they developed what is known as the Varberg school. Nordström painted the fortress, the rocks and the barren landscape of Halland with simplified, heavy forms and dark, saturated colours. Varberg Fortress of 1893 is one of his best-known works. Many of his pictures from the period are in the Gothenburg Museum of Art and the Nationalmuseum.
The style is often called synthetic. This means that he did not copy nature detail by detail but summarised it in large areas and lines in order to convey a mood. He was inspired by Gauguin and French Symbolism.
Later he lived in the Stockholm area and at Drottningholm, where he died in 1923. He was married to the artist Tekla Lindeström. Nordström is regarded as one of the most important Swedish landscape painters around the turn of the 20th century.