Lennart Rodhe

The Men of 1947 and Swedish Concrete art.

Lennart Rodhe was one of the Men of 1947 and created large public works, including those in the post office in Östersund.

Lennart Rodhe was born in 1916 in Stockholm. He studied at Otte Sköld’s painting school, an important training ground for young modernists in Stockholm in the 1930s and 1940s. During the war years he worked his way towards an increasingly simplified and ordered pictorial language.

In 1947 he took part in the exhibition Young Art in Stockholm, where a group of young painters showed Concrete art, that is, art built from pure forms and colours. The participants were nicknamed the Men of 1947. Rodhe’s pictures were nonetheless rarely wholly abstract. He often started from real subjects, such as landscapes, people and objects, and transformed them into rhythmic patterns of lines and fields of colour.

Rodhe worked extensively in public art and monumental painting, believing that art should be part of everyday surroundings. His large decorations in the post office in Östersund are among the best-known examples. He also produced a great deal of printmaking, textile art and mosaic.

He was an influential teacher and professor at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm and shaped many younger artists. Rodhe died in 2005. He is regarded as one of the most important Swedish artists of the generation that brought Concrete art to Sweden and gave it a personal, lyrical tone.

• The post-war era
• The post-war era and Concretism