Gösta Sandels

The modernist who died young.

Gösta Sandels was one of the Young Ones (De unga) and died in Spain aged 31. His pictures are full of vigorous colour and movement.

Gösta Sandels was born in 1887 in Gothenburg. He studied at the Valand School of Art under Carl Wilhelmson and then travelled to places including Paris and Copenhagen. There he encountered the new French painting, and like many young Scandinavian artists he was strongly influenced by Vincent van Gogh and Edvard Munch.

He took part in the exhibitions of the Young Ones (De unga) in Stockholm from 1909 to 1911. The group brought together young Swedish painters who wanted to break with National Romantic mood painting and work instead with pure colour and simplified forms. Sandels was among the most forceful colourists in the circle. His brush moves quickly, the outlines are heavy and the paint is often applied in thick, glowing strokes.

He painted landscapes, townscapes and people, and he travelled in search of new subjects and a stronger light. His life was short and partly marked by poverty. In 1918 he went to Spain and painted scenes of people and landscapes in fiery colour there, but he contracted typhus and died in Granada in early 1919, only 31 years old.

Because he died so young, his body of work is not very large. Even so, he is usually counted among the most important of the Young Ones and as a forerunner of the Gothenburg Colourists of the 1930s. Many of his paintings are in the Gothenburg Museum of Art and other Swedish museums.

• The avant-garde
• De unga and the breakthrough of Modernism