Peter Tillberg

Will you pass, Peter?

In 1972 Peter Tillberg painted Will You Be Profitable, Little Friend?, a school class in a grey classroom. The picture became a symbol of the social criticism of the 1970s.

Peter Tillberg was born in 1946 in Stockholm and trained as an artist in the 1960s. He belonged to the generation influenced by photorealism and by the political debate of the time, and he quickly became one of the most talked-about young painters in Sweden.

His best-known work is Will You Be Profitable, Little Friend? of 1972, in Moderna Museet in Stockholm. It shows a school class in a sterile classroom. The pupils sit silent and bored at their desks under cold fluorescent lights. The title alludes to the idea that school should merely produce people who are useful to the economy. The painting became a symbol of 1970s criticism of school and society, and it is one of the most widely reproduced Swedish paintings of the period.

Tillberg painted in a precise, almost photographic style, but the pictures are not mere depictions. The light, the empty spaces and the stiff figures create an atmosphere of surveillance and loneliness. He also painted large pictures of urban settings, landscapes and people in groups, often with the same coolness and the same questions about how society shapes the individual.

Later his painting became freer and more ambiguous, with subjects hovering between dream and reality. Tillberg has continued to exhibit for several decades. For posterity, however, he remains above all the artist behind the classroom picture, a work many Swedes recognise even if they do not know who painted it.