Vera Nilsson

Vera Nilsson
Bub's, Public domain

The powerful Swedish Expressionist.

Vera Nilsson painted her daughter, the city and later political and moral subjects. Her colour is forceful and heavy.

Vera Nilsson was born in 1888 in Jönköping. She trained in Stockholm and Copenhagen and then travelled to Paris, where she encountered Cubism and French modernism. She came to belong to the circle around the Young Ones (De unga) and early Swedish Expressionism, but her style was harsher and heavier than that of many of the others.

She painted with forceful, often thick paint and firm, almost sculptural forms. There is no lightness in her townscapes and landscapes. The colour is charged and dark, and the forms feel built rather than sketched. She travelled widely and painted in France, Spain and the Netherlands, among other places.

In 1925 she had a daughter, Catharina, whom she called Cajsa. For many years her daughter was her most important subject. The pictures of the child eating, playing or sitting still are not sweet but serious and respectful, and they are among the best-known works she produced. She was a single mother, which was unusual and difficult at the time.

From the 1930s her art became increasingly moral and political. She reacted against fascism, war and greed and made large compositions with allegorical and social subjects. She also worked on monumental art.

Vera Nilsson died in 1979. For a long time she was somewhat overlooked beside her male contemporaries, but today she is counted among the most independent-minded Swedish Expressionists. Her works are in the Moderna Museet and the Nationalmuseum, among other collections.