The Gothenburg Colourists: colour as subject

The Gothenburg Colourists is the name given to a number of painters who trained at the Valand School of Painting in Gothenburg in the 1920s and made their breakthrough in the 1930s, among them Ivan Ivarson, Ragnar Sandberg, Åke Göransson and Inge Schiöler. They painted the west coast’s cliffs, gardens and everyday scenes with thick, glowing paint built up in layers, and it was the colour rather than the subject that carried the picture. They were never a formal group.

Facts

Valand and Tor Bjurström

Since the 19th century Gothenburg had had an art school of its own, Valand, linked to the city’s museum. Its teachers had included Carl Larsson and Carl Wilhelmson. In the 1920s teaching was led by Tor Bjurström, who had himself studied under Henri Matisse in Paris. He taught that colour should not describe reality but build the picture and carry the feeling. After him Sigfrid Ullman took over.

Birger Simonsson too, one of the Young Ones of 1909 and himself a painter of the Bohuslän coast, taught at Valand and encouraged the students to trust colour and their own impressions. Tora Vega Holmström from Skåne was another model with her deep, glowing colour. Behind them also stood the west Swedish painter Carl Kylberg, whose dreamy colour painting showed how much feeling colour could carry.

Colour carries the feeling

The Colourists painted with thick paint applied layer upon layer, with a brush and sometimes with a palette knife, until the surface acquired an almost relief-like texture. The subjects were simple: the west coast’s cliffs, the fields of Hisingen, gardens, bathers and everyday scenes. The forms partly dissolve, and it is the colour that creates the space. A green field can glow against an orange, and a sky can be as dense as a cliff.

They learned from Matisse and Bonnard, from Post-Impressionism and from the Nordic Expressionists, but the result was something of their own. That two colours reinforce each other when placed side by side, especially opposite colours such as red and green or blue and orange, was the basis of their painting. The picture below shows how the same colour shifts depending on what surrounds it, and the guide to complementary colours explains the rest.

Four temperaments

Each had his own mode of expression. Ivan Ivarson, born in 1900, was dramatic and heavy. His colours often glow out of a dark ground, and the influence of Edvard Munch and Ernst Josephson is usually stressed. Ragnar Sandberg, born in 1902, was playful and rhythmic. He painted ball games, football on grass pitches, children playing and bathers, with small figures moving freely across the canvas, and for a long time he was the one who carried the Colourists’ legacy forward as a teacher.

Inge Schiöler was bright and lyrical and, in periods when illness let up, painted strong pictures from Koster and the Bohuslän coast. Åke Göransson, born in 1902, was introverted and obscure. He painted people in domestic settings and landscapes in dark, glowing colours, often blue, red and violet, and exhibited very little during his lifetime. The group’s history is also a history of illness and short lives: Ivarson died in 1939 and Göransson in 1942, both young.

A label, not a group

The Gothenburg Colourists had no programme, no manifesto and did not exhibit as a closed association. The name is a label that critics and art historians attached to painters with the same training and a similar view of colour. In that way they differ from the Halmstad Group, which was formed at about the same time as a real group and stayed together for decades. The two were the most talked-about new movements in Swedish art of the 1930s, but they went in different directions: Gothenburg towards colour and feeling, Halmstad towards Cubism and dreams.

For a long time Colourism was seen as Gothenburg’s own painting, almost a local concern. Today it is seen rather as part of a broader European tradition, in which colour after Matisse and Bonnard came to carry both form and feeling. Read more about the period in the app’s period The 1930s: Colourists and Surrealists.

Where to see them

The Gothenburg Museum of Art on Götaplatsen has the largest collection of the Colourists’ work, in the same building as the Varberg School landscapes and Bergh’s Nordic Summer Evening. The guide Art to see in Gothenburg covers the museum and the rest of the city. The Colourists are also at the Moderna Museet and often turn up at auctions and in homes on the west coast. Anyone who wants to see the landscape they painted can travel out to Hisingen, Tjörn or Koster.

What to look for

Squint in front of a Colourist painting. The details vanish, but the fields of colour and their contrasts remain, and you can see how the picture is built. Then look for pairs of opposite colours lying close together, and for places where the paint is so thick that it casts little shadows of its own. Finally compare with a painting by Matisse, for example Dance, and see how the Colourists made the surface denser and more varied than their French model.

How to recognise it

Exercise

Who was the teacher of most of the Gothenburg Colourists at Valand?