The Halmstad Group: Swedish Surrealism and Cubism

The Halmstad Group was an artists’ group formed in 1929 by six young men from the area around Halmstad: the brothers Erik and Axel Olson, Sven Jonson, Esaias Thorén, Waldemar Lorentzon and Stellan Mörner. They began with Cubism and in the 1930s became Sweden’s foremost Surrealists, with deserted beaches, floating objects and a sharp, cold light. The group stayed together for more than fifty years, and its history is shown at the Mjellby Art Museum.

Facts

Six artists from Halland

The Halmstad Group was formed in 1929, and its six members were all young and from the same district. Several of them had studied in Paris in the 1920s. There Erik Olson was impressed by Cubism and by Fernand Léger, and others in the group studied under André Lhote, who ran a popular painting school for foreigners. Together they wanted to bring international Modernism into Swedish art.

That an entire modern artists’ group emerged in a medium-sized town in Halland, and not in Stockholm, was unusual. It gave the group an identity of its own. Halland’s beaches, sand dunes and plains came to lie behind many of their pictures, even when the subjects became dreamlike.

The Cubist beginning

In the first years the group worked in a strict, constructive Cubist style. Landscapes and still lifes were built up from geometric forms, and the colours were often limited and cool. The pictures resemble Léger’s machine-like Cubism more than the early fragmented forms of Picasso and Braque. Read more about the background in the guide What is Cubism?

The dream takes over

In the 1930s the group turned to Surrealism. The inspiration came from Giorgio de Chirico, Salvador Dalí and René Magritte. The pictures often show deserted beaches, objects floating in the air or standing in the wrong place, and a sharp, cold light that makes everything feel unreal. Dalí’s The Persistence of Memory and Magritte’s The Treachery of Images show the kind of painting they encountered.

The Halmstad Group’s Surrealism nevertheless differed from the French. The Swedish painters rarely worked with automatic drawing or chance methods. Instead they painted carefully and clearly, with distinct outlines and almost classical compositions. The dream was not wild and chaotic but still, cold and enigmatic, and it often took place in an easily recognisable landscape. Esaias Thorén became one of the most poetic, with strange objects and figures in desolate rooms. More about the movement can be found in the guide What is Surrealism?

Copenhagen 1935 and the reception

An important occasion was the exhibition Kubisme–Surrealisme in Copenhagen in 1935, where the Halmstad Group was shown together with Danish artists such as Vilhelm Bjerke-Petersen and Wilhelm Freddie. The exhibition showed that Surrealism had gained a foothold in the Nordic countries and that there was a Nordic variant of its own, more bound up with landscape and light. The same year the group exhibited Surrealist works in Sweden.

The reception at home was mixed. Many critics found Surrealism incomprehensible, and modern art still found it hard to reach a broad public. The group nevertheless continued to exhibit together and gradually came to be seen as a pioneer of modern art in Sweden.

A group for more than fifty years

The most remarkable thing about the Halmstad Group is perhaps that it stayed together for so long, with the same six members. It was never formally dissolved, and the six exhibited together well into the postwar period, although each went his own way. Erik Olson turned to religious and spiritual subjects and made church art, Stellan Mörner became a stage designer, Sven Jonson painted cosmic landscapes and Thorén moved towards a freer, abstract painting. Erik Olson died in 1986 and Thorén in 1981.

The group’s collective history is at the Mjellby Art Museum outside Halmstad, which is devoted entirely to it and preserves artworks, letters and documents. In Halmstad, Carl Milles’s sculpture Europa and the Bull also stands in Stora torg.

Surrealism in the rest of Sweden

The Halmstad Group was not alone for long. During the Second World War artists such as Endre Nemes and Peter Weiss came to Sweden as refugees and brought Central European Modernism with them. In Malmö the Minotaur group was formed in 1943 and the Imaginists in 1946, with, among others, Max Walter Svanberg, whose fantastic female figures were noticed by the Surrealists’ leader André Breton. At the same time the Gothenburg Colourists were working with colour on the west coast. Both movements are described in the app’s period The 1930s: Colourists and Surrealists.

Look at the light when you see a painting by the Halmstad Group. The shadows are often long and sharp, as in de Chirico’s empty squares, and the sky is clear. Then look for what does not fit: an object that floats, a scale that is wrong or something standing where it does not belong.

How to recognise it

Exercise

In what year was the Halmstad Group formed?