The Varberg School: Bergh, Kreuger and Nordström on the west coast

The Varberg School is the name given to the three painters Richard Bergh, Nils Kreuger and Karl Nordström, who lived and worked in Varberg on the Halland coast in the 1890s, together in the years 1893–1896. There they abandoned French open-air painting for a simplified, atmospheric landscape painting with large areas of colour and clear outlines, influenced by Gauguin’s Synthetism. It was never a school in the proper sense, but three friends with a shared aim.

Facts

Three Opponents move to Halland

All three were among the young artists who in 1885 protested against the Academy of Arts and the following year formed the Artists’ Association (Konstnärsförbundet); read more in the guide to The Opponents and the Artists’ Association. They had studied in France, and Kreuger and Nordström had painted in the artists’ colony at Grez-sur-Loing, where they had learned open-air painting. Back in Sweden they wanted to create a new Swedish landscape art, built on their own observations of Swedish nature.

In the app’s data all three have Varberg as a place of activity: Nils Kreuger from 1890, Karl Nordström from 1892 and Richard Bergh from 1893, and all left the town in 1896. In Varberg they could work in peace, far from the capital’s art quarrels, close to a landscape they regarded as typically Swedish: bare cliffs, heathland, stone walls and the sea. The wholesale merchant Pontus Fürstenberg in Gothenburg bought their art and supported them.

From open-air painting to Synthetism

The most important impulse still came from France, but from a different direction. Paul Gauguin and his circle in Brittany had developed a painting with simplified forms, clear outlines and large, unified fields of colour. It was called Synthetism, because the painter was not to depict nature detail by detail but to summarise, to synthesise, his impressions. The Varberg painters learned of the movement through, among others, the artist Ivan Aguéli. Read more about the background in the guide to Post-Impressionism.

Synthetism brought a new aim. At Grez the point had been to capture the light as it actually looked. In Varberg it was about mood: not how the landscape looked, but how it felt. Dusk and the blue hour became important, because the light is then hovering, the colours muted and the outlines simple.

Karl Nordström: the fortress and the cliffs

Karl Nordström, born in 1855 on Tjörn in Bohuslän, was the most single-minded of the three and for a long time chairman of the Artists’ Association. In Varberg he painted the fortress, the cliffs and the bare Halland landscape with simplified, heavy forms and dark, saturated colours. Varberg Fortress of 1893, in the Gothenburg Museum of Art, is regarded as one of the principal works of Swedish art of the 1890s. The fortress lies heavy and dark against a pale sky, and the forms are simplified to almost flat surfaces.

Nils Kreuger: horses and low horizons

Nils Kreuger, born in 1858 in Kalmar, had horses as his favourite subject. He painted them in paddocks and on deserted roads, in the muted light of spring and autumn. In the spirit of the Varberg School he simplified the landscape into large areas and clear lines, and he often worked in tempera, which gives a matt surface and a subdued, harmonious range of colour. Later he returned again and again to Öland, where the low horizons, windmills and stone walls suited his way of building pictures.

Richard Bergh: mood as an idea

Richard Bergh, born in 1858, was the son of the landscape painter Edvard Bergh, who had studied in Düsseldorf and become a professor at the Academy of Arts; read about his father’s generation in the guide to the Düsseldorf School. The son instead became one of the rebels and a sharp writer, who maintained that art should express the artist’s inner life and not merely depict reality.

His best-known picture, Nordic Summer Evening, was painted around the turn of the century, a few years after the Varberg period, but carries its ideas. A man and a woman stand silently on a veranda before a glassy lake in the bright summer night. The only thing happening is that the evening is passing, and the distance between the two carries as much as the figures themselves. The painting belongs to the Gothenburg Museum of Art. In 1915 Bergh became head of the Nationalmuseum.

The legacy and where to see the works

The Varberg School was a short period, but it brought atmospheric painting into Swedish art. At the same time Prince Eugen and Eugène Jansson took up similar ideas in Stockholm, and literature moved in the same direction: in 1889 Verner von Heidenstam had attacked the grey realism of the 1880s and called for imagination and a national character. Prince Eugen’s The Cloud, with an enormous white cloud over a dark landscape, is one of the clearest examples of the new feeling for nature. Read more in the app’s period The Opponents and the 1890s.

The largest collection is in the Gothenburg Museum of Art, which built up its collection of Nordic fin-de-siècle painting on the gift from Pontus Fürstenberg; see the guide Art to see in Gothenburg. More works are in the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm. In Varberg you can walk around the fortress and the cliffs yourself and compare them with the pictures. Look for how the painters draw the landscape together into a few large forms, let the horizon lie low and choose the light of evening over that of midday.

How to recognise it

Exercise

Which three painters are counted as the Varberg School?