Edvard Andersson

In recent years, Stockholms Auktionsverk has sold, with great success, a collection of works by the relatively unknown modernist Edvard Andersson. We are now delighted to present further works from the artist’s estate.

Edvard Andersson lived from 1891 to 1967 and during his lifetime witnessed the birth, breakthrough and development of modernism. With an open mind and a keen interest in the essence of art and its many-faceted forms of expression, he actively followed, and drew inspiration from, the international art scene throughout his life. The result is a striking oeuvre by an assured and experimental modernist. Edvard Andersson is an artist who deserves to be brought to the fore and admired. Growing up in the working-class district of Helsingborg, Andersson showed a pronounced talent for drawing from an early age. His parents, who ran a tobacconist’s, managed to save enough money to enable him to move to Stockholm in 1916 to train as a drawing teacher at Högre Konstindustriella Skolan, today Konstfack.

In 1918, at the age of 27, Andersson held his first exhibition at Killbergs Konstsalong in Helsingborg. After graduating in the capital, he began working as a drawing teacher, a profession he would maintain alongside his artistic practice. This allowed him to approach painting without constraint and with less financial pressure, and the result was a free and independent mode of expression. During the 1920s and 1930s, Andersson worked extensively with portraiture, moving towards a Cubist idiom. This in turn led him to explore abstract painting in the 1940s, which he confidently embraced to the full in the 1950s. Vibrant abstract compositions with decorative linear forms now filled ever larger canvases. These often also contain figurative elements, such as stylised women or suggestive movement.

To the wider public, Edvard Andersson remained an unrecognised talent during his lifetime. In addition to the exhibitions mentioned, he exhibited in Stockholm and Malmö, among other places, and posthumously in Paris and Florida. Andersson received more attention abroad than in Sweden, featuring in leading journals such as ‘La Quotidienne’, ‘Le Peintre’, ‘Nouveaux Jours’ and ‘La Revue’.

Edvard Andersson

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