|
Svanberg, Max Walter
(b Malmö, 20 Feb 1912). Swedish painter and collagist. After taking lessons in decorative art at the Tekniska Skola in Malmö, from 1931 to 1932 he attended the Skanska Malerskola in Malmö. He failed to get into the Konstakademi in Stockholm and so went to the painting school run by Otte Sköld. In his work of the 1930s he experimented with various styles including Cubism. He also produced numerous fantastic works of grotesque human and animal metamorphoses that were influenced by Surrealism, for example Under the Wings of Paradise (pen-and-ink drawing, 1935; see 1979 exh. cat., p. 50). In the late 1930s he started to produce collages, such as Up-to-date Satire (1938; see 1979 exh. cat., p. 56), in which he used erotic imagery in an associative Surrealist manner. In 1943 Svanberg was a founder-member of the short-lived Surrealist MINOTAUR GRUPPEN, and in 1945 he had his first one-man show, at the Gummesons Konstgalleri in Stockholm. Around 1945 he was a founder-member and the main theorist of the IMAGINISTGRUPPEN. Svanberg’s work of the period drew on mythology and retained the grotesque organic mutations of the earlier works, for example Minotaur (gouache, 1946; Stockholm, Mod. Mus.). With the other Imaginists he contributed to the Surrealist exhibition held at the Galerie Aleby in Stockholm in 1949, and in 1953 the Imaginists had a show at the Galerie de Babylone in Paris. At this exhibition André Breton first noticed Svanberg’s work, and Svanberg then left the Imaginistgruppen to become directly involved with the Surrealist group around Breton. In 1954 he illustrated the third issue of the Surrealist review Médium: Communication surréaliste, in which Breton’s article ‘Hommage à Max Walter Svanberg’ appeared. In 1958 he illustrated Arthur Rimbaud’s Illuminations (Malmö, 1958), a favourite Surrealist text. In 1959 he was included in the Eros international Surrealist exhibition at the Galerie Daniel Cordier in Paris. He continued producing Surrealist gouaches, drawings and collages and also a few mosaic works using beads, such as Portrait of a Star III (1957–8; see 1979 exh. cat., p. 110). He did not actually visit Paris until 1964 when he was invited to exhibit at the Salon de Mai and there he met Breton and other French Surrealists. Numerous further exhibitions in Paris made his work widely known in France; works of the 1960s include In the Heart of the Garden (gouache, 1961; Stockholm, Mod. Mus.). In 1970 he produced set and costume designs for a performance of Molière’s Le Misanthrope at the Dramaten Teater in Stockholm. His later work changed very little, although collages such as Meeting between the Dark and the Light in the Wind of Butterflies (1975; see 1979 exh. cat., p. 142) were weakened by their over-emphatic eroticism.
|
|
There are more than 45,000 articles in The Grove Dictionary of Art.
To access the rest of this article, including the bibliography, subscribe to
www.groveart.com.
To find out more about this subject, click on a related article below and
subscribe to www.groveart.com
|
