Max Walter SVANBERG.

Lot 269
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Estimation :
15000 - 20000 EUR
Max Walter SVANBERG.
Untitled. 1951. Original gouache (440 x 365 mm), signed "max walters": under glass, wooden frame. Spectacular original gouache by the Swedish painter Max Walter Svanberg: it features a female nude on all fours in a room opening onto a night landscape and a richly adorned bird. Founder of the Imaginist group, close to CoBrA, Max Walter Svanberg (1912-1994) was discovered by André Breton in 1953 in a group exhibition. His work outside the established codes, whose erotic connotations were subject to scandal, immediately seduced the leader of the Surrealist movement. And Breton entrusted Max Walter Svanberg with the illustration of the third issue of Medium magazine in 1954, not without paying him tribute: "I count among the great encounters of my life that of Max Walter Svanberg's work, which allowed me to apprehend from within, by making me undergo it with all its force, what fascination can be. From the outset, it introduced me to that cone of light that is both blind and cloudy, at brief intervals arrowed with a dart, where vertigo reigns and where the being, in small steps, advances in spite of itself, driven by an irresistible attraction, sucked in by the absolute of danger" (Breton, Complete Works IV, p. 1049). The following year, Breton organized a solo exhibition of the artist's work at the Galerie de l'Étoile scellée, and then dedicated a fine article to him in Le Surréalisme et la Peinture in 1965: "Too bad, isn't it, for those who, with their eyes broken - in every sense - to the "chords" of the School of Paris, would be a little coy, arguing about supposed tonal dissonances that seem to me to be due to a different, quite Nordic orchestration of the Night. To be alarmed by this, one would also have to have never acceded to the meaning of this "à rebours" whose temptation Huysmans did not take with him... On the fringe of the plastic fashions that are all the rage today, there is Svanberg's way of being anywhere, but outside of time" (Le Surréalisme et la Peinture, Ibid., p. 642). Galerie 1900/2000 label on the back.
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