Olle Olsson-Hagalund

The Swedish artist Olle Olsson has been described as a naïvist, expressionist and a romantic. He was born and raised in the house his grandfather had built in the quaint neighbourhood of Hagalund, a suburb of Stockholm. It became the home for Olle, his wife Maja and their daughter Lena. By the end of 1960’s it was decided that the old fashioned painted wooden houses of Hagalund would be torn down to give space for an urban development more in “harmony” with the times. An era came to end and today only a handful of the original buildings remain. Olle Olsson fought hard and succeeded to save his home and today it is conserved as a museum open to the public. Eight blue imposing high-rises dominate the surroundings, a sad reminder of the short-sightedness of bygone technocrats.
Olle Olson, who added Hagalund to his name as a sign of his devotion to the place, documented the buildings, the streets, and the daily life of the inhabitants of his beloved Hagalund in his art. He also made several study trips abroad and it has been said that Olle and is wife Maja explored Paris without knowing a single word of French. They visited museums, sidewalk cafés, travelled by bus and metro all while intensively studying the people from all walks of life.

The Oscars Theatre in Stockholm became a second home for Olle when he was hired to create stage sets in the 1940s. He enjoyed the work immensely and became more of a stage coordinator spending time backstage, getting to know the actors, the musicians, and the dancers. He has said: "I enjoyed the work in the theatre, I liked painting paintings that people live in and can walk in. You get a new angle on reality".

The women who appear in Olle Olsson Hagalund’s paintings are not portrayed in the classical sense, but rather depicted as stories with titles such as Yellow hat, Girl in front of the mirror or as here - The Ballerina's Christmas. The artist tended to idealize the image of the woman he portrayed, she is beautiful with large dark eyes, well dressed, often with a hat and necklace, resting, seated, or standing, rarely at work. In the current painting offered at auction, the ballerina is seated at a small café table, perhaps at the theatre. A single paper cut-out Christmas decoration in the background bears witness to the fact that she has sacrificed something for this moment. Her steady gaze takes in the artist, anchoring her in a composition where the flattened perspective causes the Christmas decoration to flutter and the mirror to lean in on her.