Agnes Cleve
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Study for "S:t Eriksbron".
Signed A. Cleve. Executed in the 1910s. Canvas mounted on panel, approximately 36 x 46 cm.
Provenance
Bukowskis Auctions, Stockholm, Modern Art + Design 608, 17–21 May, 2018, cat. no. 372.
More information
In 1915, the newlyweds Jon-And and Cleve settled in a studio at S:t Eriksgatan 63 in Stockholm. The studio was located on Kungsholmsstrand, next to Sankt Eriksbron, with the neighbourhood Atlasområdet on the other side of the water.
Cleve only had to look out of the studio window to find motifs that were ideally suited to be distilled and interpreted according to the principles of Futurism and Cubism.
The advent of the modern machine age, illustrated by the steam locomotive, had already served as the subject of Joseph Mallord William Turner's ‘Rain, Steam and Speed - The Great Western Railway’ in 1844. In 1877, Claude Monet executed his famous suite of paintings depicting the Gare Saint-Lazaire in Paris. In these paintings, the frustrated steam locomotives are wrapped in clouds of smoke that linger beneath the station's glass-clad cast-iron architecture.
In the catalogue number, which is a pre-study for a painting from 1915-16 (cf. Bukowski Auktioner, Familjen Andersson Samling (Andersson Family Collection) H042, 2012, cat. no. 35), Cleve has allowed the clouds of smoke to spread across the entire canvas, where they become stylised building blocks of the modernist composition. The motif, inspired by the fragmented pictorial space of Cubism, is given additional tension by Futurism's focus on movement and energy as the train rushes under the three arched spans of the Sankt Eriksbron bridge.
Artist
Agnes Cleve was born in Uppsala in 1876. After completing her secondary education, she studied art at the School of Arts and Crafts in Stockholm. When she started a family she moved to Gothenburg and studied art at Valand where Carl Wilhelmsson was her teacher. After a difficult divorce, Angnes moved to Paris in 1913, where she studied for Le Fauconnier together with John Jon-And. They eventually got married, and later moved to Stockholm and settling in Gothenburg. The couple often stayed at their summer cottage by the Gullmar Fjord, a place called Källviken, which became a gathering point for several artists, including the couple Gabriele Münter and Wassily Kandinsky. Kandinsky was, in his homecountry Germany, the leader of the group “Der Blaue Reiter”, a group which advocated for cubism and German modernism. It is without a doubt that they influences Agnes Cleve and Jon-And. Cleve has done several artists trips to paint Sandhamn, Skagen, London, Italy, Holland, Belgium, North Africa, Spain, Turkey, and the USA (where he even lived for a period). In Cleve’s collection, one can find figure paintings, window views, portraits, cityscapes, and west coast genres. Agnes Cleve's art was exhibited across Europe (Paris, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, among others). There was a lot of talk surrounding her exhibition together with none other than Sigrid Hjertén in Paris in 1937, and she was classified by a German critic as Sweden’s most influential artist during the first half of the 20th century. She is currently represented by the National Museum, Gothenburg’s Art Museum, Gävle Museum, Norrköping’s Museum to name a few.
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