Helge Linden

Helge Linden (1897-1961) grew up in a family interested in art and music. At the age of 25 he started at Carl Wilhelmson's painting school in Stockholm. He spent a lot of time in Italy and France, where he was influenced by the art of Cézanne and Gauguin. In Italy he was inspired by Quattrocento painting and Italian architecture.

In his paintings, Helge Linden simplified the structure of the images into austere forms, and combined this with a melancholy tone - often in twilight or strong backlighting. Along with Torsten Jovinge, he is regarded as one of the foremost representatives of Swedish Purism. The Purists were characterized by stripped-down details and large, complete surfaces. Helge Linden himself said that his art was a “synthesis on a realistic basis”.

Helge Linden's big breakthrough came in 1938. Shortly afterwards he moved back to Umeå and quickly became a driving force in the city's art and cultural life. Helge Linden was active in the local art scene. He was of great importance to many of the county's young artists; as a critic and debater - as a role model, support and inspiration. Helge Linden became a role model for young adepts who surrounded him in Umeå, including the now highly regarded Vera Frisén.

During the 1940s and 50s, Helge Linden was one of Norrland's most acclaimed painters with considerable success. He often chose simple, everyday subjects. His paintings are characterized by austere, pure forms that are often surrounded by dark contours and muted colours.

In his final years, Helge Linden dreamed of creating a representative collection of Swedish art in Umeå. He wanted to give the inhabitants of Västerbotten art experiences, to stimulate and inspire future generations of artists.

These ambitions were never realized before Helge Linden's death in 1961. But in the same year, an external initiative was taken, which resulted in the “Stiftelsen Helge Lindes Minne" ("Helge Linden Memorial Foundation”), which today consists of about 500 works of art and has been managed by Västerbottens Museum since 1995. The collection includes several museum works by Helge Linden but also by Öyvind Fahlström, Carl Fredrik Reuterswärd, Lena Cronqvist, Ulrik Samuelson and Marie-Louise Ekman.

From a review in VK (Västerbottens-Kuriren, Swedish
newspaper) ,Umeå 2013, about Västerbottens Museum's retrospective Helge Linden exhibition:

“The earliest works come from the time immediately after Carl Wilhelmsson's painting school, when Helge Linden traveled and lived in Italy, Germany and the south of France and painted with unmixed colors and more mobile and detailed brushwork than in the artistic language that would later become his strong signature - the tight forms and clean surfaces, a painting that led to Linden's big breakthrough in the late 1930s.

With his black contours and pure forms, Helge Linden attracted international attention and became a representative of a new way of interpreting the Norrland landscape and Västerbotten's coastal countryside - closer to the authentic environments, the plains and harbour basins, than in previous paintings, which Helge Linden felt used the tourist's gaze too much on Norrland nature.’
From Västerbottenskuriren 14 June 2013.