A Spatula & a Vague Idea

In the tormented life of the playwright Johan August Strindberg, the darkest time fell between the years 1893 and 1895. The government of his native Sweden--"the land of the nonadult, the disenfranchised, the mutes"--had tried to suppress his work as "blasphemy." Penniless, he settled in Paris with one summer suit to his name, for summer or winter wear. His second marriage was going badly, confirming his obsessive distrust of women who, he said, "admire swindlers, quack dentists, braggadocios of literature, peddlers of wooden spoons--everything mediocre." He himself was close to madness --a shabby, shuffling figure who dabbled in alchemy and black magic and once nearly committed suicide. He was addicted to absinthe, but he had one outlet that relieved him even more effectively than alcohol, Strindberg was a painter, and a startling one.

Automatic Art. Last week, 27 of his rarely seen oils were on display in the Swabian city of Ulm, the birthplace of Albert Einstein and one of the most culture-minded towns in West Germany. The two earliest paintings were rather routine seascapes; the last eleven seemed to anticipate the expressionism of Emil Nolde. It was the paintings in between that interested art historians most. Just as Germany has its Russian-born Kandinsky; just as France has Gustave Moreau; and just as the U.S. has Marin and Arthur Dove, so Sweden now has its entry in the great international game of whose artists got into the abstract act first.

Some of Strindberg's Paris paintings are depressing studies in black, grey and various shades of brown. Others are shrill compositions of hard whites and yellows, oranges and blues, set against a frame of green that is liberally sprinkled with scarlet and purple dots. In one, the colors blend into something resembling mother-of-pearl; another was obviously begun by rubbing together two pieces of cardboard wet with color to make what Strindberg called "automatic painting." The show is about to take the grand tour: when it closes in Ulm, it will move to the Museum of Modern Art in Paris, the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels and finally the British Museum.

"I Can't Explain." In 1894, Strindberg described in the avant-garde Revue Blanche his own brand of action painting. "I approach my painting with only a vague idea of what I want to present. Let's say: the image of a cool, benign forest opening towards the sea. Now I am beginning. With my spatula (I do not possess any brushes) I throw on colors, distributing them and mixing them right on the surface. I am mixing many colors, fourteen, fifteen perhaps, evolving a labyrinth of hues and shapes. Finally, the entire surface is swimming in color. I retreat a few steps to look at my work. For the devil's sake! I can't see any ocean. The luminescent opening in the center has become an enormous perspective of pink and bluish lights. And here--a white and pink spot. I can't explain how it got there and what it may mean."

A year later Strindberg wrote: "The painting I now imagine may at first resemble merely a chaos of colors. But gradually as one looks at them, shapes form themselves, some of them may resemble something familiar, and then again they may not. At last the work opens itself to the spectator. The act of creation comes alive. Better still, the painting continually assumes new meanings, changes with the light, never tires, rejuvenates itself because it has been given the gift of life."

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