“The Town”
August Strindberg excelled in many arts. Though he came to notoriety for his plays, he was also a visual artist, and today his paintings continually sell at record high prices.
“The Town” is an oil on canvas painting by the Swedish artist, August Strindberg, from 1903. Strindberg was a playwright, novelist, poet, and painter. He is called the father of modern Swedish literature.
In this piece, Strindberg paints a city landscape. The city is unnamed but has been interpreted as Stockholm, Strindberg’s hometown. It is all aglow but is small in comparison with the rest of the canvas, where Strindberg paints the sea and sky, which is overwhelmingly dark and gray. The city is bright and yellow and sits back on the horizon, with spots of green flanking the buildings. The tallest city building and spots of green reflect on the water. Otherwise, the water is dark, reflecting the skies above. Waves gently crash into the shoreline in the foreground. Strindberg painted this entirely with a palette knife. It is a dark and dramatic painting.
In the 1870s, Strindberg turned to the visual arts and began painting as an alternate means of expression, which gave him brief but necessary periods away from writing. He used painting as a tool to help him manage periods of writer’s block. Though he was familiar with contemporary art, Strindberg was untrained and self-taught. 1903, the year that Strindberg painted this, he was planning on writing a cycle of plays covering the arc of world history. Though he did write five short plays on major historical figures, including Socrates and Jesus, the grand plan never came to fruition. Alternatively, he was very productive in terms of paintings that year, alluding to the notion that he may have had writer’s block, planning out such a lofty project, and turned to painting.
Strindberg thought of himself as a Symbolist, conveying emotional states to his art. It has been interpreted that this painting, with the visual insignificance of the city against the large expanse of dark seas and skies, channels a feeling of anxiety, insecurity, and insignificance.
Strindberg made his first painting in 1872, which is unfortunately lost to history. He painted mostly landscapes and seascapes that were unique and radical in their expressionism style and lack of formality. He embraced spontaneity, creating truly original works of art. Today, 117 paintings by him are known to exist and sell for extremely high prices.
“The Town” is currently in the collections of the Nationalmuseet Sweden in Stockholm, Sweden.
For more on August Strindberg, please visit his short biography here.
You can find more artists to learn about here.
