ArtistSwedish
Bertil Landelius
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Sven Bertil Landelius was born in 1912 in Malmö and spent most of his working life in the Skåne and Blekinge regions of southern Sweden. After completing his schooling in 1930, he pursued art training in Copenhagen and at the Scanian School of Painting in Malmö before enrolling at the Högre konstindustriella skolan in Stockholm, where he studied from 1931 to 1935 and qualified as a drawing teacher. During these formative years he was particularly struck by the work of Paul Gauguin, from whom he drew an understanding of woodcut technique that would shape his graphic output alongside his painting.
Landelius made his public debut in 1931 at the Skåne Art Association's large autumn salon in Malmö, and his reputation grew steadily through the 1930s. He held his first solo exhibition in 1934 in Lund with the artists' group Aura, of which he became a member in 1937. His Stockholm debut followed in 1942 at Galleri Gummeson, where the critic Yngve Berg at Dagens Nyheter described him as "one of the strangest, one of the young, international Scandinavian painters shown in Stockholm." In 1940 he settled in Näsum, on the northern shore of Lake Ivö, a landscape that would feed his painting for decades.
Alongside his easel work Landelius built a substantial career as a monumental decorator. His first fresco commission came in 1947 at Folkets Hus in Malmö. Further commissions followed at the courthouses in Hörby (1951), Kristianstad (1952) and Sölvesborg (1966), as well as church decorations in Oppmanna Church (1955) and the Chapel of the Holy Cross in Kristianstad (1956). These large-scale public works established him as one of the most active practitioners of fresco technique in the province during the postwar period.
His paintings span city views, portraits, and figure subjects, but he returned most often to landscapes - autumn colour along the Kristianstad waterways and, especially, snow-covered winter scenery with its stripped-back palette. His 1977 retrospective at the museum in Kristianstad's Tyghuset reviewed a career of consistent engagement with the light and terrain of the Swedish south. He also served as a drawing teacher at the Teachers College in Kristianstad from 1962 to 1969. Landelius is represented in the collections of Nationalmuseum in Stockholm, Moderna Museet, Malmö Museum, and Regionmuseet Skåne.
On the Swedish auction market, Landelius appears primarily through regional houses in southern Sweden. Sikö Malmö has handled the largest share of his works at auction, followed by Ekenbergs and Garpenhus Auktioner, reflecting the geographic concentration of his collectors. His works at Auctionist span oil paintings of winter landscapes, a Copenhagen cityscape, an interior scene from 1970, and a marine motif - a consistent range that mirrors his broader output. Sale prices have been modest, with the highest recorded result in our database at 3,100 SEK, suggesting a local rather than national market presence.