ArtistSwedish
Brita Af Klercker
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Brita af Klercker was born on November 11, 1906 in Lund, the daughter of physician Kjell-Otto af Klercker of the noble Klercker family and his first wife Louise von Seth. She spent her entire long life in the same city, though her art drew repeatedly on the light of Provence and the streets of southern Sweden. She died in Lund on August 27, 2001, aged 94, having worked as a painter for more than six decades.
After completing her schooling, she trained at the Scanian school of painting before moving to Stockholm in the late 1920s to study at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts from 1929 to 1934. Among her teachers there was Isaac Grünewald, Matisse's former student and one of the central figures in Swedish modernism, and both Grünewald and Matisse left clear marks on her handling of colour - warm, direct, without the hedging of tonal realism. But the person she later credited most for her artistic development was the Austrian-Swedish painter Felix Hatz, whom she married in 1931. The marriage ended in 1942; the influence, she said, did not.
Her subjects were consistent across her career: people in streets, children, portrait sitters, the still life arranged on a table, the olive grove seen from a terrace. She worked in oil, watercolour, charcoal, and pastel. She made murals in Klippan and built up a regular practice of portraiture alongside the figurative and landscape work. "I am interested in people, I want to paint all kinds of people - not only the successful ones who commission portraits," she said in 1991, around the time of her exhibition "Inför människan" at Krognoshuset in Lund.
Her exhibitions concentrated in Scania, with solo shows in Lund, Malmö, and Stockholm. In 1981, Lunds konsthall gave her a retrospective covering her career to that point. Her monogram BK appears on works across a wide range of formats and subjects. In 1986, when Lund municipality inaugurated its annual cultural prize, af Klercker was the first recipient, in recognition of her sustained portrayal of Lund and its residents over half a century. Her work entered the permanent collections of Norrköpings konstmuseum, Malmö Museum, Ystad Art Museum, and was previously held at Nationalmuseum in Stockholm. Moderna museet also holds a documentary portrait of her as a painter.
At Auctionist, 22 lots are recorded, with sales concentrated at Crafoord Auktioner in Lund and Malmö, Garpenhus Auktioner, and Björnssons Auktionskammare - all Scanian houses, reflecting the regional depth of her collector base. The top result in our data is 4,730 SEK for a work titled "Schackspelare" (Chess Players); other recorded sales include a street scene with figures at 2,100 SEK, a moonscape at 1,300 SEK, and a female nude at 1,153 SEK. The market remains anchored to southern Sweden.