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Eric Hallström
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Eric Hallström was born on November 22, 1893, in Stockholm and grew up in the city's industrial outskirts - the working-class neighborhoods, factory yards, and canal edges that most painters of his generation left well alone. It was exactly this material he returned to again and again: Rörstrands porcelain factory, Haga park, Karlberg's riding school, the ice at Tegelviken. He studied at the Technical School and then at Wilhelmsson's painting school in Stockholm, where he absorbed enough of the craft to work fluently without abandoning the slightly off-kilter perspective that would define his best work.
Hallström made his debut in 1917, and the paintings from that year and the next are among the most concentrated of his career. "På ön" (1917, Norrköpings museum) and works from the Karlberg cycle show a painter translating memory into picture with the compression of someone working hard to hold an image before it dissolves. The naivism in these early pictures is not ignorance of technique but a deliberate flattening of detail in favor of narrative charge - the kind of story that requires you to look for a few seconds before the small drama inside the frame becomes visible.
His connection to Ångermanland came through reading Pelle Molin's collection "Ådalens poesi", prose poems about the forest, river, and people of that northern province. Hallström traveled to Ångermanland to see the dark forests, the undulating horizon, the rivers and the timber rafting firsthand, then painted the experience back in his Stockholm studio. These works carry a different register from the Stockholm pictures - a density of atmosphere in place of anecdote.
In the 1920s, travels to southern France and Italy shifted the palette considerably. Contact with the light of the Mediterranean and with emerging currents of new objectivity pulled his work toward cleaner surfaces and a cooler handling of color. The naive storytelling receded. Then in the 1930s it returned in a changed form: stronger colors, more expressive figure work, a vitalist energy that ran through his later canvases until his death in Danderyd on June 17, 1946.
In 1932, Hallström was among the co-founders of Galleri Färg och Form in Stockholm. His work is represented in the collections of Moderna museet ("Nyårsafton på Skansen", 1919), Göteborgs konstmuseum, and Malmö Museum.
On the Nordic auction market, Hallström's 19 lots on Auctionist have passed through Bukowskis Stockholm, Stockholms Auktionsverk, Göteborgs Auktionsverk, and Björnssons Auktionskammare. Prices have been modest in recent years, with top results including 8,500 SEK for "Cyklister på bro" and 4,801 SEK for "Picknick". Works depicting Stockholm motifs - inner courtyards, bridges, urban figures - and figurative subjects such as "Sovande gosse" and "Kvinna vid fönster" represent the range of subject matter available at auction.