ArtistSwedish
Evert Lundquist
1 active items
Born in Stockholm on 17 July 1904, Evert Ernst Erland Olof Lundquist grew up in a family with deep roots in Swedish cultural life - his mother's side connected him, by kinship, to both the singer Jenny Lind and the painter Oscar Björck. These connections would prove less formative than his own slowly cultivated sense of what painting could be, one he spent nearly seven decades refining.
Lundquist began his formal training in January 1924 at Carl Wilhelmson's painting school in Stockholm, then moved to the Royal University College of Fine Art the following year. Studies at the Académie Julien in Paris brought him into contact with European currents, though his development was interrupted repeatedly by bouts of depression, a condition he struggled with throughout his life. The long dark months of Swedish autumn were particularly difficult. He did not make his public debut until 1934, at Konstnärshuset in Stockholm, a relatively late start that reflected both his exacting standards and the psychological terrain he was navigating.
The real turning point came in 1944, when a retrospective at the Academy of Art in Stockholm brought him widespread critical recognition. His approach to painting was unlike most of his contemporaries: neither straightforwardly figural nor abstracting, Lundquist worked slowly, allowing paint to accumulate on the surface until a motif seemed to emerge from within the material itself. As he described it, the motif was not on the canvas nor beneath it but inside the paint - form and substance made one. Subjects such as resting women, still lifes, portraits, and studio interiors recur across his work, rendered with thick, deliberate strokes carrying echoes of Edvard Munch and northern expressionism.
In 1943 he married the artist Ebba Reutercrona, and by the early 1950s the couple had settled on the grounds of Drottningholm, where Lundquist converted an early 20th-century Jugend-style power house into his studio. He would live and work there until 1993. The studio, now a museum open to the public, preserves his oil paintings, charcoal drawings, and drypoint etchings in the space where they were made.
Lundquist taught at Gerlesborgskolan from 1959 and at Konsthögskolan (the Royal Institute of Art) from 1960 to 1970, where he shaped a generation of Swedish painters. In 1961 he received the Prince Eugen Medal for painting. His international profile grew steadily through the late 1950s and early 1960s - he was selected for the Guggenheim International Award in 1964 among the world's hundred best artists, and participated in the Dunn International at the Beaverbrook Art Gallery, shown at Tate London. Despite enthusiastic reception and museum acquisitions abroad, Lundquist chose to withdraw from the international market, a decision consistent with his general resistance to self-promotion.
A major retrospective was held at Moderna Museet in 1974, and in 1989 he made what critics called a sensational return with new paintings - produced despite near-total blindness - that confirmed his sustained relevance. He published his autobiography, "Ur ett Målarliv" (From the Life of a Painter), in 1984. Lundquist died in Stockholm on 4 November 1994.
On the Nordic auction market, Lundquist appears regularly at leading Swedish houses, with Bukowskis Stockholm and Stockholms Auktionsverk together accounting for the largest share of his auction appearances. His works span paintings, prints, and drawings, with a portrait reaching 8,000 EUR at the top of recorded sales on this platform and etchings from his numbered print editions selling consistently in the 1,600-4,000 SEK range.