Lennart Rodhe

The pivotal moment came in autumn 1947, when Rodhe travelled to Paris with his wife and encountered two things that would reshape his thinking entirely: Shoowa textiles from the old Kuba kingdom, with their centuries-old geometric imagery, and photographs by Germaine Krull looking up at the Eiffel Tower, where the iron structure carved space into triangular divisions. From these encounters, Rodhe developed the triangle motif that became his signature form, not as symbol or decoration but as an instrument for constructing movement, depth, and light within a flat surface. By 1948 he was working systematically with triangular compositions, and the results placed him at the centre of what Swedish art history came to call the "1947 års män" (the Men of 1947), a loose grouping of artists who exhibited together at Galleri Färg och Form that year and committed themselves to concrete, non-representational painting.

Through the 1950s and 1960s, Rodhe's practice expanded well beyond canvas. He received his first major public commission in 1952 with a frieze for the post office in Östersund, followed the next year by work at Ängbyskolan in Stockholm, both projects translating formal elements he had found on the Bohuslän coast, where cliff light and twisted shells generated the same triangular and spiral forms he was pursuing in his studio. A commission for the Department of Ecology and Genetics at Uppsala University brought him into dialogue with scientists, where he worked from microscope samples of aquatic life. The newspaper Dagens Nyheter's building in Stockholm received a large-scale work between 1963 and 1967. His textile collaborations with Handarbetets vänner produced pieces for the National Archives ("Signs in the Archive", 1970) and for the Riksbank ("Gold and Green Forests", 1975-1976), demonstrating that his geometric language could move fluently across media.

Alongside his studio and public work, Rodhe was a formative presence at the Royal University College of Fine Arts as a professor, where students including Peter Dahl and Olle Baertling came under his influence. He was awarded the Prince Eugen Medal for painting in 1967, one of Sweden's most significant recognitions in the visual arts. Retrospective exhibitions at Moderna Museet in Stockholm and at Göteborgs Konstmuseum in 1988 confirmed his standing, and Moderna Museet today holds the largest institutional collection of his work.

Rodhe died in Stockholm on 17 January 2005, having spent six decades proving that geometric abstraction could carry real expressive weight without tipping into decoration. At auction, his works appear regularly in Swedish salesrooms. The painting "Hösten" has sold for 4,700 SEK and a composition screenprint for 2,944 SEK, with a gallery rug reaching 2,900 EUR, prices that reflect steady collector interest in his work across formats.