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Maj Arnell
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Maj Vilma Arnell, born Nilsson on 30 April 1910 in Gothenburg, grew up in a working-class household and spent her early adulthood in Stockholm training as a cutter before returning to Gothenburg, where she worked at the textile factory Gårda Fabriker designing clothing models. She married civil engineer Helge Arnell in 1933 and, during a period of depression while raising three young children, turned to painting as a form of self-expression. Her husband actively supported this turn: he arranged a dedicated studio outside their home and funded private lessons.
In 1939, Arnell was accepted to Göteborgs Musei rit- och målarskola, the institution now known as Konsthögskolan Valand. She studied there from 1940 to 1945 under Nils Nilsson, who had trained directly under the founding figures of Göteborgskoloristerna. Although the movement as an active group had largely dissolved by the time she enrolled, Arnell absorbed its core principle -- color as a primary carrier of meaning -- and applied it throughout a career spanning six decades.
Her debut came at a group exhibition called Unga Göteborgare, held at Lorensbergs konstsalong through the gallery God Konst. The paintings she showed were light-toned and optimistic in mood. In the late 1940s she shifted toward a darker palette, experimenting with heavier shadow and denser tonal contrasts, before reversing course in later decades toward the luminous, high-keyed color she became best known for. Her mature work treats familiar domestic subjects -- flowers in vases, fruit on tables, garden corners on Tjörn, coastal rocks along the Bohuslän shore -- with a directness that makes each painting read as a concentrated encounter with light and surface.
From the 1950s onward, Arnell exhibited steadily at galleries in Gothenburg, Stockholm, and Malmö, as well as at venues in Italy, France, and the United States. Her first solo exhibition took place in Gothenburg in 1948. The major institutional acknowledgment of her career came in 1995, when Prins Eugens Waldemarsudde in Stockholm mounted a retrospective focused on her work from the 1980s and 1990s. The show introduced her to a national audience beyond her Gothenburg base. Her work entered the permanent collections of Nationalmuseum, Moderna Museet, Göteborgs konstmuseum, Malmö konstmuseum, and Borås konstmuseum. In 2022--23, she featured prominently in the Göteborgs konstmuseum exhibition "Den underbara färgen" (Wonderful Colour), which reappraised Gothenburg Colourism and foregrounded several women artists who had been underrepresented in earlier accounts of the movement.
Arnell painted in oil on canvas as her primary medium, with gouache and watercolor appearing frequently in smaller-format works. She signed canvases with the monogram MA as well as her full name, and often dated works on the verso. She died in Gothenburg on 10 June 2005 at age 95, having painted actively into her final years.
On the Nordic auction market, Arnell's works appear most often at Göteborgs Auktionsverk and have also sold through Bukowskis, Stockholms Auktionsverk, and Halmstads Auktionskammare. The 13 items tracked on Auctionist span oil paintings, gouaches, watercolors, and mixed media. The top recorded result in the dataset is 2,400 EUR for the oil on canvas "i en trädgård", with other works including floral compositions, coastal watercolors, and red-ground still lifes.