ArtistGerman-Swedish
Marthe Bohm
2 active items
Marthe Louise Bohm was born on May 27, 1898 in Warnsdorf, a textile town in the northernmost part of Bohemia that was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Her father Franz Kieseberg worked in the city's textile industry in a role equivalent to what we would now call a textile designer, and from a young age Marthe was identified as the sibling who had inherited his eye for pattern and form. She received her first artistic training at the local arts and crafts school in Warnsdorf and went on to design textile patterns herself before her ambitions turned toward painting.
At twenty-three she moved to Dresden and enrolled at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste, where she studied from 1921 to 1927. Those were formative years for German art, and in Dresden the atmosphere was charged by currents of Expressionism and the emerging Neue Sachlichkeit — New Objectivity — that sought to bring a sober, analytical gaze to the world after the disruptions of the First World War. Bohm absorbed those influences and they shaped her approach for the rest of her working life.
It was in Dresden that she met Gösta Bohm, a Swedish painter from Idenor near Hudiksvall who had come to the same school. They married in 1927 in Warnsdorf and moved together to Hudiksvall, where she would remain for the rest of her life. Sweden became her permanent home, but she never lost the continental sensibility she had developed in Bohemia and Saxony. She worked in advertising illustration in both Germany and Sweden in the early years and exhibited in Sweden as early as 1927, first in Gävle, then the following year in Hudiksvall.
Her subjects were portraiture, landscape, and still life. The harbour and streets of Hudiksvall appear in her work, as do the nearby island of Kråkön, the Lilla Kyrkogatan studio view, and more distant motifs from travels including the Sierra Nevada and views of Genoa. In the 1940s she began working in what is sometimes called painterly cubism, applying structural fragmentation to still lifes and landscapes without abandoning legible form. She exhibited in group shows across Sweden — Helsingborg, Gothenburg, Malmö, Falun, Sandviken — and internationally in Oslo, Paris, Monaco, and Agrigento.
As wife, mother, and hostess to a household that centred on Gösta Bohm's career, Marthe had fewer material conditions in which to work than her husband. That domestic asymmetry meant she remained less visible during her lifetime than her output warranted. She died in Hudiksvall on March 14, 1972, and subsequent decades have brought renewed interest in reassessing her place in mid-century Swedish art. She is buried at Hudiksvalls kyrkogård.
On the auction market, Bohm's 13 lots indexed on Auctionist concentrate in auction houses across the Hälsingland and Dalarna region — Hälsinglands Auktionsverk, Falun Auktionsbyrå, and Uppsala Auktionskammare — which reflects both her geographical legacy and the collecting patterns of the area where she spent her career. Subjects in the database include a street scene ("Stadsgata", the highest recorded sale at 2,213 SEK), a Sierra Nevada landscape, a Genoa watercolour, the Hudiksvall harbour view from Lilla Kyrkogatan, a floral still life, and a portrait of a man in mixed media. The 400 EUR hammer price for the Genoa watercolour stands as the strongest result by value, suggesting that her more cosmopolitan travel works attract competitive interest.