ArtistSwedish
Oscar Reutersvärd
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In 1934, a nineteen-year-old Swedish art student sat in a Latin class and began doodling in the margin of his notebook. What emerged was a triangle made of nine cubes, an object that appeared perfectly logical on paper but could never exist in three dimensions. That student was Oscar Reutersvärd, and that doodle was the first impossible figure in the history of art, predating M.C. Escher's famous explorations of the same territory by decades.
Oscar Reutersvärd (29 November 1915, 2 February 2002) was born in Stockholm and trained in arts under the Russian-born painter Michael Katz, a former professor at the Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg. A grant in 1950 took him to Paris to study with Fernand Léger, an experience that sharpened his understanding of form and spatial relationships. But it was the impossible figure, the visual paradox that looks coherent at first glance but collapses under closer inspection, that became his life's obsession.
Reutersvärd produced more than 2,500 impossible figures over his career, drawing them freehand with India ink on Japanese rice paper, never using a ruler or any mechanical device. His technique relied on what he called "Japanese perspective", a system where parallel lines remain parallel rather than converging toward vanishing points, as in Western perspective. This approach gave his figures their distinctive flatness and geometric clarity, allowing the paradoxes to emerge with elegant precision.
Where Escher built inhabited worlds around impossible objects, staircases that loop endlessly, waterfalls that flow uphill, Reutersvärd's work stayed closer to pure geometry. His figures are stripped to their essence: impossible triangles, impossible staircases (which he first drew in 1937), impossible forks. They are visual puzzles that reward sustained attention, revealing their contradictions gradually as the eye traces each line.
Beyond his artistic practice, Reutersvärd developed a parallel career as an art theorist and academic. He lectured at Stockholm University from 1953 and served as professor of art history and art theory at Lund University from 1964 to 1981. In 1982, Sweden Post honoured his achievements with a series of three postage stamps featuring his impossible figures, a rare recognition for a living artist.
On the Nordic auction market, Reutersvärd's works appear most frequently at Limhamns Auktionsbyrå (near his academic base in Lund), Stockholms Auktionsverk, and Crafoord Auktioner. His "Perspective japonaise" watercolours typically trade between 2,000 and 5,000 SEK, with signed lithographs available at lower price points. With 203 lots on Auctionist, the market offers accessible entry points for collectors interested in one of the twentieth century's most original visual thinkers.