ArtistSwedish
Tore Strindberg
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Tore Strindberg was born on 19 February 1882 in Stockholm, and came of age at a moment when Swedish sculpture was navigating between the academic traditions of the nineteenth century and the emerging currents of continental modernism. He enrolled at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm in 1902, studying there until 1905 under the medallist professor Adolf Lindberg. The training with Lindberg instilled a rigorous understanding of relief work and small-scale casting that would remain central to Strindberg's practice across a long career.
After the Academy, a grant enabled Strindberg to travel through Europe and spend time in Paris, where he immersed himself in the French sculptural tradition of the sixteenth century - a lineage of refined figuration, controlled naturalism, and technical precision that would become a touchstone for his own work. He returned to Sweden with a command of both monumental and intimate forms, and began establishing himself in the dual roles of sculptor and medalist that he would maintain throughout his life.
Strindberg belongs to the generation that developed the Swedish strain of Art Deco figurative sculpture - classical in its reference points, simplified in its modelling, and attentive to the decorative possibilities of surface and silhouette. His best-known work is the bronze Krokus (Crocus), a figure of a young girl holding a wilting crocus blossom, erected in 1925 on the Stadshusterrassen at Stockholm City Hall. The figure became one of the most reproduced pieces of Swedish public sculpture from the period, with copies installed in Gothenburg, Karlshamn, and Boras. Two years later, in 1927, he completed the Jarntoget fountain in Gothenburg - formally titled De fem varldelsdelarna (The Five Continents) - a granite and bronze composition featuring five nude female figures representing the continents, with a ship at the summit symbolising the five oceans. It remains one of the largest public bronze works in the city.
Strindberg's reach extended to international competition. A sculpture by him was entered in the art competition at the 1932 Los Angeles Summer Olympics, one of a small number of Swedish works to participate in the games' fine arts programme. His medals and reliefs were collected by institutions across Sweden, and he continued producing work well into the mid-twentieth century, living to the age of eighty-five and dying on 6 February 1968.
On the auction market, Strindberg's bronze sculptures command meaningful prices. Within the Auctionist database, 16 items have been recorded, the majority classified as sculpture, with a smaller number of brooches and miscellaneous objects. The top recorded sale is a bronze sculpture titled Mor och barn (Mother and Child) at 12,500 EUR, followed by another Krokus variant at 8,000 EUR. These figures reflect sustained collector interest in his best-known subjects. Works appear across Swedish auction houses including Auktionshuset Kolonn, Stockholms Auktionsverk Magasin 5, Gomér and Andersson Linköping, Garpenhus, and Crafoord in Malmö.