ArtistSwedish
Uno Vallman
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Born on March 24, 1913, in Norrala in Hälsingland, Uno Vallman grew up in a part of Sweden whose forests and winter landscapes would filter through his work for decades. He trained at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm, where the colorists Isaac Grünewald and Sven X-et Erixson shaped his early sensibility, an approach to paint as something expressive and spontaneous rather than descriptive.
From around 1940, Vallman spent extended periods in Paris, and those years proved formative. In the city's postwar art circles, he met Marc Chagall, whose use of color and folk memory left a lasting mark. Through the Danish painter Asger Jorn, Vallman was drawn into the orbit of COBRA, the international avant-garde group that sought to reconnect painting with raw instinct and collective myth. The encounter pushed his style toward greater abstraction while keeping the vivid, almost childlike directness that would become his signature.
His breakthrough in Sweden came with the Ung konst (Young Art) exhibition in Stockholm in 1947, which placed him among a generation determined to break from academic convention. In 1952, Vallman and Chagall held a joint exhibition in the United States, a measure of the standing he had achieved abroad. By the 1960s, French critics were calling him "Picasso of the North", a label that captured both his restless invention and the slightly hyperbolic enthusiasm his work could inspire.
The style that emerged from all this came to be called Vallmanism. It is naivist in its flattened forms and folkloric touches, but the palette is dense and the compositions carry an inner tension. Figures, animals, and landscape elements appear woven together, often with a symbolic or dreamlike charge. Oils dominate his output, though his work spans a range of formats and surfaces.
Vallman's paintings entered the collections of the Nationalmuseum and Moderna Museet in Stockholm, as well as the Tessin Institute in Paris. Among private collectors, his work reached the households of U.S. presidents Lyndon Johnson and Jimmy Carter, a reach that reflects how broadly his art traveled during the Cold War decades.
At auction, Vallman appears regularly across the major Swedish houses. His 88 recorded lots span Stockholms Auktionsverk, Göteborgs Auktionsverk, and Bukowskis, with prices ranging from a few hundred to several thousand euros. A winter scene titled "Isfiske" (Ice Fishing) reached 4,400 EUR, while an oil on panel from 1972 sold for 5,682 SEK. The market is steady rather than speculative, with collectors drawn to his larger oil compositions and the atmospheric landscape work that carries the Hälsingland winter quietly beneath its modernist surface.