ArtistSwedish
Wilhelm Henning
1 active items
Edvin Wilhelm Henning was born on 23 May 1899 in Stockholm and died on 13 July 1955 in Askim, then a coastal village south of Gothenburg where he had settled in his later years. His life traced an unusually wide arc for a Swedish artist of his generation: from the studios of the Stockholm Academy to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, through years in Hollywood working for film studios, and across extended stays in North and South America before he turned, in his forties, almost exclusively to the streets of Gothenburg.
Henning studied at Konstakademien in Stockholm in 1921 and 1922, part of a generation shaped by the academy's rigorous technical curriculum but increasingly drawn toward what was happening in Paris and beyond. He completed his formal education at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. The time spent in South America proved decisive: the plasticity and colour relationships of Latin American modernism left a clear imprint on how he would later organise light and surface in his small-format panel paintings of Gothenburg.
The Hollywood years are an unusual chapter. He worked as a sculptor within the film industry, a trade that required both speed and a command of three-dimensional form in service of illusion. Whether this detour reinforced his sculptural instinct or simply provided income during a transitional period, it left him with technical fluency in both mediums. His patinated plaster head - one of the 11 items in the Auctionist database - is a reminder that he remained a sculptor alongside his painting practice.
When he returned to Sweden and settled near Gothenburg, Henning effectively invented his own subject matter. He did not exhibit paintings publicly until 1940, debuting at Fortuna Konsthandel in Stockholm. From that point forward, the Gothenburg street became his signature. The paintings are consistently small in scale and intimate in mood: tramlines pulling the eye into narrow urban corridors, rooftop angles against pale Nordic sky, the particular texture of Gothenburg's older building stock. The influence of South American modernism surfaces in a certain flatness of plane and a warmth of tone that differentiates his work from the cooler Gothenburg regionalism of his contemporaries.
Public recognition came through permanent installation rather than gallery prizes. The reliefs Henning executed for the headquarters of the Swedish-American shipping company Transatlantic in Gothenburg placed his work in one of the city's significant interwar commercial buildings. Moderna museet in Stockholm holds both a painting and a sculpture, a dual representation that reflects the breadth of his practice.
On the secondary market, Henning's work sells consistently through Göteborgs Auktionsverk, which accounts for 10 of the 11 items in the Auctionist database. Prices have ranged from around 1,364 SEK for a figure scene to 2,681 EUR for 'Gatubild Göteborg', with multiple Gothenburg street motifs clearing 2,000-2,600 EUR at the December 2025 Göteborg auction. The tram-motif panels attract particular interest. All items are listed as oil on panel or oil on canvas, with one patinated plaster sculpture rounding out the holdings.