KunstenaarSwedish
Beppe Wolgers
1 actieve items
John Bertil "Beppe" Wolgers set out in 1946 with a clear ambition: to become a landscape painter. He spent a year at Otte Skölds målarskola in Stockholm, the same school that had shaped a generation of Swedish modernists, before heading to Poppius journalistskola and eventually taking a detour into writing, performance, and television that would consume most of the next four decades. But the brushes were never packed away for good.
Wolgers was born in Stockholm on 10 November 1928. His visual art practice ran alongside his better-known roles as songwriter, author, actor, and children's television host. In 1968 he moved with his family to a homestead in Ströms Vattudal in northern Jämtland, which they renamed Milwaukee. The landscape there - the river valley, the summer meadows, the fells - fed both his poetry and his painting. The Jämtland motifs that appear repeatedly in his canvases are not incidental; they reflect a genuine attachment to a place he considered home for the final chapter of his life.
His paintings are oil on canvas works, largely landscapes and figurative scenes, executed with an expressionist looseness that sits in contrast to the careful craft of his literary output. Works include Jämtländskt landskap, Den blå bäcken, Sommarlov, and Boullespelarna i Saint-Paul-de-Vence - the last suggesting that his travels through France also fed his visual imagination. The Nationalmuseum in Stockholm holds work by Wolgers in its collection. He also exhibited alongside the painter Ernfrid Bogstedt.
Wolgers died on 6 August 1986 in Stockholm, at 57. He remains best remembered in Sweden for writing around a thousand songs - among them Swedish lyrics for "Eleanor Rigby", "Waltz for Debby", and "Take Five" - and for playing the father of Pippi Longstocking in the 1969 television series. The paintings form a quieter thread through that public career, evidence that the landscape painter he once aimed to be never entirely gave way to the entertainer.
At auction, Beppe Wolgers paintings appear across Swedish houses including Norrlands Auktionsverk, Stockholms Auktionsverk, Göteborgs Auktionsverk, and Uppsala Auktionskammare. Works are predominantly oils with landscape subjects. The top recorded result in the Auctionist database is 17,000 SEK for Jämtländskt landskap, with other oils selling in the 4,000-13,000 SEK range. All 22 indexed items are historical sales with no current active listings.