KunstenaarSwedish
Staffan Hallström
0 actieve items
Staffan Hallström was born on October 19, 1914 in Stockholm, and the city's art institutions would shape his formation in decisive ways. He studied at Tekniska skolan (the University College of Arts, Crafts and Design) from 1932 to 1934, then moved to the Royal Institute of Art where he worked from 1935 to 1941 under Isaac Grünewald and Olle Hjortzberg - two teachers who represented distinct strands of early 20th-century Swedish modernism. Travel deepened his preparation: France, Italy, the Netherlands, and Belgium offered Hallström direct encounter with the European painting he most admired, particularly Delacroix, Rubens, and Goya.
In the 1940s Hallström settled in Saltsjö-Duvnäs, a community east of Stockholm where he rented a room from artist Olle Nyman. This arrangement brought him into sustained contact with Evert Lundqvist, whose neo-expressionist approach proved formative. Together with Nyman, Lundqvist, and Roland Kempe, Hallström became associated with the Saltsjö-Duvnäs group, a loose gathering of painters who explored the materiality of painting and found their points of departure in the everyday rather than national-romantic idealism.
Hallström's process was deliberate and physically intensive. Drawing held central importance for him; his paintings were described as radiating as much line quality as painterly poetry, with visible layers of correction and revision left intact as part of the finished surface. Traces of Giacometti's approach to figure drawing are audible in his work - the repeated mark, the image built through accretion rather than settled in a single confident stroke. In the mid-1930s he had drawn wolves at Skansen, and those sketches, reworked across two decades, eventually generated the series that defined him.
The first "Ingens hundar" (Nobody's Dogs) appeared in 1953. Rooted in observations of stray dogs in Sicily and France - animals belonging to no one, existing in uneasy collective tension - the series reached its most achieved form in the 1958 version acquired that same year by Moderna Museet. The work ranked second in a public vote for the museum's most popular holdings. Art historian Stig Johansson described these paintings as "some of the most original work in Swedish art," noting their "unique visual concepts" that resisted easy comparison. Hallström extended into public commissions as well, contributing stoneware work to the T-Centralen and Masmos metro stations in Stockholm in collaboration with Lasse Andréasson, alongside the Lidingö Bridge (1970) and the district heating plant in Akalla (1974).
He was appointed professor in 1976, the same year he died in a car accident on December 8. His work is held by Moderna Museet, the National Museum, Gothenburg Museum of Art, and Norrköping Art Museum. On Auctionist, 26 recorded lots confirm his continued auction presence. The database shows a standout result of 44,500 SEK for a hand-coloured lithograph of "Ingens hundar", with oil paintings typically settling in the 3,000-8,500 SEK range across Stockholms Auktionsverk and Bukowskis, where his work appears most frequently.