Waldemar Lorentzon

In early 1924, Lorentzon traveled to the French capital with his cousin Erik Olson after Halmstad's mayor Bissmark became his patron. They enrolled at Fernand Leger's Academie Moderne, where Lorentzon also studied under Amedee Ozenfant, the purist who had co-founded the movement with Le Corbusier in 1918. The city was at the peak of its interwar avant-garde energy. Lorentzon absorbed not just Leger's structural cubism but the dreamlike spatial dislocations of Giorgio de Chirico, and the poetic scale-shifts of Marc Chagall. In December 1925 he took part in the major international exhibition L'Art d'Aujourd'hui, showing alongside Picasso, Severini and Leger himself.

Back in Sweden, Lorentzon became one of the driving forces behind the formation of Halmstadgruppen in 1929, together with his cousins Axel and Erik Olson and fellow painters Sven Jonson, Esaias Thoren and Stellan Morner. The group began from a cubist foundation and moved, through the early 1930s, toward surrealism -- becoming the first artists to introduce the movement systematically in Sweden. In 1935 the group participated in the international Kubisme=Surrealisme exhibition in Copenhagen alongside Salvador Dali, Max Ernst and Wilhelm Freddie. The same year, Lorentzon painted what is considered his most significant work, "Kosmisk moder" (Cosmic Mother), in which a female figure merges with a dreamlike coastal landscape.

A spiritual turn arrived in 1938, when Lorentzon was drawn to the Oxford Movement's message. From that point his work took on a markedly religious character: the marine symbols and coastal atmospheres that had always populated his canvases -- bathing huts, fishermen, boats, the flat Halland shore -- were charged with something closer to cosmological weight. His later classicism depicted athletes, sailors and bathers in clear pastel palettes, architectural in composition but open toward dream.

The Halmstadgruppen remained intact as a group for fifty years, until Stellan Morner's death in 1979. Mjellby Art Museum in Halmstad, founded in 1980 by art critic Viveka Bosson, was built around the group's legacy and holds a permanent collection of all six members' work. Lorentzon died on June 14, 1984, and is buried in the churchyard at Soandrum outside Halmstad.

On the Nordic auction market, Lorentzon's 28 recorded lots on Auctionist span paintings, drawings and lithographs. The top realized prices reach 12,000 SEK, for oils including "Hos Laxfiskaren" (dated 1970) and "Vitt badlakan" (painted in Benidorm, 1963), with further strong results for coastal and bathing-hut subjects. His prints sell in the 300-450 SEK range. His works appear most often at Halmstads Auktionskammare (7 lots), Bukowskis Stockholm (3) and Goteborgs Auktionsverk (3), reflecting both his regional rootedness and presence in the national market.