The first major exhibition in the United States devoted to Carl Fredrik Hill (1849‱911), one of the most important and original Swedish artists of the Nineteenth Century, is on view at Scandinavia House: The Nordic Center in America. “Carl Fredrik Hill, Swedish Visionary and Modernist: Drawings from the Malmö Art Museum,” remains on view through January 9.
The exhibition focuses on the series of astonishingly expressive and visionary drawings Hill produced during the last 30 years of his life, a period in which he was regarded as incurably insane. Although dismissed by his contemporaries, these late drawings are now recognized as important precursors of such movements as Surrealism, Expressionism and even Pop Art. Many of today’s leading artists, including Georg Baselitz, Donald Baechler and Per Kirkeby, acknowledge Hill’s influence on their work. The selection of 75 drawings, many never before exhibited in the United States, comes from the collections of Sweden’s Malmö Art Museum, a major repository of the artist’s work.
Acclaimed in his youth as Sweden’s most gifted exponent of French Impressionism, at age 28 Hill suffered a mental breakdown from which he never recovered. During his long period of confinement, until his death at age 62, he drew obsessively, creating a parallel world inhabited by images drawn from nature, memory, art history and his imaginative fantasy. By turns apocalyptic and lyrically poetic, these late works range from wildly expressionistic scenes of the Scandinavian countryside and erotically charged nudes to complex and precisely drawn interiors of fantastic palaces to haunting portraits of family and friends.
The exhibition presents a comprehensive overview of the extraordinarily wide range of styles, techniques and imagery that Hill explored in his late drawings. Although none of the drawings are titled, several are inscribed with exhortations or curses, suggesting that Hill’s art at this time may have functioned as a means to control and order his world.
Approximately half of the works on view are landscapes, executed in colored chalks and often carried out in a bold, spontaneous style that seems to anticipate German Expressionism. While several represent scenes of cataclysmic destruction and violence †in one, blasted trees overhang a raging river †in others the mood is elegiac and serene. An image of a reindeer silhouetted against a waterfall is drawn with a childlike simplicity reminiscent of Scandinavian folk art. Still others conjure up a surreal fantasy realm: In one, a gigantic elephant skull rests on an island in the sea; another appears to depict the head of sea monster rising from a lake.
The exhibition also includes what is perhaps Hill’s most famous †and enigmatic †landscape: a drawing of a barren plain in which slashing black lines, suggestive of torrential rain, converge to form the repeated word “HILL.”
Themes of sexual desire recur frequently in Hill’s figural works, which include black chalk drawings of voluptuous women, often arrayed in groups, which may have served as a “fantasy harem” for the artist. In his so-called “Leda and the Swan,” a vibrantly colored drawing of a long-necked bird atop a reclining woman, the sinuous outlines, smoldering eroticism and combination of blood-reds and dark green are strikingly reminiscent of Hill’s Scandinavian contemporary, Edvard Munch.
Imagery drawn from the art of the past is another recurring feature of Hill’s work. His drawing of a standing woman, her arms entwined with snakes and flanked by rearing beasts, recalls sculptures of female nature deities found in ancient Mycenaean art.
The exhibition also includes a number of Hill’s colored chalk portrait heads, whose intense stares and oversized black eyes may have been inspired by the encaustic portraits on Egypto-Roman mummy cases. While most remain anonymous, some may represent family members as well as the artist himself.
A particularly intriguing category of Hill’s work are the numerous pen and ink drawings he executed on brown wrapping paper. Unlike the distortions and often crude execution that characterize his other works, these are rendered with painstaking precision and linear elegance. Many suggest the soaring interiors of a medieval cathedral or baroque palace, in which tigers and other exotic beasts roam amid displays of classical statuary.
Scandinavia House is at 58 Park Avenue. For information, 212-879-9779 or www.scandinaviahouse.org .
