LAUSANNE.- Internationally renowned as a writer and the author of plays like The Father and Miss Julie, August Strindberg (1849–1912) was also one of Sweden’s greatest visual artists: a self-taught painter and photographer, and a remarkable creator of images.

The Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne, is presenting the first-ever retrospective of Strindberg’s art in Switzerland, where he stayed on a number of occasions. This is a rare opportunity to see his main masterpieces brought together in a single exhibition.

From the early 1870s to the first years of the 20th century, Strindberg worked intermittently at his painting and photography, creating vigorous, powerful works that had no real equivalent at the time: landscapes in which, amid the unleashing of the elements, sea and sky seemed on the verge of disintegration. At the same period he was developing a new theory of art whose main text, « The Role of Chance in Artistic Creation », prefigured the ideas of the Surrealists. In photography, his quest for truth initially found expression in self-portraits and portraits of his friends and family, but in the early 1890s he adopted a more experimental approach, seeking to capture the invisible – the soul and the sky – on paper or glass.

The exhibition is structured around Strindberg’s three painting periods – from 1872 to 1874, from 1892 to 1894 and after 1900 – and his photographic experiments: portraits and self-portraits (1886–1906), photograms (1890–1896) and cloud studies (1906–1907).

In the archipelago: 1872–1874 and 1892
The sole subjects of Strindberg’s early paintings were the sea and the landscapes of the Stockholm archipelago, two recurring motifs in the oeuvre to come. After a break of almost two decades he went back to painting in 1892. In several pictures he focuses on a lone flower on a deserted shore ; the depictions are meticulous, but these works have often been interpreted as symbolic – as self-portraits or transcriptions of the artist’s solitude. The atmosphere of the paintings of this period varies from sunny tranquillity to sombre chaos.

Berlin-Dornach-Paris, 1893-1894
Even when far away from the Stockholm archipelago Strindberg continued to make the sea the subject of his paintings, complementing his dark, threatening skies with raging waves. Dissolving the separation between sea and sky he brought forth a new substance made of spray and mist, in a viscous fusion roughly laid on with his palette knife and his fingers. During this period of intense activity Strindberg developed a theory of art based on painting, which he notably outlined in “The Role of Chance in Artistic Creation”. In constructing his images he let chance play the principal part ; in Wonderland (1894), for example, the forest giving onto the sea mutates into a subterranean grotto.

Strindberg in the 20th century : 1901–1905
When he returned to painting in 1901, Strindberg had just been through his so called Inferno crisis, the blackest period of his life. Settling in Stockholm again, he once more took up his portrayal of the sea around the archipelago, together with subjects inspired by his walks through the outskirts of the city. Composed of overlapping, almost parallel horizontal fields of colour, these works achieve a kind of synthetism which has led to comparisons with Symbolist stage sets.

Photographic portraits and self-portraits: Entering the soul. 1886–1906
“I look for truth in the art of photography,” Strindberg wrote, “intensely, as I look for it in many other fields.” At first he believed he had found this truth in a series of self-portraits and portraits of his family taken when he was living in Gersau, on Lake Lucerne in Switzerland. At the time he was playing several roles, as writer, father, gardener – and even Russian nihilist ! In search of a truth which, as he saw it, was no longer to be sought in mere mechanical reproduction of appearances, but rather in an intimate capturing of what truly was, he produced “psychological portraits” and “photographs of the soul”, images capturing the innermost character of his subjects.

Experimental photography: Capturing the invisible. 1890–1896
In its quest for truth in the realms of the invisible, Strindberg’s photography took an experimental turn, moving closer to his scientific investigations and, above all, his passion for the occult. He tried to create reproductions of the stars by exposing photographic plates at night, with no camera or lens ; and to capture directly on photographic paper the enigmatic images created by frost on a glass plate.