Inger Ekdahl Swedish Abstract Expressionism Alexander Engström Department of Culture and Aesthetics Degree 15 HE credits Art History Art History - Bachelor´s Course (30 credits) Spring term 2020 Supervisor: Magdalena Holdar Abstract Inger Ekdahl was a female painter at the center of Swedish Abstract Expressionism in the fifties. This essay investigates how her art was received in Stockholm and Paris. We conclude that although her type of art dominated the avant-garde in Paris during the late fifties, she was too early for the Swedish avant-garde and did not amass enough support to transform it. The analysis used Actor-Network Theory following Latour. Keywords Inger Ekdahl, Spontaneity, Tachism, Abstract Expressionism, Action Painting. Acknowledgements The author thanks Magdalena Holdar for excellent advice and Angela Cesarec at Malmö Konsthall for organizing a special tour of their Ekdahl exhibition and providing access to background material. No figures This is an electronic version without figures, due to potential copyright problems. Contact the author at [email protected] for a copy with figures. Contents Introduction ............................................................................................ 1 Aim and research questions .............................................................................. 1 Previous research ........................................................................................... 1 Theory .......................................................................................................... 2 Method .......................................................................................................... 3 Sources ......................................................................................................... 4 Disposition ..................................................................................................... 4 Grand Tour .............................................................................................. 5 Italy and France, 1947-1950 ............................................................................ 6 Connections home and far away ........................................................................ 7 Paris, -1960 ................................................................................................... 9 Scouting for avant-garde ......................................................................... 9 The creation and annihilation of isms ............................................................... 10 Avant-garde that fizzled out ........................................................................... 11 Concrete descending ............................................................................. 12 Paris ........................................................................................................... 13 Sweden ....................................................................................................... 14 Spontaneity ascending .......................................................................... 15 Ekdahl’s exhibition at Petra’s Small Pavilion ...................................................... 17 The Fahlström and Hagberg spontaneity debate ................................................ 19 Ekdahl’s exhibition at Gummeson’s .................................................................. 21 The Around Spontaneity touring exhibition ....................................................... 23 Conclusions ........................................................................................... 25 Bibliography .......................................................................................... 27 List of Figures ....................................................................................... 33 Introduction Aim and research questions Inger Ekdahl was a Swedish painter active from right after WWII until some years ago when she passed away. Her paintings from the fifties were later on usually associated with Abstract Expressionism and in particular Jackson Pollock. After that her style changed significantly and is outside the scope of this study. At a recent exhibition in Stockholm of the “canon” of Swedish female painters, Ekdahl was represented by four paintings from that period, see Figure 26. My impression is that Ekdahl was considered a new young exciting painter for some years, fell into obscurity, and is now revitalized after passing away. But there is not much research about her, and some catalogue and exhibition information repeat anecdotes or facts of questionable origin. One problem in discussing her art is that the period description is lost in Swedish. It wasn’t called “Abstract Expressionism” in those days in Sweden, and the French and Swedish descriptions are gone today. The current use of “Abstract Expressionism” implicitly positions Ekdahl as a follower of the American school, but she studied, travelled and exhibited in France and Italy before Pollock was anyone in Europe. I want to analyze how this confused process to understand and classify her art and its international context worked at that time. The four research questions guiding this study about Ekdahl are: 1. More exactly than the 1950s, when and where did she produce the paintings in a style today associated with Abstract Expressionism? 2. How was her art received by the art world during that period? (by art critics, gallerists, museums, other painters... Who exercised power to what end?) 3. What kind of avant-garde was she associated with and how did she influence, or was influenced by, the contemporary debate regarding that? 4. How was the international contextualization of her art renegotiated? Previous research There are no research publications focused on Ekdahl. Marta Edling wrote a paper on the art historical narrative of center and periphery, and exemplified with Paris and Stockholm when Ekdahl was active along that axis.1 Employing Pierre Bourdieu, Martin Gustavsson studied the social economical aspects of power on the Swedish art market during 1920-1960 and Ekdahl was an art producer on that market.2 The two Swedish female painters Randi Fisher and Barbro Östlihn were close to Ekdahl in time and have been dissertation topics. Linda Fagerström used feministic theory and Bourdieu to analyze 1 Marta Edling, “From Margin to Margin?: The Stockholm Paris Axis 1944–1953,” Konsthistorisk Tidskrift, 88, no. 1 (2019): 8, 15 2 Martin Gustavsson, “Makt och konstsmak: Sociala och politiska motsättningar på den svenska konstmarknaden 1920-1960” (PhD diss., Stockholm University, 2002), 132. 1 Fisher, who was slightly earlier than Ekdahl but today is inscribed in the same female avant-garde.3 Ekdahl might be more similar to Östlihn than Fisher: both of them had a strong international presence and were married to successful artists. The center and periphery narrative studied by Edling is also mentioned explicitly regarding Ekdahl in Öhrner’s dissertation about Östlihn.4 Theory Actor-Network Theory (ANT) as described by Bruno Latour in his book Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory is the basis for Theory and Method of this essay.5 The reader should be warned that the author’s experience of ANT before writing this thesis was virtually nil. Latour’s book is a joy to read, and, if anything, this essay exemplifies how one misunderstands his beautiful detours rather than put them into action. Although ANT is a theory according to its name, and Latour’s book is filled with methodology, he dislikes calling it theory and method. It is more of a general approach to everything in the social sciences. But his approach is amenable to external rules for how articles, dissertations, essays, or research reports should be written. This study should have Theory and Method parts, and that is that. The basic theoretical assumption of ANT is to have no assumption. Researching Ekdahl, Feminist theory would have been a reasonable option. You focus at the power imbalances related to gender, and excellent conclusions from that might be possible to reach. The theory provides glasses to see those aspects extra well. But there is also a risk to overexplain power imbalances with that particular theory, and being blind for other explanations. Moreover, the investigation will function at two separate scales: the really small with individuals, and the really large with sweeping social forces. That tends to remove agency from the individuals and attribute it to the large narratives. But if that narrative already was the choice of theory, what was concluded? In ANT you try at great lengths to avoid prescribing social forces on top of the actors in the society, and let them tell the story of social forces.6 Latour’s book on ANT has two parts. The first part, on “How to Deploy Controversies About the Social World,” perhaps falls more into the Theory camp rather than Method, and is structured by five sources of uncertainty: “No Group, Only Group Formation; Action is Overtaken; Objects too Have Agency; Matters of Fact vs. Matters of Concern; Writing Down Risky Accounts.”7 For an Art History essay, the first interesting thing to note is that objects have agency in ANT. Not only painters, gallerists, and the museum visitors have agency, but also the paintings and the museum buildings themselves. Lots of pictures of Ekdahl’s paintings ends this study, and it is not only because pictures of her art are hard to find and nice to look at, but mainly because the paintings themselves are objects we