We, we waves,
That are rocking the winds To rest–
Green cradles, we waves!
Wet are we, and salty;
Leap like flames of fire-
Wet flames are we:
Burning, extinguishing;
Cleansing, replenishing;
We, we waves,
That are rocking the winds
To rest!

August Strindberg, Poem in The Dream Play, written 1901 (translated by Edwin Björkman)

August Strindberg is best known as a playwright, novelist, poet, and essayist. Considered the "father"of modern Swedish literature (his The Red Room (1879) has frequently been described as the first modern Swedish novel), he wrote more than sixty plays, including, most famously, The Father, Miss Julie, and Creditors, and more than thirty works of fiction, autobiography, history, cultural analysis, and politics during his career. However, despite no formal artistic training, Strindberg also turned to painting as a form of expression at times of crisis in his writing career and personal life. His hundred or so paintings all date to three specific periods: 1872-74; 1892-94, and 1901-05.

Painted in 1902, Wave IX is the last in a series of nine paintings titled Vagen, or Wave, painted in the decade between 1892 and 1902; and one of four iterations of the same composition, the other three (Wave V, Wave VII, and Wave VIII) being in the Lillehammer Art Museum, Norway, the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, and the Museum of Nordic Art, Stockholm, respectively.

This visceral and psychologically loaded work epitomises Strindberg’s abstract sea and landscapes which he began painting in the 1890s as he moved away from the Naturalism that informed his early work, including his more objective early paintings of 1872-74, towards his more expressionistic idiom inspired by and his interest in Symbolism, scientific experimentation, and the occult.

Ostensibly a marine (and Strindberg was always drawn by the sea) divided into three horizontal fields-storm clouds, a narrow band of clear sky, and the swirling black sea with a white wave crest-like so many of Strindberg’s paintings, Wave IX is as pregnant with meaning as it is literal.

Strindberg’s artistic method was predicated on ideas expounded in his 1893 essay Des arts nouveaux! Ou le hazard dans la production artistique (The New Arts! Or the Role of Chance in Artistic Creation), about unexpected and random motifs and forms that crop up in a work of art as a result of his stream of consciousness without the artist intending to create them (rather like what the surrealists called automatic writing).

As a result, in Strindberg’s own words, "every picture is double-bottomed, as it were: each one has an exoteric aspect that everybody can make out, albeit with a little effort, and an esoteric one for the painter and the chosen few." In some works, such as Night of Jealousy (1893) and Inferno (1901), the symbolic meaning of the landscape is inherent in the titles Strindberg gave them. Here, the literal interpretation is that of a stormy sea under a stormy sky; while the deeper interpretation is the battle between chaos and order, between light and dark; in this instance, perhaps the result of the artist grappling with the bitterness of divorce from his second wife Frida Uhl and the calming happiness of his marriage to Harriet Bosse.

Strindberg’s paintings, as well as expressions of the mind, can be seen as his own speculations concerning the very philosophy of nature. He challenged current scientific ideas and wanted to create a monistic doctrine. His basic idea was that everything exists in everything else, and that everything can change into everything else. Earth, sea, and sky become reconciled into a single element. Here, the frothing crest of the wave could as easily be interpreted as the snowy summits of a distant mountain range, just as in Alpine Landscape I (1894), the subject could as well be interpreted as a swirling ocean. The merging of the elements is expressed in the very material technique in which Strindberg lays down his pigments, using a palette knife to create swirling miasmic color fields, the sky and the sea barely indistinguishable.

Pushing the boundaries of painting to the limit to express the artist's consciousness and philosophy, Strindberg’s paintings hark back to Turner and Courbet (both of whom he admired), but more startlingly anticipate the work of the Surrealists and Abstract Expressionists, as well as Mark Rothko, Anselm Kiefer, Georg Baselitz, and Gerhard Richter; not to mention writers, poets, and playwrights.