‘An atmosphere of raw dawn reigns over the canvas where not even light and darkness seem yet to have been separated from each other. The earth and the sea and the sky seem to form some kind of rudimentary stage of themselves. Borderlines and differences are still hazy as though the various elements might at any moment become each other.’
Johan 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.
Completed in 1893, this work is the culmination of a series of paintings Strindberg embarked upon during his retreat to the remote Dalarö headland south of Stockholm in 1892. Early in the summer of 1892 his writing had reached an impasse, new plays were not being staged, and he was coming under fire from the press. His professional predicament was compounded by lawsuits arising from his divorce from his first wife Siri von Essen, making him nervous and distraught. Indeed, this period marked the beginning of what he later referred to as his Inferno Crisis, which lasted for much of the 1890s. Paradoxically, his state of mind gave rise to the second of his most productive phases of painting, as he turned to the medium as a form of escape and expression.
Alone in a small cottage by the coast, Strindberg worked in a frenzy, painting on whatever came to hand – book covers, scraps of paper, cardboard, zinc plates. In these paintings, marines alternating between frenzied storms and calm vistas, he moved away from the more naturalistic style of his early paintings of 1872-74, towards the more abstract, expressionistic idiom for which he is best known. Many of the seascapes from this series have in common the presence of a solitary sea mark, buoy, thistle, or plant, symbols of the artist’s feeling of loneliness. The inclusion of a toadstool is unique in the artist’s work. Finished as it was after Strindberg had left Stockholm for Berlin, with its playful juxtaposition of the scarlet flycap and the expanse of calm blue, this painting conveys a feeling of hope as Strindberg, by this time in love with Frida Uhl whom he married that year, looked forward to new beginnings.
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 barely distinguishable horizon line between beach and sea make the two elements mirror images of one another, an effect achieved by the very material technique in which Strindberg lays down his pigments using a palette knife to create almost abstract colour fields.
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.
Solitary Fly Cap has prestigious and uninterrupted provenance. It was bought from the artist by his friend and great admirer Adolf Paul (1863-1943), the Swedish novelist, playwright and a friend of Jean Sibelius, Edvard Munch and Akseli Gallen-Kallela. Paul was instrumental in introducing Strindberg to the artist community in Berlin after he relocated there, following his divorce from Siri von Essen. By 1914 the painting was in the collection of the artist’s nephew - art dealer and curator Sven Strindberg (1874-1957). His Helsinki gallery displayed modern art and in particular the work of the German Expressionists. It then entered the collection of the financier and avid gambler Ivar Kreuger (1880-1932) whose many companies went bankrupt in 1932, the same year he committed suicide. His collection was sold at the Swedish-French Art Gallery in Stockholm and thereafter, the work remained in private hands in Stockholm, before appearing on the market over thirty years ago when it was purchased by the present owner.