Nordic Surrealism: 1930-1960
Surrealism, though born in Paris, was from the start imagined as international. André Breton envisioned a movement unbound by national borders, grounded in the unconscious and the poetic rather than geography. And yet, the spread of Surrealism into the Nordic countries has remained largely overlooked in art history. Nordic Surrealism brings together a rare group of artworks that trace the early reception and evolution of Surrealist thought in this region. From the 1930s through the postwar decades, these works reveal how Surrealism was not only adopted but transformed by artists working far from the Rue Fontaine: shaped by local traditions, symbolic landscapes, and solitary visions of metamorphosis.
The emergence of Surrealism in the Nordic countries can be traced to a constellation of key figures in the early 1930s. Central among them was the Danish artist and theorist Vilhelm Bjerke-Petersen, who would become the most important advocate for Surrealism in the region. After studying at the Bauhaus under Kandinsky and Klee, he moved to Paris and entered into direct correspondence with key members of the Surrealist group. More than any other figure, Bjerke-Petersen attempted to build a coherent Nordic Surrealism—writing manifestos, editing journals, curating exhibitions, and calling for a revolution of the mind through image and symbol. His 1933 book ‘Symboler i abstrakt kunst’ laid the theoretical foundation for the movement’s northern reception, merging Surrealist strategies with influences from Symbolism, mythology, and abstraction.
The painting Sunset Hill (1941), shown here, is one of the most striking examples of Bjerke-Petersen’s visual language. At once constructed and dreamlike, the canvas renders a hill under a surreal sky, haunted by a figure sitting alone. It exemplifies how early Nordic Surrealism moved away from the frenetic automatism of Paris and developed a more controlled, symbolic, and often metaphysical expression. This is Surrealism in dialogue with nature, landscape, and the inner self.
In Sweden, similar currents were taking shape through artists who had encountered Surrealism abroad and returned to develop its language independently. One of the earliest and most clearly Surrealist painters was Stellan Mörner, a leading figure of the Halmstad Group. The group, founded in 1929, is now recognized as Sweden’s first major response to modernism. Though influenced initially by Cubism and post-Cubist abstraction, Mörner and his colleagues turned increasingly toward metaphysical and Surrealist imagery in the early 1930s. The Lamp (c. 1935), a small but telling painting, shows a yellowish surreal landscape broken by a window showing a lamp. The space turns symbolic. It is a quiet, controlled Surrealism—far from Breton’s violent convulsions.
The 1930s were not a period of mass conversion to Surrealism in the Nordic countries. But certain works from this decade prove that the language of the movement had already seeded itself in highly original ways. A 1935 drawing made by a then 23-year-old Max Walter Svanberg, is an important early document of Surrealism in the exhibition. The graphite composition reveals several metamorphic female forms intertwined. Long before his association with the postwar group Imaginisterna or his recognition in Paris, Svanberg had already internalized the grammar of Surrealism and made it his own. The drawing is unintelligible, unsettling, and visionary. It stands as evidence that Surrealism’s presence in Sweden was not marginal, but foundational for a new generation.
Around the same time, in 1937, another Swedish painter, Lambert Werner, was experimenting with a different facet of Surrealism. Having studied in Berlin and come into contact with Klee and Kandinsky, Werner developed a formal Surrealism—structured, spatial, and silent. He was mentored by Gösta Adrian-Nilsson (GAN), who encouraged both his artistic and personal self-exploration. This early work, alongside another painting from 1948, forms a crucial bridge between the early adoption of Surrealism in the 1930s and its postwar persistence in Nordic visual culture.
By the late 1940s and 50s, Surrealism in the Nordic countries entered a second phase. The war had fractured networks and displaced artists, but the movement continued. Not as a coordinated effort, but as a language available to those seeking to explore the inner image. The shift is visible in the poetic and restrained Beach with Pearls (1950s), a small painting that draws from Magritte’s logic of displacement. There is no shock, no rupture—only a quiet strangeness, a subtle staging of the familiar as unfamiliar. It reflects a Surrealism that had by then become part of the visual vocabulary in the North: not revolutionary, but quietly transformative.
Meanwhile, Svanberg’s work had evolved into full, elaborate metamorphosis. A 1957 gouache from this period shows his signature iconography fully formed— female bodies in perpetual transformation, ornamented with biological and fantastical motifs. In 1953, Svanberg joined André Breton’s Surrealist group in Paris and was included in ‘Le Surréalisme, même’. Breton, who admired him deeply, wrote: “Among the great encounters of my life, I count that with Max Walter Svanberg's work, which has allowed me to grasp the meaning of fascination from within, by allowing me to suffer it in all its strength.” Svanberg’s surrealism was formally inventive, sensually charged and mythologically rich.
In his later years, Svanberg continued this vision with increasing refinement. A tall, narrow painting from 1961 reflects the culmination of an engagement with metamorphosis: part erotic ornament, part Nordic fairytale.This work, like so many others in the exhibition, shows that Surrealism in the Nordic countries was not derivative or delayed. It was layered, evolving, and deeply entangled with local imaginaries: spiritualism, folklore, introspection, and landscape.
Nordic Surrealism does not present a movement in the traditional sense. What it offers is a historical re-evaluation that brings to light artists and artworks that deserve a more central place in the story of Surrealism’s global reach. Through painting and drawing, from the 1930s to the 1960s, this exhibition reveals how Surrealist thought was taken up in the North: not in imitation, but through independent transformation. The works gathered here invite us to rethink what Surrealism looked like when refracted through winter light, long shadows, and a deeper silence.
