Andy Warhol, Claude Monet and Gerhard Richter were some big names that featured in Sotheby's Modern & Contemporary Evening Auction held on Wednesday, June 29 in London. The catalog presented works by about 30 artists, including a painting by August Strindberg. The 101 x 69.9 cm oil painting, titled Wave V, had a starting estimate of £2 million but ended up being sold for £6.79 million - a new record that set it as the most expensive Swedish work of art sold at auction.
“We are very pleased with the phenomenal result for Strindberg’s Wave V, which deservedly set a new world auction record for the artist and for all Swedish works of art," said Peder Isacson, CEO of Sotheby’s Scandinavia, in a press release. "We saw strong bids from collectors and institutions around the world who enthusiastically competed for the painting. It’s very exciting to see Strindberg, one of our great national symbols, enjoy this international recognition.”
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August Strindberg is best known as a playwright and writer. The Red Room (1879) has often been described as the first modern Swedish novel. Strindberg wrote more than sixty plays, including Miss Julie and The Father, and more than thirty works during his career.
Although Strindberg had no formal artistic education, he turned to painting as a means of expression when his writing career and private life suffered a crisis. There are approximately 130 paintings of his from three artistic periods: 1872-74, 1892-94 and 1901-05.
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Wave V, the fifth in a series of nine called Wave, was painted in 1901 and is one of four versions with the same motif. The other three rest in the Nordic Museum in Stockholm, the Musée d’Orsay in Paris and in a private collection. The work is an example of Strindberg's abstract landscapes and seascapes that he began to paint in the 1890s when he left the naturalism that characterized his early work.
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The record painting has previously been owned by, among others, the actor August Falck, who together with Strindberg founded the Intima Theatre in Stockholm, as well as the American playwright Sidney Kingsley and his wife Madge Evans Kingsley. The seller, the Swiss businessman Jacqui Safra, bought the painting in 1990 from the Kingsley couple. The new buyer is not known.
“Despite internationally recognized Swedish artists such as Alexander Roslin, Anders Zorn and Hilma af Klint, August Strindberg retains a special position in the global art market. His distinctive artistry and extremely limited production appeal to museums and art connoisseurs around the world,” says Pontus Silfverstolpe, founder of Barnebys.
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August Strindberg's previous record was set when Alpine Landscape I was sold at Sotheby's London in 2007 for around £2 million, at the time the most expensive Swedish work of art sold at auction. The record was then broken three years later when Anders Zorn's Sommarnöje (1886) was sold at Stockholms Auktionsverk for £2,262,000. In December 2021, Zorn broke his previous record when the painting Söndagsmorgon was sold by Bukowskis for £2,490,000. Now that Wave V was sold for £6,797,800, Strindberg has once again taken over the first place as the world's most expensive Swedish artist.
