Agnes Cleve grew up in an upper-bourgeois environment in Uppsala, where her father was a professor of chemistry. After studying at the Higher School of Arts and Crafts in Stockholm, now Konstfack, she worked as a designer, producing works characterised by the decorative formal language of Art Nouveau.

Around the turn of the twentieth century, Cleve turned to painting and studied under Carl Wilhelmson at Valand School of Art in Gothenburg. Her early paintings clearly reveal Wilhelmson’s influence, which also extended to their personal relationship. Surviving letters testify to a love affair between teacher and pupil, with consequences for both their marriages.

At the beginning of the 1910s, Cleve met the artist John Jon-And, who was thirteen years her junior. They travelled together to Paris in 1913 and married in 1915. Her time in the French capital marked a significant turning point in Cleve’s artistic development. There, she encountered the new directions of modern painting, not least Cubism, and studied at the art school La Palette under Henri Le Fauconnier and André Dunoyer de Segonzac.

Cleve belonged to the small circle of Swedish women artists who, at this time, sought out the international avant-garde in Paris. Her artistic practice nevertheless developed largely independently, alongside the more established groups. Her works display assured technical skill and a personal exploration of the expressive possibilities of modern painting.

By the time she returned to Sweden in 1914, following the outbreak of the First World War, the conditions for Cleve’s continued artistic development had been established. Throughout the remainder of the 1910s, she developed a dynamic style of painting in which Cubist and Expressionist elements were combined. Cityscapes and landscapes occupied a central place in her oeuvre, whose formal language is characterised by movement, rhythm and an endeavour to convey the structural composition of the motifs.