Helmer Osslund

Helmer Osslund had a varied background and was, among other things, employed as a decorator at the Gustafsberg porcelain factory. After studying at the Technical School and the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm, he, like many of his contemporaries, travelled to Paris to attend the Académie Colarossi. For a brief period, he also studied under the then-unknown artist Paul Gauguin, who had just returned from the South Seas.

The encounter with Gauguin was decisive. Through him, Osslund was introduced to synthetism and the use of areas of pure color without shaded areas or modeling, a few strong lines – as reaction against the dissolved forms of Impressionism. The influence was profound and lasting. As Nils Palmgren writes: “There was the refined and wholly personally resonant, strong colouration [...] and a beauty worship intertwined with mysticism, all qualities that appealed to Osslund to the highest degree” (Helmer Osslund, 1937).

Perhaps the most important legacy from the meeting with Gauguin was the desire to forge his own path. Osslund worked in a time when the new stood in sharp contrast to the old – where the artist placed the self at the centre and abandoned the naturalism and Impressionism's quest for reality. Like his teacher, he sought refuge from the noise of the city and found his inspiration in solitude and nature.

In 1897, Osslund became a drawing teacher in Sollefteå. There, he discovered the dramatic northern light and the landscape that would become his lifelong subject. He often wandered with his brushes in the mountains and along the rivers, using grease-proof paper – a material he had fallen in love with back in Paris. The paper was lightweight, inexpensive, and easy to carry, and was later affixed to cardboard with wheat paste as larger paintings emerged.

In the 1910s, Osslund painted several works titled Ice Breakup, Ångerman River. The motifs varied between locations such as Ed, Forsmo, and Granvåg, but all share the same high vantage point and grand perspective. The work presented in this auction, Islossning, Ångermanälven, strikes a spring-like tone. With broad brushstrokes and a synthetic approach to colour, Osslund creates a tension between the soft areas of colour of the fields in the foreground and the cold blue-toned mountain range rising on the high horizon. The melting ice edges of the riverbank appear as a brilliant white border along the watercourse that breaks it's way through the landscape.

One of Osslund's most characteristic traits is his ability to see the grand lines of the landscape. He never allows details to disturb the whole, but lets the forms merge in a rhythmic movement. In Islossning, Ångermanälven, his inspiration from Gauguin is clearly evident – in colour, composition, and in the pursuit of nature's grand mystery rather than its exact representation.