Ulf Trotzig

Ulf Trotzig's painting "Über allen Gipfeln" is based on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's world-famous lyrical poem of the same title. "Über allen Gipfeln" (named after the first line of text), was written by Goethe in 1780.

Many of Sweden's most well-known authors have made their personal translations of this Goethe work. These include the Nobel Prize winner Verner von Heidenstam (1859-1940), the author Bo Setterlind (1923-1991) and Swedish academy members such as Bo Bergman (1869-1967) and Anders Österling (1884-1981). The Swedish magazine "Lyrikvännen" named Über allen Gipfeln "the untranslatable poem" in 1979.

"Über allen Gipfeln" (Wanderer's Nightsong II) is often considered to be perhaps the most perfect text in the German language.
Goethe probably wrote his poem on the evening of September 6, 1780, on the wall of a wooden guardhouse on top of Mount Kickelhahn, where, according to a letter to his fiancée Charlotte von Stein, he spent the night.

Although it is apparently not said much in the poem - "that it is not windy, that the birds have fallen asleep and that you can soon go to bed" - the reader "must literally make an effort to stay away from the strange and obvious fact that this text wants to bring ”(From the book Litteraturintryck, Bonniers 1926).

The literary historian Algot Werin (1892-1975) believes that the poem provides an insight into the secret of poetry, by conveying in a congenial way the feeling that filled Goethe at the sight of the landscape on the German mountain Kickelhahn on September 6, 1780: pure, calm, gross, simply.

Über allen Gipfeln
Ist Ruh,
In allen Wipfeln
Spürest du
Kaum einen Hauch;
Die Vögelein schweigen im Walde.
Warte nur, balde
Ruhest du auch.
- J.W. von Goethe (1780)

O'er all the hilltops
Is quiet now,
In all the treetops
Hearest thou
Hardly a breath;
The birds are asleep in the trees:
Wait, soon like these
Thou too shalt rest.
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882)

Over every mountain-top
Lies peace,
In every tree-top
You scarcely feel
A breath of wind;
The little birds are hushed in the wood.
Wait, soon you too
Will be at peace.
- Richard Stokes (2005)

Ulf Trotzig is represented at the National Museum, the Modern Museum, the Gothenburg Art Museum, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Brooklyn Museum New York, the Congress Library Washington DC, the British Museum in London and The Modern Museum Kamakura in Japan. In 1960, Ulf Trotzig's work was shown at a traveling exhibition in the USA.
Compare the auction's painting with the Moderna Museet's paintings "Ekelunda II" (1963, NM 5799) and "Diptyk" (1960, NM 5575).