Olivier Herdies Part II

Olivier Herdies was born in Brussels, Belgium, in 1906 and studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels, undertaking study trips to several countries across Europe. During his travels, Herdies visited Scandinavia and became increasingly curious about the region. In 1937, he came to Stockholm to write a feature and grew increasingly enamoured with the city. He decided to remain in Sweden, supporting himself as a writer and teacher of French. It was on one of his French courses that he met his future wife, Gudrun Huss. They married in 1947 and had two children.

Herdies initially worked as a poet, but began drawing and painting in an “informal” manner – that is, abstractly but without being geometric – with artists such as Klee, Pollock, Miró and Michaux as his influences. This style is sometimes also referred to as Art Informel or Tachisme, although most so-called spontaneous artists in fact constructed their images with as much care and precision as any other painters. Herdies, however, truly worked spontaneously: quickly and directly, sometimes almost calligraphically, producing explosive, vegetative worlds.

Herdies did not begin painting until the age of forty-two and, like many artists who start late, he quickly went straight to the essential. His images are direct and open. It is as though all the impressions and influences he had absorbed over many years finally found expression in a distinct artistic practice of his own.

Herdies’s home and kitchen in Aspudden, Stockholm, became a meeting place for young artists from both Sweden and the Continent, and he became one of the many artists and writers in exile who enriched Sweden’s cultural life from the 1940s onwards.

He became highly significant to Swedish art in the post-war period. At the time, the country’s art scene was relatively restrained, while the strict compositional rules of Cubism, together with the emphasis on control, moderation and decorum among academics and traditionalists, held considerable sway. Herdies entered this artistic landscape as something exotic, anarchic and romantic. He himself was strongly influenced by the new abstract art emerging in Paris, which he encountered when he travelled there after the war to make art programmes for Radiotjänst, Sweden’s national radio service. It was also in Paris that he made his artistic debut, in 1955, at the Colette Allendy Gallery.

Herdies’s “sign painting” had a profound influence on Öyvind Fahlström. Around Fahlström, an international circle of artists, musicians and writers gathered in Stockholm in the years around 1960, among them Herdies. These were fruitful years for Stockholm’s art scene: Moderna Museet, for example, opened its doors and introduced new forms of art. Stockholm became more outward-looking and, for a few years, one of Europe’s major artistic centres. Several artists and writers who had come to Stockholm from different parts of the world played an important role in this development, including, alongside Olivier Herdies, the poet Ilmar Laaban, the photographer and poet Lutfi Özkök, and the writer and artist Peter Weiss.

Herdies died in Stockholm in 1993. In 2022, Thomas Millroth published the monograph Olivier Herdies – Pioneer and Mentor, featuring reproductions of many of the drawings offered at auction. In spring 2024, a number of his drawings were also exhibited in Olivier Herdies – Living His Own Life at the Museum of Drawings in Laholm.

Viewing: September 1–4, Berzelii Park 1, Stockholm
Open: 11 AM – 5 PM