Lennart Rodhe

Paintings, drawings, prints and monumental works from six decades of Swedish modernism.

This website documents the works of Lennart Rodhe (1916-2005). Here you will find biographic information, catalogue and documentation about one of the foremost modernist artists in Sweden.

Lennart Rodhe

Paintings, drawings, prints and monumental works from six decades of Swedish modernism.

This website documents the works of Lennart Rodhe (1916-2005). Here you will find biographic information, catalogue and documentation about one of the foremost modernist artists in Sweden.

Select artworks

Early works – Still lifes and self-portraits

Lennart Rodhe began his studies in Copenhagen in the 1930s. The Foundation’s collection includes a large number of early works from this period, mainly portraits, self-portraits, interiors and still lifes.

The 1940s – The War Years

His continental childhood in Germany and his studies in Copenhagen may have contributed to Lennart Rodhe’s difficulties in adjusting to the Academy in Stockholm. He did not start painting at the Academy until his final years, when Sven X-et Erixson was his professor.

The 1940s – The War Years

The first prints and the Good Art

Graphic art was to have a considerable share in Rhode’s practice. His first prints were made during his time at the Academy, and the collection shows them at various development stages.

The first prints and the Good Art

The Post-War Era

In the post-war period, art was seen as a positive social influence, and there were ambitions to spread good art to the general public in the form of prints.

The Post-War Era

Post-war travels – Contemplations

After the war, Europe was again open and free. In 1947, Rodhe made his first trips to France and Italy, resulting in a plethora of travel drawings.

The Swedish west coast– Nature and abstraction

Rodhe spent several summers in the 1940s and early 1950s on the Swedish west coast. These sojourns generated a large number of landscape studies in the artless, immediate plein-air style, as in Cliffs by the Sea, 1946.

Fruits and blocks – Concrete influences

In the pivotal period from the 1940s to 1950s, Lennart Rodhe was associated with The Men of 1947, originally a group featured in the exhibition “Ung Konst” (Young Art) at Galleri Färg och Form.

Seston and Day and Night

In the early 1960s, Rodhe was engaged in a monumental work for the Department of Ecology and Genetics at Uppsala University. He based it on the researchers’ material – aquatic life forms in the samples they studied – as in Plankton, water under a microscope, from 1962.