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. He also participated in other exhibitions focusing on concretism, including “6” in 1956 at Malmö Museum, for which he also designed a poster in edition, 6; Bonnier, Jones, Lindell, Olofsson, Pehrsson, Rodhe. The triangle theme led to themes based on Blocks – possibly the artist’s most concrete works. It is typical for Rodhe that he nevertheless used observations of nature as his starting point, with the play of light and shadow on buildings and flat roofs in Capri, for instance. His block drawings are purified, all the shapes fill a purpose in a play of positive and negative volumes. The blocks are arranged asymmetrically on the paper’s surface, no part of the drawing is central, all parts are of equal value. A few years later, Rodhe elaborated on this theme in what he called Fruits and Blocks. In 1955, he was commissioned to design three large glass windows for Svenska Handelsbanken’s Stockholm office. He began sketching in Saint-Tropez, and it was the deep contrasts between light and dark in the fig trees and grape vines that inspired Rodhe to combine the blocks with round shapes, as in Untitled, Fruits and Blocks (c 1958). The orchard and the fruit theme recur in drawings, paintings and prints from the late 1950s, and in the portfolio with the Seasons triptych, published by Konstfrämjandet in 1960 (The Seasons, Autumn, 1960). The contrasts between colours and the play of light, and how shapes can form patterns, are seen throughout Rodhe’s artistic oeuvre. Much later, he revisited the study of light in the trees in suites of drawings from his summer house Flivik (Untitled, 1999) but it also appears in his late works with branches and reflections in the forest.