Posts by Alexis de Bernède

In June 1936, Erik Olson and Stellan Mörner, founding members of the Swedish Halmstad Group (Halmstadgruppen), exhibited at the International Surrealist Exhibition at the New Burlington Galleries, London, alongside the leading figures of European surrealism. This organised and collectively publicised participation has never been the subject of a dedicated scholarly article in English. This article reconstructs the diplomatic and artistic networks through which Olson and Mörner came to exhibit in London. It examines their works to characterise the group's distinctive contribution to surrealist practice. Finally, it argues that Swedish surrealism is best understood not as a derivative outpost following the Parisian movement, but as artists pursuing distinct individual practices that contributed to the development of the movement. This development was shaped by exchanges between artists, and substantially reworked through Nordic landscape, social composition, and inherited culture. It further situates a scholarly neglect of the history of Scandinavian surrealism within the limits of recent 'global surrealism' initiatives, and identifies the archival resources: the Roland Penrose Archive, the Vilhelm Bjerke-Petersen correspondence archive, and the Mjellby Konstmuseum holdings that future research can engage with.

Keywords: 

Halmstad Group; Erik Olson; Stellan Mörner; International Surrealist Exhibition 1936; Nordic surrealism; Vilhelm Bjerke-Petersen; surrealism historiography; transnational modernism