Otto Gustaf Carlsund (11 December 1897 – 25 July 1948) was a Swedish

avant-garde In the arts and literature, the term ''avant-garde'' ( meaning or ) identifies an experimental genre or work of art, and the artist who created it, which usually is aesthetically innovative, whilst initially being ideologically unacceptable ...

artist and art critic, connected to

cubism Cubism is an early-20th-century avant-garde art movement which began in Paris. It revolutionized painting and the visual arts, and sparked artistic innovations in music, ballet, literature, and architecture. Cubist subjects are analyzed, broke ...

purism Purism, referring to the arts, was a movement that took place between 1918 and 1925 that influenced French painting and architecture. Purism was led by Amédée Ozenfant and Charles Edouard Jeanneret (Le Corbusier). Ozenfant and Le Corbusier f ...

neo-plasticism Neoplasticism or neo-plasticism, originating from the Dutch , is an avant-garde art theory proposed by Piet Mondrian in 1917 and initially employed by the De Stijl art movement. The most notable proponents of this theory were Mondrian and anoth ...

, and

concrete art Concrete art was an art movement with a strong emphasis on geometrical abstraction. The term was first formulated by Theo van Doesburg and was then used by him in 1930 to define the difference between his vision of art and that of other abstract ar ...

Biography

In 1924 he moved to Paris to study under

Fernand Léger Joseph Fernand Henri Léger (; February 4, 1881 – August 17, 1955) was a French painting, painter, sculpture, sculptor, and film director, filmmaker. In his early works he created a personal form of cubism (known as "tubism") which he gradually ...

and

Amédée Ozenfant Amédée Ozenfant (15 April 1886 – 4 May 1966) was a French cubist painter and writer. Together with Charles-Edouard Jeanneret (later known as Le Corbusier) he founded the Purist movement. Education Ozenfant was born into a bourgeois ...

at their newly founded Académie Moderne, where he developed a style of painting at first resembling Léger's, though soon became greatly influenced by Ozenfant's Purist style. In 1925 he met

Le Corbusier Charles-Édouard Jeanneret (6 October 188727 August 1965), known as Le Corbusier ( , ; ), was a Swiss-French architectural designer, painter, urban planner and writer, who was one of the pioneers of what is now regarded as modern architecture ...

and was commissioned to create murals for a cinema he was working on, though the project was eventually shelved, and in the same year he was recommended by Ozenfant to create murals for the planned library annex to

Erich Mendelsohn Erich Mendelsohn (); 21 March 1887 – 15 September 1953) was a German-British architect, known for his expressionist architecture in the 1920s, as well as for developing a dynamic functionalism in his projects for department stores and cinem ...

's Einstein Tower. Although Mendelsohn eventually abandoned this later project, an example of the designs from the series of paintings that Carlsund had prepared for the Einstein Library - the suite ''Rapidité'' - was realized in a mural at the Stockholm restaurant Parkrestaurangen Lilla Paris, in connection with the Stockholm Exhibition in 1930. In 1926 he was invited by

Katherine Dreier Katherine Sophie Dreier (September 10, 1877 – March 29, 1952) was an American artist, lecturer, patron of the arts, and social reformer. Dreier developed an interest in art at a young age and was afforded the opportunity of studying art in the ...

and

Société Anonyme The abbreviation S.A. or SA designates a type of limited company in certain countries, most of which have a Romance languages, Romance language as their official language and operate a derivative of the 1804, Napoleonic, civil law (legal syste ...

to participate in her exhibition ''International Exhibition of Modern Art'' at the Brooklyn Museum in New York City. featuring both his mural projects, and over the following years he exhibits several times in Paris, also again in New York at

Jane Heap Jane Heap (November 1, 1883 – June 18, 1964) was an American publisher and a significant figure in the development and promotion of literary modernism. Together with Margaret Anderson, her friend and business partner (who for some years was als ...

's Little Review Gallery (1928), the Arts Council (1928), and the Rand School (1931). As he met

Piet Mondrian Pieter Cornelis Mondriaan (; 7 March 1872 – 1 February 1944), known after 1911 as Piet Mondrian (, , ), was a Dutch Painting, painter and Theory of art, art theoretician who is regarded as one of the greatest artists of the 20th century. He w ...

Theo van Doesburg Theo van Doesburg (; born Christian Emil Marie Küpper; 30 August 1883 – 7 March 1931) was a Dutch painter, writer, poet and architect. He is best known as the founder and leader of De Stijl. He married three times. Personal life Theo van Do ...

and the circle of radical artists working in the neo-plasticist aesthetic, he came to adopt an increasingly reduced vocabulary of abstract rectilinear form, as well as being more and more affected by

Constructivism Constructivism may refer to: Art and architecture * Constructivism (art), an early 20th-century artistic movement that extols art as a practice for social purposes * Constructivist architecture, an architectural movement in the Soviet Union in t ...

Art concret

In 1929 he and van Doesburg,

Jean Hélion Jean Hélion (April 21, 1904October 27, 1987) was a French painter whose abstract work of the 1930s established him as a leading modernist. His midcareer rejection of abstraction was followed by nearly five decades as a figurative painter. He w ...

, Léon Arthur Tutundjian and

Marcel Wantz ''Art Concret'' was a single-issue French-language art magazine published in Paris in 1930. It was the vehicle for a group of abstract artists who wished to differentiate themselves from others gathered around the magazine Cercle et Carré. Event ...

(1911–79) founded the group Art Concret, and the following year they published their joint

manifesto A manifesto is a written declaration of the intentions, motives, or views of the issuer, be it an individual, group, political party, or government. A manifesto can accept a previously published opinion or public consensus, but many prominent ...

. "Their proclamation called for a universal art composed of planes and colours executed crisply, precisely, mechanically. Form and rhythm were governed by mathematical principles, while abstract cinema provided a model of combining space and time in a single work of art" The group was short lived and only exhibited together at three occasions in 1930 as part of larger group exhibitions, the first being at ''Salon des Surindépendents'' in Paris in June, followed by ''Production Paris 1930'' in Zürich, and in August at the exhibition ''AC: Internationell utställning av postkubistisk konst'' (International exhibition of post-cubist art) in Stockholm, curated by Carlsund himself. In the catalog to the latter, Carlsund states that the group's "programme is clear: absolute Purism. Neo-Plasticism, Purism and Constructivism combined". The Stockholm exhibition was largely a failure, getting harsh judgement from unsupportive critics, and ultimately led to Carlsund's decision to move back to Stockholm. Following van Doesburg's death in 1931, the Art Concret group united with the larger association Abstraction-Création, founded in 1932, though was never formally dissolved.

Later life

After 1932, Carlsund was primarily active as an art critic, still painting and creating murals but not exhibiting his art. Following increased domestic attention to geometric abstraction in the 1940s, a retrospective exhibition was held in Stockholm in 1947 to great acclaim.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Carlsund, Otto Gustaf 1897 births 1948 deaths Swedish artists