INTO SOMETHING RICH AND STRANGE

 Anche le nuvole in Italia sono belle.

CONFER WITH THE SPRUCES, REVEL IN THE MUDDLE: FANNY CHURBERG AND CARL FREDRIK HILL ABREAST

Carl Fredrik Hill, The Tree and the River Bend, 1877. Photo: Åmells Konsthandel, Stockholm.

Carl Fredrik Hill, The Lime Quarry, 1876. Photo: Bukowskis, Stockholm.

It wasn’t over till the fat lady DJed and the two performers on the blazing raft on the Seine churned out the wicked kitsch that is “Imagine”, Lennon’s ode to world Communism. The vomitory inauguration of the Paris Olympics (with the insignificant athletes tucked away on dinky boats) was a baleful flaunt under the care of our new totalitarians and their little foot soldiers, the witless wokies. A certain novel from 1948 warned us about a time when ignorance would be cherished as strength – but carry on you fools.

 

When Sony ditched Lasse Hallström on the grounds that he couldn’t keep up with the lousy standards of today’s Hollywood, the Swedish director spawned a new project at home, involving his daughter and his wife as the transcendental painter Hilma af Klint (1862–1944). Hilma (2022) has the looks of the artist’s day and age, but the film’s dishonest, dumb and lifeless sentiments are all cooked up in the usual woke pan of contemporary Feminism. Anyone who has encountered af Klint’s strange and vast paintings (and who has the capacity to think for a few seconds) knows that a cornerstone in her art is the beautiful erotic dualism between the male and the female. Consequently, you have to be an imbecile to put these words in her mouth, but these filmmakers do: “There is only one sex.”

 

Although the catalogue has its mandatory share of woke pan nonsense (this is Sweden after all), the marvellous yin-and-yang of XX and XY chromosomes rules at Sven-Harry’s Art Museum in Stockholm, where the reflective yet emotionally intense landscape painting of Fanny Churberg (1845–1892) and Carl Fredrik Hill (1849–1911) is on show – a face-to-face/head-on exercise that confers with the forests and spruces of Churberg’s Finland (a host of them are curiously painted in Düsseldorf) and the precious vision-lustred vistas of Hill, the Swedish giant with the lunatic in his head.

 

“I have wanted to do an exhibition with Carl Fredrik Hill for a long time, and one of the biggest reasons is that the founder of the museum, Sven-Harry Karlsson, had one of the largest private collections of Hill before he donated it. Carl Fredrik Hill is not only Sven-Harry’s favourite artist, but also that of many artists in the present day. Many people know about Hill’s period of illness, and there are many exhibitions around it. I myself was very curious to explore a little more about the ten years before he was sadly struck by schizophrenia. To help me out, I invited Pedro Westerdahl as a guest curator. At the same time, I felt that I wanted to highlight not only Hill but also a coeval female artist who was just as skilled,” explains Museum Director Dragana Kussoffsky Maksimović.

 

Though she had been on a museum tour around Finland together with Sven-Harry Karlsson a few years earlier, the XX share of the exhibition was an elated discovery for Kussoffsky Maksimović, as for most Swedes. “I couldn’t find a name here in Sweden, so I called Finland. Barbro Schauman [the other guest curator] replied in a flash: ‘It is Fanny Churberg.’ I didn’t know about her but started to google and saw this fantastic landscape painting, and I was completely taken by it. It was amazing that it held such power, even as online images.”

 

“And here they are, a year and a half later, side by side – Fanny Churberg and Carl Fredrik Hill – who also, as it turned out, were in Paris at the same time. There is no documentation that their paths were crossed. But Churberg had [the Swedish painter] Wilhelm von Gegerfelt as a teacher, who was Carl Fredrik Hill’s close friend and patron, so it is highly likely that they met. And now they are facing each other, more or less one hundred and fifty years later, here at Sven-Harry’s Art Museum.”

 

Towards a New Landscape is indeed a relevant exhibition in this vexingly layouted art museum – this time with the room at the top as the best option, where the two artists’ influences are made known (including a painting by Corot) and where Hill’s and Churberg’s pieces work quite well together unlike the combos in the less tiny galleries.

 

Fanny Churberg’s adventure began on a steamboat to the country’s new white capital Helsinki in the early autumn of 1865. She was only twelve when her mother died, and for this reason she had to grow up all too fast since there were six younger siblings who needed her parenting and her services at home in Vaasa. Now she was nineteen years old and free for the first time, her beloved father had recently passed away after a long period of failing health. The young woman couldn’t sleep that final night on the steamboat, life was just too beautiful and full of hope – the sea was smooth, the stars waltzed for her in the dark and she was wealthy enough to do whatever she desired with her future.

 

In her first letter from Helsinki (dated September 29) Churberg wrote, “Perhaps too bold to think of the spruce tree – the image of fidelity – but the spruce is a Finn and so am I.” A few weeks later she described a walk in a park with some friends: “I enjoyed the fresh breeze and the wild nature indescribably – an autumn landscape lit by the October sun is very lovely – everything looks fresh and mighty bold, the air is so clean and invigorating, and the bare trees bear witness to struggle and battle. Here it was mostly conifers, hills and valleys, lake and rock walls. My company thought it was not enough of order, I enjoyed the disorder – had longed to get out into God’s free nature.” This was how Churberg looked at things and experienced them, and these were the particulars that she would mirror in her landscape painting.

 

Her younger colleague Helene Schjerfbeck wrote many years later in her diary: “That which lies innermost – passion – that I would like to reveal, but then one is ashamed of oneself and cannot conjure it up – because one is a woman. Women have seldom become such conjurers. Fanny Churberg did.”

 

Once Churberg had come to the conclusion that it was an artist that she wanted to be, she confided to a friend that “now I have decided to paint like a woman never has”. She spent the happiest years of her life in Düsseldorf in the winters – in the late 1860s, with a long break during the Franco–Prussian War (more of the forced old dread and sacrifice for the “privileged” sex), and then throughout the first part of the 1870s – where she was privately tutored by male painters who supported her in every way possible (yet the catalogue runs its dull male-oppression narrative about how the “limitations and obligations being a female artist entailed”).

 

“The Düsseldorf School” was a mixed bag of showy, jocular genre painting, while imaginative assessments were kept in low regard, with the flipside that it made the general public discover art in a different way. Though there are elements of the picturesque and the decorative in her less interesting works, Churberg was for the most part herself and painted in raw opposition to the run-of-the-mill idealism of the day, using (comparatively) brave colours and brushstrokes which render her paintings a kind of artificiality that is felt but also wordless. Guest curator Barbro Schauman points out that Churberg “never sought the beautiful and arranged, it is a slash-and-burn that has come to the fore in these paintings”.

 

“For Fanny Churberg nature was a battlefield for the never-ending struggle of powerful emotions and atmospheres. Nature was something altogether too great for man to have any part in it,” tells the guidebook to Finland’s National Gallery, Ateneum. “Churberg’s contemporaries found it difficult to embrace the fervour of her art. Her paintings seemed too strange, the colours loud and garish, the harshness of the landscapes frightening to idealistic tastes natured by [Finnish writer Zacharias] Topelius’s spirit of idyllic nature worship. Churberg’s trees spoke of struggle against the wind and storm, the solidity of her stones seemed crushing and hostile. Churberg’s season was dark late autumn rather than bright snowy winter. Her favourite time of day was sunset, dusk, moonlit night rather than the light of days.”

 

The piece of land that is Finland had been part of the kingdom of Sweden for some four hundred and fifty years when it became a grand duchy under Tsar Alexander I in 1809. The 1800s were a time with a new sense of nationhood, not just in Finland but in many countries. The greatest emblem of Fennomania was a work of poetic folklore that had been compiled for decades by Elias Lönnrot into the national epic the Kalevala (a definite version came out in 1849), published in Finnish and not Swedish that was the official language and the language spoken by the educated classes in Finland.

 

“Romantic nationalism began to affect the visual arts at about the same time as it has literature. But the particular problem, as far as painting and sculpture were concerned, was to establish a fine art tradition of technical proficiency with which to express it. Peasant handicrafts might continue to flourish, but fine art had only existed at a modestly provincial level,” writes John Boulton Smith in The Golden Age of Finnish Art: Art Nouveau and the National Spirit. “Up to the 1880s the subjects chosen were often empathically Finnish, but the pictures look merely typically 19^th century as the artists struggled, with increasing success, to master the various degrees of international romanticised Realism.”

 

The highly religious Churberg was a passionate spokeswoman for Finnishness. One hundred years before Kraftwerk made Düsseldorf great again, the city and its distantness from the land of the 168,000 lakes and the deep spruce forests only emphasised Fanny Churberg’s national attachment, which is more than evident in her Düsseldorf paintings. In a letter she tells a friend that she is working on a picture of an imminent thunderstorm, “and as I paint it, I have such a warm summer feeling, as if I were sitting there and could hear the whispering of the birches, smell the flowering fragrance of the rye, and the air would be so very, very light – and my heart too”. In her mind and in her art, she was always back in Finland.

 

Barbro Schauman says that Churberg’s time in Paris – October 1875 to April 1876 – was decisive for the remaining years that she dedicated to painting. “She visited museums, galleries, she painted for von Gegerfelt and she sent her paintings home for exhibitions. And above all, she was inspired by [the great name of the time, Charles-Françios] Daubigny and Corot. She was very much influenced by these two, and after Paris came her moonlit landscapes, atmospheric landscapes, evening blushes and nature scenes that cannot be imagined without this time in Paris. Düsseldorf was her schooling, where she learnt to paint technically, but the soul of her landscapes came after Paris, in 1876, for barely four years. Her production was also very small: about two hundred and fifty oil paintings, which is not much for an artist.”

 

Churberg painted seven still lifes in Paris. Three of these are displayed at Sven-Harry’s but the impression they leave is baroque and backwards. The parks in Paris could not possibly reflect the wild nature of her temper – three landscape paintings were however made during a fortnight in the Forêt Dominale de Meudon before she left France, only to return to Paris one last time for the Exposition Universelle in 1879.

 

Two things piqued Churberg’s curiosity in the mid-1870s during her six-month stay in Paris. The first one was the Barbizon School of artists who suffused their paintings with an atmospheric glean that really never grows old. Churberg brought this approach back to Finland and originated the finest paintings of her life – as Markku Valkonen puts it in Finnish Art Over the Centuries, “Her work during that brief period was uneven but astounding. Churberg painted boldly simplified pieces that at later age would have been called Expressionist. It seems as if Impressionism liberated Churberg from her Romantic outlook by giving her the right to use independent brushstrokes and colour.”

 

In his book about East European Art 1650–1950, Jeremy Howard discusses how these last astounding years of painting were “marked by a radical departure from convention. In particular she challenged social codes concerning the ‘feminine’. Deeply affected by the pleinairisme she had witnessed in France, Churberg’s landscapes became images of the alien force of nature. Using increasingly free, broad and violent brushstrokes, she expressed the human relationship with this force as a strongly emotional yet ultimately insignificant struggle. Preferring wild and bleak northern scenes, the dark seasons of autumn and winter, the dark forests in summer, and dusk, hers was a nature forbidding to man and yet whose drama touched a chord with her passionate temperament.”

 

During the winter of 1880, Churberg stopped painting altogether, she also destroyed some of her recent works. Receiving the Finnish Art Society’s Ducat Prize the previous year was just way too late for this resolute artist who only gained the smallest acknowledgement in her motherland during her short lifespan, until she was rediscovered in 1919 by the country’s leading art dealer Gösta Stenman. The other thing that Churberg brough with her from Paris was a newfound preference for the decorative arts. In 1879 she and architect Jac Ahrenberg founded the Friends of Finnish Handicrafts with the purpose “to promote handicrafts in Finland and their patriotic and artistic refinement”.

 

“In all fields of culture the voice of international liberalism was at loggerheads with the views of national Fennomania,” argue Merja Manninen and Päivi Setälä in The Lady with the Bow: The Story of Finnish Women. “As a Fennoman, Churberg set as her goal the development of a ‘Finnish style’. The Friends of Finnish Handicrafts circulated new ideas and models for handiwork based on folk art. Fanny Churberg also wrote about these ideas in the press. The society’s greatest achievements were in participation in the Art and Industry Exhibition in Copenhagen in 1888 and the Paris World Exhibition in 1889. The textiles for the Paris exhibition were to be Fanny Churberg’s last major work for the society.”

 

Before the (imaginary) band that Carl Fredrik Hill was in started playing different tunes, he produced two hundred landscape paintings that are as profound, refined, raw, elegiac and stunning as Talk Talk’s last two albums, Spirit of Eden (1988) and Laughing Stock (1991).

 

Guest curator Pedro Westerdahl talks about how Hill “explored the possibilities of painting in a way that is unrivalled in Swedish art history. He went to great lengths to create a style of painting that foreshadowed Symbolism ten years later. He unravelled these artistic knots in a couple of years, which is why we must also highlight his healthy period, it is extremely exciting. In Churberg’s work there are often figures, but not in Hill’s. Hill wanted the viewer to populate his landscapes. Hill’s landscapes are actually camouflaged self-portraits, he expresses his own pain in these paintings. There is a lot of emotional content in his painting during this period and I think it is so incredibly transformative for its time.”

 

Carl Fredrik Hill was in truth two dissimilar artists, with two dissimilar non-careers. During the second term as the homebound madman-genius – when his mother and sister and the housemaid in the family home at Skomakaregatan in Lund (behind the City Art Gallery) in southern Sweden provided him with four sheets of paper each day to draw on – Hill wrote in his scattered 248-page-long manuscript: “I sing how a picture becomes deep and true / Of how vividly it reveals nature / And how a picture in its own greatness burns / And how a picture in its own true feeling smiles.”

 

Hill’s old father was an erratic nutter who set the ground for Carl Fredrik’s ill health and further did what was in his power to put a lid on his son’s artistic dreams. Lars Gårding describes in Mathematics and Mathematicians: Mathematics in Sweden Before 1950 how Hill Sr was “the source of the anecdote about the learned professor who built himself a house without a staircase to the second floor and a fireplace without a flue. But it was the memory of Hill’s curious notations that survived longest in the mythology of Lund professors.” The mathematical father’s eccentricity included ploys such as his suggestion to make the mustard seed a unit of measure and his thesis on “The Average Distance of Fields to the Home”.

 

Carl Fredrik Hill’s way towards a landscape painting that burns and smiles as if the certitude of the universe is speaking to us began at the provincial Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm in the fall of 1871, when he was twenty-two years old. Lars Ragnar Forsberg remarks in his book on the country’s famous banker and major art collector, Ernest Thiel, that the Swedish art students’ flight to Paris “almost had the character of exile. The Royal Academy of Fine Arts, where many of them had been pupils, was a stuffy and disadvantageous institution. The young painters’ criticism was not gracious. Carl Fredrik Hill felt that none of the teachers could either paint or teach.”

 

Before he abandoned his Stockholm situation, Hill wrote to his parents – who he had to curry favour from to receive the monetary aid that he was completely dependent on – stating that “wait till I get to Paris and learn to paint, and then I shall earn money, and it will be my pleasure to show the old school here how rotten were the idols they have kneeled down for and worshipped”. Hill came to Paris on November 7, 1873 with the objective “to arrive at the true harmony between the inner and outer, between the spiritual and the sensuous, between feeling and understanding”.

 

The great Corot was the artist in France who overwhelmed the young Swede for “Corot has discovered a new world, because he has discovered a new way of seeing the old.” The ethereal quality of the French artist’s works was what especially persevered with Hill. The summer of 1874 was spent in Barbizon (south of Paris) accompanied by the German painter Max Liebermann (and two Hungarian colleagues, László Paál and Mihály Munkácsy). Half a decade later Liebermann told Swedish art historian Adolf Anderberg that “there was something of the visionary about my friend Hill, something which set him in a class by himself”.

 

In 1874, a roof window in Hill’s studio home in Paris fell over his face and scarred him both on the outside and the inside. The artist remarked that “I would rather lose my nose than my genius, because you very often spot beautiful noses but very rarely great geniuses.” It is not sure whether Hill’s call-me-genius disposition stemmed from an actual understanding of his true potency as a God-given artist, or if most of this derived from poor self-esteem – however, these are the kinds of things that he boasted in his letters: “My friends have proclaimed that I am a genius, which I have always been convinced of myself, but I don’t know how it will end if I fail in all the great things that I intend to do. I’ll be the laughingstock of my enviers at home.”

 

Carl Fredrik Hill completed a work in 1875 that he had initiated in Stockholm and that he had erased and repainted fifty times, and it is a moonshine landscape that is in the Sven-Harry’s show. That year was the sole occasion when the Paris Salon accepted a painting from Hill. In 1876 he penned that, “I have now arrived at the conviction that the one thing to seek in art is the true, le vrai. But not the banal naturalistic, but rather the heart of truth.” When he for the last time was rejected in 1877, Hill thundered: “Any old spice dealer can learn to paint a picture that will be accepted; and believe me, having painted as long as I have, it would be the easiest thing in the world to get two works in, if I were to betray my originality and my conscience as an artist.”

 

In the spring and summer of 1877, Hill was chasing after his ends in a roaming mode around the Seine, in the rural areas south of Paris and always with the river close by. His most famous and to the format largest painting, The Tree and the River Bend, has a given place at Sven-Harry’s Art Museum but was bafflingly turned down by the Salon. This is a masterpiece that shines of carefree solitude and a sudden respite from life’s ailments. The cat who walked by himself wrote to his family in Lund: “I feel like a pearl in gold.”

 

The catalogue is edited with a bit of the ordinary inconsistency, and the foreword regurgitates the common inculcated affectations of the climate emergency – “We are in the midst of a critical event in the Earth’s 4.5-billion-year-long history. Climate disasters come one after the other” – while one of the essays informs us about France’s “unusually intense summer heat” of 1877 that made Hill relocate to a seaside town in Normandy for a month, where he painted a new marine every happy day: “There is no more similarity between what I used to do and what I do now than between night and day. As heavy, dark and gloomy as my works were before, they are as light, bright and airy now. The asphalt is totally banned.”

 

The “asphalt” returned all too soon, though. Back in Paris, Hill painted a few masterworks in Parisian blue and cadmium yellow that foreshadowed his fast-approaching schizophrenia. Hill was twenty-eight years old when he completely lost his mind and his screams and frenzies became insufferable for the neighbours. (When some friends visited Hill a few weeks earlier that winter and asked him to close the window to his freezing studio, he told them to shut the hell up, he was already someplace else and he was sweltering.) On January 19, 1878, Wilhelm von Gegerfelt and another Swedish artist arrived by horse and carriage to take Hill, as they asserted, to an art exhibition. The two men jumped out of the carriage just before it passed the gates to Dr Blanche’s Maison de Santé in Paris, with a crying Hill inside.

 

Hill’s famous painting of a hearse with the red glowing dot that is pushing through a despairing landscape is in the Sven-Harry’s exhibition and it was executed at the Passy mental asylum as a remembrance of the kidnapping – an abduction that was absolutely necessary given Hill’s severe schizophrenia and prosecution delusion. (His abductors did something indefensible however when they obliterated all the paintings in his studio that they found too wacky and offensive.) Hill had noted in December 1877 that “One hour’s painting madness is so glorious that one would gladly give up a whole ordinary life for it.” A month later he was insane for life.

 

In June 1880, Hill’s two sisters Hedda and Marie-Louise travelled to Paris to move him back to Sweden. He spent a few years in an asylum in Lund, and the remaining decades of his life in his native home where thousands of drawings were made, depicting the fantastic journeys Hill savoured in his head. The only ones who saw these works other than his family were unknowing people who were just passing by on the street when he used to exhibit his drawings in the garden on Sundays.

 

In Hill’s Lund manuscript is written: “Madness – how sublime when you wholly shut out the world.”

Fanny Churberg, Mountain Landscape, Savolax, 1874. Photo: Erkki Salminen, Ostrobothnian Museum, Vaasa.

 

Fanny Churberg, Moon Rises Over Fog Bank, 1880. Photo: Erkki Salminen, Ostrobothnian Museum, Vaasa.

Carl Fredrik Hill and Fanny Churberg: Towards a New Landscape at Sven-Harry’s Art Museum in Stockholm through September 15, 2024.

NIGHTS ARE WARM AND THE DAYS ARE YOUNG: THE GOLDEN YEARS OF KARY H LASCH

© Kary H Lasch/Bridgeman Images.

Cannes was to blame, he told himself defensively. It was a city made for the indulgence of the senses, all ease and sunshine and provocative flesh.

 

– Irwin Shaw, Evening in Byzantium (1973)

 

It was the best of times, it was the best of times, it was the age of personality, it was the age of proficiency, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of great looks, it was the season of light, it was the season of nourishment, it was the spring of hope, it was the sweet life any time of the year when Jesus came to Rome dangling from a helicopter.

 

The February 1966 issue of Playboy includes an interview with the director of La dolce vita (1960) which starts off like this: “‘You’ve been accused of embroidering the truth outrageously even in recounting the story of your own life. One friend says that you’ve told him four completely different versions of your breakup with your first sweetheart. Why?’ Fellini: ‘Why not? She’s worth even more versions. Che bella ragazza! People are worth much more than truth, even when they don’t look as great as she did. If you want to call me a liar in this sense, then I reply that it’s indispensable to let a storyteller colour a story, expand it, deepen it, depending on the way he feels it has to be told. In my films, I do the same with life.’”

 

The legendary Kary Herman Lasch (1914–1993) from Prague, Bohemia, was a keen character, a teller of tall tales and trumped-up stories. But the marvellous thing about it is that they were all in some way or another based on true events and actual encounters, which hundreds and hundreds of his best pictures give evidence of: the speciality of his intimate portraits of the stars and starlets of the dolce vita era (and later artists and directors), his considerate and beautiful photojournalism that never circumvented the depths of human life, and his early and much delightful girl photography of the world’s loveliest unknowns.

 

“He told a lot stories in different ways,” says Michel Hjorth who with his associate Christer Löfgren administer The Kary H Lasch Archive – comprising over half a million pictures from the man’s roughly fifty years in the service of photography – which has been in their possession since 2019. “Kary had to sell his pictures to make a living. He was making good money, but he wanted to have all his pictures published so he told his different stories to different gangs, and they were in turn distorted in interviews. There was a mystique to the whole thing that was building up. To sell his pictures he had to be really sharp, and he was. He could tell any story he wanted. It was all about arousing interest all the time.”

 

The central piece on the display table at Fotografiska in Stockholm, where the quite sensational Kary H Lasch: The Golden Years is on show (and which later this spring moves to Tallinn for a new arrangement), is a portrait of Lasch taken by Michel Hjorth who was the photographer’s friend and pizza companion (Lasch was a vegetarian so he always had a Margherita) for the last fourteen years of his life. And here’s Lasch, elegant enough for Sweden, in a waistcoat, tie and a light jacket, his legs apart on a sofa, fist clenched, making his best angry face with a pair of mad googly eyes attached behind his thick glasses. “I hate photographers, except for Michel …!!” he has jestingly scrawled on the print with the sort of black marker pen that he always used to border his press photos with. This is the other side of Kary Lasch, the cavorter.

 

“He was a very serious person,” Hjorth assures, “but outwardly he appeared to be a clown and many people couldn’t cope with the fact that he spaced out as hard as he did. He had a basic character and you can see it very early on in his private pictures from home. At the age of five, Kary lured in the neighbour girl and promised her a cucumber if she stripped naked.” The showcase is merely a brush of items representing Lasch’s extraordinary life, such as a copy of Photography magazine of June 1952, his first international cover; Lasch’s spoof on Life with the “Great Photographer” type of person bragging about his camera gear possessions, and a photo of the BBC visiting him in Stockholm for a thirty-minute special about his alignment with the stars.

 

Marvin Heiferman articulates in his book Photography Changes Everything that “Photographs don’t only show us things, they do things. They engage us optically, neurologically, intellectually, emotionally, viscerally, physically.” The Golden Years at Fotografiska, oh the show – it’s pure eye candy. Kary H Lasch: The Golden Years is the kind of thing that animates our heads and our hearts and our loins. It carries the joy, knack and profoundness of this man who was one of the most industrious and dedicated portraitists during the high-life of the 1950s and early 60s, the golden years when the movie legends looked so immaculately dapper, as if beyond reproach, and yet so alive and comfortable in their own skin.

 

“Kary was a wonderful, wonderful friend and I miss him very much. We stayed friends until the end of his life. Now at eighty-four, I still get a lump in my throat remembering that day. Dear Kary, whose talent with the lens was unequalled. And he was admired by great artists like Pablo Picasso,” expresses the lovely France Nuyen via email. Nuyen was not yet fifteen years old when she arrived at the Festival de Cannes in April 1953, riding on a motorcycle with her friends from the École des Beaux-Arts where she was the famed institution’s very own mascotte. She was very shy, strikingly beautiful, and there was not a snapper in Cannes who did not aspire to photograph this remarkable girl.

 

“As soon as we got there, I was faced with having to hide behind my big architect friends to discourage them. The one who would not give up was Kary Lasch. He was stopping the traffic on the Croisette by pretending that his little imaginary dog was having a poo-poo in the middle of the street, making the infuriated drivers honk and scream in anger. But Kary would not move until his invisible dog had finished and Kary would lift the dog’s tail and clean the little behind with his handkerchief. By then there was a huge crowd of people watching and laughing. Then Kary came up to us and said to me, ’Now that I made you laugh, will you let me take your picture?’ All my friends said yes and I ended up being photographed by Kary Lasch and I was on the cover of a lot of international magazines as ’The Girl on the Beach at Cannes’. Kary went on taking pictures of me during my whole career in Hollywood and on Broadway so I owe him everything.”

 

There is a picture on Wikipedia from 1978 of Lasch in his very charming and likewise peculiar two-floor studio at Skeppargatan 4 (within sniffing distance from Sweden’s most expensive street, Strandvägen) in Stockholm, holding an Oldenburg-sized red toothbrush. Most of the circumstances about this photographer – who in point of fact was the one with whom Anita Ekberg shared the night after her wedding on May 5, 1956 in Florence – were for sure larger than life. “He was accredited to the Festival de Cannes for thirty years straight. Then you become legendary, and can behave exactly as he did, and he could go anywhere and everybody knew who he was,” explains Michel Hjorth.

 

“Movies alone could not establish the Festival as a worldwide stage for international film culture but press coverage of ‘events’ could,” argues Vanessa Schwartz in It’s So French! Hollywood, Paris, and the Making of Cosmopolitan Film Culture. “At a pivotal moment in American domination of the international film market, the French-run Festival developed an international platform for the world’s films and film personalities. In Cannes, films and their stars had access to an unprecedented scope of publicity, disseminated by the increasingly photo-oriented mass international press. While studies of cultural diplomacy have underscored national chauvinism, rivalry, and the frigid battles of the Cold War, the history of the Festival describes the forging of a collaborative international film culture.”

 

The first Festival de Cannes opened on September 1, 1939 but had to be revoked after just one screening – it was the morning when the Nazis marched over Polish borders. Two days later the Second World War broke out. The Festival was revived in April 1946 as the world was trying to get back on its feet again. At the beginning of the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1938, Lasch lost his good life in Prague, the privileged travelling, the boarding school in Switzerland and everything else. His middle brother managed to escape to London and the stateless Lasch arrived in Stockholm to establish a new life from next to nothing, starting as a window cleaner. His parents and his oldest brother were sent to a labour camp in Belarus where they were terminated thirty-six months later, a wound that Lasch would never recover from.

 

“Kary was very fond of his mother, they had a strong love for each other. Even as a child he said that she was his best model. I think that he was very original as a child. He knew six languages by heart, it could be said that his talent was complete,” Hjorth reflects. “He was expelled from almost every school that he attended because he made practical jokes that could end up in the most absurd situations.”

 

“Kary disliked his violin teacher in Switzerland so much that he slammed his instrument on the grand piano, and since then he never touched music – other than listening to Mozart, all the time. He knew everything about Mozart, the family background was like that. I understand that they were surrounded by a musical elite. The family had a summer villa, a big house in Kutná Hora [fifty kilometres east of Prague], and in the garden they had a train that went to a music pavilion. I never managed to find out about the dimensions of that train.”

 

Lasch was also fanatically fond of girls. He photographed 4,500 natural young beauties that he located everywhere, and he claimed that he fell in love with them all. In the January 1958 issue of the (since-long defunct) American monthly Coronet, there is a story of Lasch finding one of his dreamgirls on a boulevard in Paris, then quickly pulling out a chair from the nearest café to photograph this mademoiselle by the name of Yvonne Monlaur (who had just started her short career as an actress) in the middle of the street. These things had a much deeper meaning than pissing off motorists: this was essentially about the sense of time being paused during the moment when love and yes, yes lust fill your entire being.

 

“His early girl pictures had a clear sense of style with a compelling aesthetic and there is a graphic sense to it that is very nice. During his first nine years as a photographer, he had a woman who was more than twenty years younger, Lillemor Wredman, and she helped him with everything. They were everywhere. But he was chasing girls pretty much constantly and their relationship ended,” Hjorth elucidates. At times when the Benny Hill/”Yakety Sax”-side-of-the-matter took over Lasch’s photography, libido overturned artistry.

 

“He got tired of girls pretty quickly, that I realised. They became a kind of consumable and I don’t think that these pictures turned out well either. But when he has something where there is dignity, he was sharp as a tack. He said that he was disappointed in all the chicks because they would always let him down, but the truth is that he was just the same himself. He claimed that he was chronically unfaithful but I find that very strange because I didn’t think that he was particularly sexual. He was more pubertal in sex; his audacity was exceptional. The basis for this is to be elegantly impudent. But he always emphasised that he was very kind and those I have talked with attest to his gentlemanliness.”

 

“In Kary’s case I didn’t see charisma. He was more what you would call a manipulator, he was cunning but in a very good way. Kary was persistent. When he was shooting you can clearly see that it was a collaboration and that he had a very good, instinctive approach to portraiture. So he was able to capture these moments when the person is present, and not pretending to be present, and Kary is a great example of that. Over the years it became less and less possible for him to get his pictures out because in the 70s everything changed completely. He told me on various occasions that he was terribly disappointed that everyone thought that he only photographed girls when he had such fine pictures as those shown here at Fotografiska.”

 

During the last year of his life when he was slowly dying from cancer, Lasch was fully engrossed in securing his life’s work. The archive remained dormant for thirty years – stored at the picture and news agencies Pressens Bild and later TT, and was (not ideally) in the possession of a Finnish ex-model who worked as a journalist in Paris. Two books on Kary Lasch’s pictures were published in the 1990s by two of his agency friends, and old and inferior press prints circulated here and there but not much else transpired. Things suddenly began to spin when Michel Hjorth initiated the idea of making a major photobook on Lasch. With the help of the Governor of Turku in Finland, Hjorth and Christer Löfgren managed to capture the entire Kary H Lasch Archive of 21,600 sheets of negatives and unbox this treasure for the world.

 

Everything in the collection has been documented and digitalised. The pristine prints come with a unique certificate on the back, and with a mobile you are directed to a server in Switzerland where the authenticity is verified. From his early days in Stockholm – when Lasch challenged a photo editor in the Hasselblad store on Strandvägen, and in jest told him that he could do so much better than the editor’s pictures – till the end of his career when he carried out his work in a more hasty and careless manner, much of Lasch’s photography was marked by a slapdash attitude towards the technical side of his profession. He never bothered about things such as using a light meter or developing his rolls in an orderly fashion.

 

“Since I knew how bad, grey and blotchy the press photos were, I had the idea that we should bring his images up to the highest level that exists today,” resonates Hjorth. “The books from the 1990s have mimicked him in a sense that the reproductions look as if they are from the 1950s. There is such a quality in the material that you have to deal with.” The Golden Years: Photography by Kary H Lasch came out in 2021, and each theme – “Glory and Fame”, “The Years in Cannes” and “Moods and Humour” – is housed in its own physical book with pictures so alluring that they make you feel that there are more songs to be sung and bells to be rung.

 

It should probably be mentioned, however, that most of what can be read in these books is in dire need of editing. That said, there is a beautiful little piece by Joakim Strömholm, whose famous father Christer thought it would be a better idea for his son to improve his darkroom practices in Lasch’s bathroom (in his home at Brantingsgatan 30) than to join a friend on a ski trip to the Austrian Alps. It was one of those mornings in March 1965 that Lasch knocked on the bathroom door, carrying a tray full of breakfast delights together with the dread of the news brought by the morning paper: the coach with Joakim’s friend had been swallowed by a snowslide and everyone was dead.

 

“I remember him as kind, generous, mischievous, funny and very considerate,” adds Strömholm in a message. “For a 15-year-old it was like being in paradise, to be among all his negatives and pictures of gorgeous babes and famous actors. In a sense, he probably helped me when I started my own photography. His social skills and friendly forwardness were inspiring.”

 

In Bring on the Empty Horses (1975), David Niven’s second personal account of his life in films, the debonaire actor writes that “Hollywood was Lotus Land between 1935 and 1960 and bore little relationship to the rest of the world, but it was vastly exciting to be part of a thriving, thrusting ‘first-growth’ industry – the greatest form of mass entertainment so far invented.”

 

We are back in Lotus Land at Fotografiska, under the guidance of Herr Lasch. “Kary connects with the people he photographs, they feel the warmth when they smile and look at Lasch, he participates in their moment – and you sense it, regardless of age, I think. Equally, it is not a bad thing to experience a bit of a concentrate of the temper of this particular era that continues to influence much of our contemporary range of film, fashion and design,” replies Lisa Hydén, Director of Exhibitions at Fotografiska’s mothership, who has curated The Golden Years show with finesse and a sincere understanding of Kary H Lasch and his photographic flair.

 

It is easy to nod in agreement when the curator appreciates how Lasch “persistently won his photographic moments through perseverance, humour and mischief but still with respect, and how he as a social virtuoso with refinement had his eyes raised towards a kind of cosmopolitan horizon, despite the rather narrow Swedish confinements that he found himself in. Lasch was moreover street smart, and that is a good thing to be.”

 

After various attempts to have Kary Lasch shown at Fotografiska in Stockholm without even being replied to, Tobias Röstlund, Head of Picture Agency at TT Nyhetsbyrån, found a new way to unlock these doors when the agency’s News Flash: A Century of News opened at Fotografiska by the end of 2022. “Now that I had managed to meet the right people, I told them about Michel and Christer’s extraordinary work with Lasch’s pictures and the book that they had produced. And this eventually led to the exhibition, to everyone’s delight,” recounts Röstlund. “My ambition from the beginning was simply that more people would be given the opportunity to see his wonderful pictures from another, bygone era since they are worthy of being displayed in a large format, on fine photo paper.”

 

Lisa Hydén explains that “We chose, out of all the thousands of imaginable possibilities, to keep the selection focus that Michel and Christer had delineated in their book volume, the 1950s and early 60s. Then I wanted us to try to capture a little more of Kary’s playfulness in the exhibition. It felt like a possible way to bring the space a little closer to the feeling of being part of the swirling energy that he seems to have had around him. We tweaked it a bit, and asked our graphic designer at Studio Kunze to create a textual design that retained a basic element of elegance but also energy and merriment. Lasch expressed in interviews that he would have liked to exhibit more but the assignments and time ran faster, so here we had a great opportunity to make an impact and produce his prints magnified and emphasised.”

 

To hint-hint a bit of Kary Lasch’s star quality: picture a man who goes to Copenhagen to catch the night train to Stockholm because he knows that Sophia Loren is on that train and that he knows that her agent will let him knock on her door at 5:30 in the morning, and that the eternal woman will be delighted to see him again and allow him to photograph her in her black nightie. When Loren arrived in Stockholm (with two other actresses, Silvana Pampanini and Lea Massari) in December 1955 to attend an Italian film festival, she was met by the habitual throng of press photographers running after her railway carriage. There was also only one photographer in the whole world who could have taken the picture of Loren in her Grand Hôtel suite, elegantly posed at the tall window with a crowd outside and the Royal Castle across the water. That’s excellence.

 

“For foreign filmgoers, between the 1940s and 1960s, Italian female stars were exotic, fiery, passionate, beautiful and adult,” argues Stephen Gundle in Bellissima: Feminine Beauty and the Idea of Italy. “Whatever connotations they might have had for Italians, for English and American audiences they were anything but familiar girls-next-door and nor were they the sort of artificial product that the major Hollywood studios had been turning out for decades. Before all else, Italian stars appeared to be natural; they offered not the constructed sex appeal of the glamourised star, but a certain raw earthiness that seemed natural and unspoilt. To outsiders, Italy possessed the eternal appeal of an old civilisation and the fresh vibrancy of a country that, for all its problems, seemed basically dynamic and optimistic.”

 

Fellini had plenty of good things to say in that 1966 interview in Playboy: “I loathe collectivity. Man’s greatness and nobility consist of standing free of the mass. How he extricates himself from it is his own personal problem and private struggle.” We now live in a uniquely senseless time in human history. Graeme Turner in Understanding Celebrity Culture is effectively mild-mannered when he describes the dazzle of today’s imperious meh-celebrities and how they rattle in their cages for any kind of validation: “as the example of Kim Kardashian might suggest, most media pundits would agree that celebrities in the 21^st century excite a level of public interest that seems, for one reason or another, disproportionate”.

 

“Never touch your idols: the gilding will come off on your hands,” cautioned Gustave Flaubert in Madame Bovary (1856). One could only wish that “new” Fotografiska will keep clear of these rattlers with their cold energies who seem to be unable to escape the vacuum of their own personal irrelevance, and whose faces have often enough covered the walls ever since the opening in 2010 with the photographic misrepresentation of Annie Leibovitz. Kary H Lasch: The Golden Years is on the other hand Fotografiska when it spangles.

 

The stardust of yesterday exudes from lustrous medium- or small-sized prints, framed or frameless, while the soundtrack and the paraphernalia secure the mood in the later years of the 1950s. Here you encounter Gina Lollobrigida in Paris in 1951 after Lasch had placated her green-eyed husband Milko Škofič with a potent notion of “Slavic brotherhood”; wave farewell to Anita Ekberg and Anthony Steel at the Firenze Santa Maria Novella and wish them happy trails on their honeymoon; follow Frank Sinatra to the Gare de Cannes in 1955; play boules with Gene Kelly and some happy Côte d’Azur locals; stay with Salvador Dalí in his pitchforked dream castle in Cadaqués in 1958 – or you can think about the chocolate sauce and the stabbing of Janet Leigh in Psycho (1960) while Anthony Perkins smiles at you.

 

In his book Glamour: A History, Stephen Gundle expresses how “Bardot struck a blow against some of the traditional canons of movie star glamour. She rejected the costly gowns and rigid formality of previous French stars and instead proposed a casual, yet sexy and glamorous, alternative that consisted of gingham dresses, Capri pants, and striped tops, that were left cheekily unbuttoned. Her imperfect, bottle blonde mane symbolised her casual, carefree manner. In an era when stiffness reigned, she offered a dream of emancipation and an image of unlimited desire. Bardot was hugely successful abroad but highly controversial at home.”

 

The first time that Kary Lasch photographed Brigitte Bardot was when he met the very young France Nuyen at the Festival in April 1953. The last time that he was close to BB was on the set of Une parisienne in 1957 where he had a small part playing himself (which is not in the film however). It is beyond question that Brigitte Bardot has embodied the Festival de Cannes like no one else, though Lasch found her “a little cheap, and I would almost say vulgar” when he tried to come to terms with her sexiness during the early years of her career.

 

The most beautiful picture in the show has nothing to do with stars, sunshine and provocative flesh. It is a beauty photographed in an Italian church with Lasch’s woman Lillemor Wredman in the centre of the perfectly composed Hasselblad square, and there is a toned-down holiness to everything about it: to this woman standing at the inside of the entryway in her white blouse and what seems to be a pencil skirt, her posture is lovely; to the soul of the carved stones and the three very different columns to her left; to the light and darkness enhanced by the window opening to her right; to the man in his chair below her who is deep in thought. This is the point of great photography – a heartening portrait of a woman (and an old man) united with the serene vivacity of life itself.

 

“The last time I met Kary Lasch was in 1992 in Gothenburg at the Swedish Exhibition and Congress Centre in connection with an exhibition of his pictures. And there, between Brigitte Bardot, Gina Lollobrigida and Britt Ekland, was little old me. In the evening Kary was travelling home and I followed him to the Central Station. Kary looked tired, his ever so impish eyes had faded a bit. I asked him how he was feeling and he replied, ‘You see, darling, the geezer is getting a bit old,’” remembers Birgitta Lindberg in Mitt jordenruntäventyr med den berömde fotografen Kary H Lasch (My Around-the-World Adventure with the Famous Photographer Kary H Lasch). “I can still feel his warm hug that night. He never told me that he was seriously ill. Kary died on August 27, 1993.”

 

In the beginning of the 1970s, Lasch’s friend Gordon McLendon, who owned the well-known Southfork Ranch outside Dallas, sponsored their worldwide adventure during which ten thousand pictures were taken of Lasch’s new young model Birgitta in an endless array of beachwear in Singapore, Sumatra, Jakarta, Borneo, New Caledonia, Fiji, Tahiti, Jamaica, Acapulco, Dallas and Los Angeles, and the famous photographer seemed to have friends or make new ones in every paradise and at every luxury hotel they came to. “Kary was phenomenal at conversing in foreign languages. He would run around like a ferret to make sure that he didn’t miss anything,” writes Lindberg. “I say it again, he was indefatigable! That one person can have so much energy! I don’t get it.”

 

“Kary also had many other sides,” Lindberg reveals in a handwritten letter. “Deep down he was very vulnerable, sensitive and also lonely. When I was in Stockholm recently for his exhibition at Fotografiska, I visited his grave and saw the simplest tombstone imaginable, it cried out: so lonely. Nothing about him being a master photographer. Nothing. It was painful. Kary H Lasch died alone.”

 

Baudelaire’s recommendation to the sensitive souls of the world was that “One must be drunk always … If you would not feel the burden of time that breaks your shoulders and bows you to the earth, you must intoxicate yourself increasingly.” Aside from his fondness for Mon Chéri pralines, Lasch never touched alcohol. But the unequalled and amazing way he lived his life was exactly like that, in spite of the fact that he didn’t “score” each time.

 

In a sweet letter to his favourite model Birgitta Lindberg in December 1977, Kary H Lasch thanks her “for everything that has been and has not been”.

© Kary H Lasch/Bridgeman Images.

Kary H Lasch: The Golden Years at Fotografiska in Stockholm through April 14, and at Fotografiska in Tallinn, April 19–September 8, 2024.