poignant world of Lena Cronqvist, The

Scandinavian Review, Autumn 1997 by Hultman, Marianne

You will hear the truth from children and mad men," writes Birgitta Trotzig in the foreword to the book, Lena Cronqvist's drawings 1969-1979, published by Galleri Lars Bohman in Stockholm. The acclaimed Swedish painter Lena Cronqvist did actually go mad for a while, and she does depict the world of children, always very truthfully.

My first encounter with Cronqvist's work was in 1995 at the Gothenburg Art Museum where I was working as a docent. The exhibition was a vast touring retrospective, which had first been shown at the Liljevachls Konsthall in Stockholm. At first I wondered how to explain these raw and sometimes even ugly paintings that I was obliged to understand, yet in the process I soon came to admire her work.

First Show in New York

Two years later, Lena Cronqvist had her first New York exhibition at the Thomas Nordanstad Gallery in March 1997. Though she had exhibited extensively in Europe and elsewhere for the past 25 years, she was virtually unknown in the United States.

It was exciting to walk up the stairs and step into what was once Willem de Kooning's studio. There, revealed behind the entryway, was Cronqvist's world of little girls, a subject she has been studying since 1990. The show was named Rub-a-dub-dub!, a ditty referring to the difficulties you sometimes encounter trying to give your child an evening bath. The walls were enlivened with oil paintings of young girls in the water, or in a tin tub in a tiled checkered bathroom, or playing with daddy and mommy-dolls. In one painting the girl is holding a mommy-doll tightly at the throat. The doll has the features of an old woman. The girl's expression shows fascination for the power she possesses.

Three Girls (page 52), shows two girls standing close to each other, while the third girl stands alone. We all recognize this scene. We have all been through it at some point in our childhood. But what is perhaps harder to admit is that we recognize the intense feeling of abandonment, of not being wanted, of not being allowed to play with the others. The third girl is so angry and disappointed that she is ready to burst. She holds her fists tight, concentrating on her own outrage.

One of the more intense paintings was Girl in Water with Cat (page 52). The red-ribboned girl stands in twilight-colored water playing a violent game with a black cat, whose body is submerged under the water. What is the girl thinking about? Does she want to push the cat's head under the surface? As we all know, cats are not usually very amused by such wet games and neither are we as spectators. The subject is horrifying, yet the painting is beautiful. Cronqvist's act of balance between the colors and the image is seductive. The colors force you to keep your eyes on this violent scene. They make the painting radiant.

This is exactly what makes Cronqvist's work so wonderful: the fact that it is so honest and naked. We are not seeing a brushed up picture. Instead we are confronted with the truth of life. We get to see the good with the bad, the beautiful and the ugly, the love and the hatred. These are feelings we have all experienced, whether we are prepared to admit it or not.

Poisoned at Girl's School

Lena Cronqvist was born in 1938 in the Swedish town of Karlstad. She considered herself contaminated by her early girls' school education, so she later detoxified at Konstfack, an Art School in Stockholm. In 1964, the year she married the writer Goran Tunstrom, Cronqvist graduated from Konsthogskolan, the second Art School that she attended. She also studied monkeys at Skansen, a recreation ground in the midst of Stockholm, which resulted in her Gorilla paintings. In 1967 she had her first show, a group exhibition at the Academy of Fine Arts.

During the second half of the Sixties she and her husband traveled a great deal: to Greece, Morocco, the United States and Mexico. During their stay in Chiapas in 1968 Cronqvist became pregnant. They traveled back to Sweden from Guatemala on a big tanker loaded with bananas. At this time she began to work on a series of family life paintings and suburban Madonnas.

While staying at their summer house in the Gothenburg archipelago after the birth of their son, Linus, Cronqvist went into a post-partum psychosis. She experienced a nervous breakdown. She picked pumpkins from the garden, thinking the pumpkins were her babies as well. What triggered this behavior was apparently her mother's reference to baby Linus as "pumpkin," which made Cronqvist's imagination spin. She was also convinced that her baby had extraordinary powers to heal the world.

Not knowing what else to do, her husband Goran Tunstrom had Lena admitted to St. Jorgens, an asylum on the outskirts of Gothenburg. During the months she was compelled to spend at St. Jorgens, the artist was heavily drugged. She also received several electric shock treatments. While institutionalized she could think about only one thing: how to get out. Just before the Christmas holidays she managed to persuade the staff to release her.