STRINDBERG, August - b. 1849 Stockholm, d. 1912 Stockholm

Swedish writer, considered a master of early modern century drama for his daringly realistic plays. After an unfinished university education and brief careers as a journalist and librarian, he began writing naturalistic, often satirical fiction and dramas that would earn him recognition as one of Sweden’s most important modern authors. Strindberg’s plays Miss Julie and The Father, and his later, more mystical dramas A Dream Play and The Ghost Sonata, are still performed today.

In the 1890s he became interested in the Symbolist movement of the visual arts and was associated with such artists as Edvard Munch in Berlin and Paul Gauguin in Paris. To Strindberg the playwright and author, painting served as a valve capable of venting the emotional chaos and pressure he continually found himself under, particularly during one of his many crises. The painting begins where the words stop, or where words cannot adequately express the overwhelming feelings of rage, jealousy, loneliness, and anxiety.

Strindberg the visual artist did not limit himself to painting only; throughout most of his life he worked with photography and photographic experiments.

"Storm in the Skerries. "The Flying Dutchman"

This is a sombre image of violent forces of nature where the expressive feel is intensified by the fierceness of Strindberg’s spatula work. He found the scene depicted at Dalar� in the Stockholm skerries in the summer of 1892.

Strindberg worked very intuitively, translating his mental state into images with brief, fierce bursts of activity. That is also why he chose small-scale formats; in fact this painting, which Strindberg called The Flying Dutchman as a reference to Richard Wagner’s lonely, ever roaming captain, is one of his largest.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 10 minutes):

Richard Wagner: The Flying Dutchman, Overture