Literature: Wilmann & Brøns, cat no. 191, ill. full page p. 195. Exhibited: “Nyere dansk kunst i Viborg-eje”, Viborg Rådhus, October 1953, cat. no. 18. Provenance: Dr. Repholtz / Goldsmith Israelsen.

Within the period of ca. 1925–1935, Vilhelm Lundstrøm created his most stringent and most colour resolved compositions. In a 1930 review, art historian Vilhelm Wanscher wrote: “Vilhelm Lundstrøm is one of the few modern painters who maintains a fixed ideal and who aspires methodically to the highest purity in colour and form.” (Wilmann & Brøns, p. 196).

The shapes are reduced to what is almost their geometrical essence. And with his most powerful images the complementary contrasts reach their extreme. The composition currently auctioned is rendered in complementary colours that are exceptionally intense and vibrant.

Lundstrøm was, by dint of his early international orientation and not least his years living in Cagnes-sur-Mer in Southern France (1923–1932), completely au courant with the stylistic tendencies of the time. During his time and later there were several attempts to place his work in a purely “ism” sense between Picasso and Braque's cubism, Fernand Léger's artistic idiom and purism as practiced by Le Corbusier and Amédée Ozenfant - without doing Lundstrøm full justice. Art historian Finn Terman Frederiksen highlights the artist's efforts around 1925 as an individual manifestation of the constructivist realist trends of the time without specific role models (Lundstrøm, “100 år 1893–1993”, p. 66). With this statement he allies himself with Preben Wilmann, who concluded that Lundstrøm took from others only what he needed to turn out a Lundstrøm.

This work, from a rarely offered period in the artist's oeuvre, contains all of the elements that go into making an excellent and iconic Lundstrøm.