Title:

"Woman with Rose and Brown", c.1940

​

Artist:

Greta Knutson-Tzara (1899−1983)

​

Type:

Oil on canvas

​

Size:

80 x 130 cm

​

Signed:

Lower left

​

RHA I.D.#:

RHA-06/2020-138

​

Provenance:

Stockholms Auktionsverk, 15 May 2000, cat. no. 519.

​

Uppsala Auktionskammare, June 2020, Modern and Contemporary Sale - Lot 714.

 

Exhibited Swedish-French Art Gallery, Stockholm, "Greta Knutson", November 1946, cat. no. 17.

​

     Greta Knutson-Tzara was a Swedish modernist visual artist, art critic, short story writer and poet born in 1899 in Stockholm. Early on she had a talent for languages, and had originally wanted to study linguistics. Her father was a musician and linguist who had worked in Germany and taught her to speak the language. Instead of linguistics, her father encouraged her to study art instead. A student of André Lhote who adopted Abstraction, Cubism and Surrealism, she was also noted for her interest in phenomenology, studying the philosophy of Husserl and Heidegger. Knutson was married to Romanian-born author and co-founder of Dadaism Tristan Tzara.
    She attended the Carl Wilhelmson Academy of Fine Arts for one year, then studied at The Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm, and later settled in Paris during the early 1920s. It was there that she began frequenting Andre Lhote's studio and became his disciple. When she moved to Paris her stay became permanent and she would only ever return to Sweden occasionally.

     Beginning in the late 1920s, she participated with her husband and their surrealist colleagues in a collaborative, chance–based, artistic parlor game known as "the exquisite corpse" (cadavre exquis). Taking turns, each artist would draw a portion of a painting without seeing what the previous artist had drawn, each adding to the other’s drawing until complete. The results were often strange Surrealist composite collaborations of people, creatures, or objects.

     In addition to Swedish and French she spoke German fluently. She used her linguistic talents to translate between French, German and Swedish. This made her an important purveyor of German romanticism to the surrealists, and of phenomenological philosophy to Char. She also conveyed French lyricism through her translations into Swedish, produced in collaboration with Gunnar Ekelöf.

     Despite this, the artist found the Surrealists to be sexist and "laughable", and the Negrophilia and Primitivism that had swept through 1920s Paris unnecessary because the primitive could be accessed through European medieval art.
    During the late 1930s she was a friend of the sculptor Alberto Giacometti and also the writer Albert Camus. She painted a portrait of Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti and later recounted that he told her his borrowings from African art, although discussed by critics, were only coincidental, since Primitivism was in fashion at that time. She had several solo art exhibits, notably one in Paris in 1929 and one in Stockholm in 1932.

     In 1942 she divorced Tristan Tzara and turned away from Surrealism, writing that she, “found the tyranny of André Breton unbearable."

     By the outbreak of the Second World War she and her son had left Paris to seek safety in Aix-en-Provence. She began a long relationship with the French poet René Char. Both of them served in the resistance and Greta Knutson-Tzara assisted refugees in their flight to Spain. She remained in southern France after the end of the war and mostly lived at a variety of different farms.

     The artist is represented in these public institutions:

• Nationalmuseum in Stockholm

• Moderna Muséet in Stockholm

• Gothenburg Art Museum

• Norrköpings Konstmuseum (Sweden)

• Musée national d'art moderne/Centre Pompidou (France)

• Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)

• Museum in Tours