OLLE NYMAN'S GRAPHICS

The classic legacy

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Duvnäsgården, the white-stepped artist's home with the extension  the glass veranda, the old and the new studio, the so-called long line,  the driver's home and the summer studio with the loggia - it has been said that Olle Nyman  (1909 - 1999) transformed his childhood environment into his tusculum, the metaphor that  originates in Cicero's "Tuscan" villa a few miles outside Rome,  later the name of “a prominent scholar or statesman  country place, where he can sometimes withdraw from the chores and  world noise ”( Nordic Family Book 1892). It was also here - in the classic  Italy, in Spain and the south of France - which Olle Nyman was looking for  artistic motives when he did not let himself be inspired by the Italian  the pre-renaissance, the spanish baroque and not least all those who populated it  the classical, mainly French mainstay of 20th century modernism,  Cézanne, Matisse, Bonnard, Braque and Morandi.

    Olle Nyman was not a pure graphic artist, and perhaps he was not  nor any coincidence that he came to make his last etchings just in connection with  one of his trips down to Italy and the south of France, which by the way happened to be  the first trip he made with fellow artist Roland  Kempe and Sixten Lundbohm in the spring and summer of 1937 to Florence, Rome,  Rimini, Ravenna and  Venice, finally the small "Cubist" village of Ollioules soon  outside Toulon. In August, he was reached  the message that his father, the artist  Hilding Nyman, had died at home in Saltsjö-Duvnäs, a hard blow that  meant that he immediately went up to Stockholm via Paris and Amsterdam.  Autumn and winter became a divided time when he also - according to Bo Lindwall -  "Enjoyed" etching some motifs he had drawn in Ravenna. It was  the last time he ever engaged in etching, a technique he  had studied in the graphics school during the years at the art academy 1929 - 1934, when he  took lessons for both Emil Johansson-Thor and Harald Sallberg.  

    It was only during the last decades of his life that the painter Olle  Nyman returned to graphics, that is, the latest technology with lithographs  produced on film and sheet metal instead of the traditional stone. It was a  technology with which he had become acquainted with Grafiktryckarna in Nacka, at  which he now collaborated with the graphic artist Per Erik - "Pecka" - Holmgren; year  In 1958, the "miscellaneous worker" had Gösta Fredriksson from Hallviken in Jämtland  came up to Stockholm and worked as a postman before he was lured off  the job as an apprentice at Nacka konsttryckeri, on which he for four years  got  grind  if  the lithographers  from  color  and  irregularities  until  he  together  with  Holmgren  founded both  The graphic printers and Nacka stone printing at Järla lake in collaboration  with Konstfrämjandet - today a collection of over thirty thousand is stored  graphic sheets at Södermalm Art Gallery in the so-called  the tax scraper at  Medborgarplatsen in Stockholm.

   Many have testified about the special atmosphere on the farm in Saltsjö-Duvnäs, the work in the studios,  conversations with colleagues and old students,  the dinners, coffee breaks, a mix of Mediterranean culture and Swedish  18th century, and in a way Olle Nyman's graphics also appeared as one  kind of concentrate of just the classic "Tusculian" qualities that characterize so  almost his entire artistic oeuvre. It is a production that by and large  the whole must be seen in the light of how the artist himself valued a Matisse significantly  higher than, for example, the "affected" Picasso at the same time as he likes  quoted Cézanne when he explained that man should not be noticed in it  good painting. In the catalog for his exhibition at Lilla galleriet at  Brunkebergstorg 1952 Olle Nyman wrote himself that he had as a painter  influenced both formally and substantively by the strictly proportioned whites  the house lengths in Duvnäs, the garden, the beautiful deciduous trees and the flaps of water,  the harmonious whole, at once monumental and idyllic.

   It has also been said of Olle Nyman that his formality hindered  him from being swept along by the warring currents of the time, that he proceeded from the austere elegance of 1920s classicism, that in Italy and France he sought to find a  "Simple and calm landscape" characterized by the subdued color scale, the  well-balanced disposition of the surfaces, the elegant play of light and it  the calm dynamics of the geometric, pseudocubist form.

   In short: Olle Nyman was, as Bo Lindwall puts it, not  anxious to assert at all costs an originality that fears being influenced by  the masters where he felt no need to revolutionize art - himself  he gladly quoted Braque's confession: "I am not a revolutionary. I'm looking for  not the excitement. The glow, the still heat, is enough for me. ” Yes, already his  father has been described as a "mildly conservative" artist who remained  the teaching generation faithful in opposition to the radicals of the time like Isaac  Grünewald and Sigrid Hjertén at the same time as himself - according to Hans  Eklund - could not bring himself to break away from the "fine" patriarchal environment  which was associated with Duvnäsgården. Olle Nyman became the "omnivore" Olle  Nyman who firmly rejected to  example the Stockholm exhibition's radical  modernism in 1930 only to be captured by the French a year later  the modernist main channel at the National Museum with artists such as Bonnard,  Braque, De la Fresnaye, Derain, Léger, Matisse and Utrillo. Tusculum became his

resting point.

                              Tom Sandqvist

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Eklund, Hans: Olle Nyman. Saltsjö-Duvnäs with views.  Stockholm: Silander & Fromholtz  Förlags AB, 1998.

Lindwall, Bo: Olle Nyman. Stockholm: Swedish General Art Association, publication  94, 1985.