299 Grand St. NYC.

Signed and dated, ‘Barbro Östlihn, 1963’, verso.

Barbro Ostlihn paints houses. Closed houses, clear and severe facades without perspective, whose forms always allude to slightly contoured volumes, painted absolutely evenly. The forms stand like inexplicable house-glyphs, discouraging verbal knocks on the door. Because of their size and clarity, Barbro Ostlihn’s pictures are immediately perceived from a distance as recognizable data, but they are not easily placed in the genealogies of style. They contain the serenity of Piero della Francesca and Vermeer. They also have the exquisite precision of old master technique. However, in our time representing the environment of man is considered equal to, and may replace, the representation of man himself. Ostlihn’s pictures are as enigmatic as those of de Chirico, but hers lack perspective and dream atmosphere. They are too monumental to be associated with the ‘Neue Sachlichkeit’ of the twenties and the thirties. Her pictures are too detached and ambiguous to be claimed as ‘pop’ art; too complex and illusionistic for minimal art. They have the stark symmetrical economy of heraldic shields. At the same time, they posses a mellow radiance of colour and the finely structured formal hierarchy that one finds in Oriental carpets. 

The initiated, and poetic, description of Barbro Östhlin’s production above, was formulated by Öyvind Fahlström (1928 – 1976, legendary and productive multimedia artist, author and poet, working in many genres, often dealing with political and social issues, who was married to Östhlin between 1960 and 1976) in a text, ‘Det extatiska huset’, published in Konstrevy, 1966. Fahlström was not only an extremely talented artist, but also a prominent writer, as shown in the passage above. The question is whether any critic, museum curator or art historian has been able to sum up Östlihn’s New York production better than Fahlström?

Östlihn and Fahlström, armed with individual scholarships, arrived in the USA with a freighter on the 13th of October 1961. They were already acquainted with American artists like Robert Rauschenberg (1925 – 2008) and Jasper Johns (born 1930), whom they had met in connection with the legendary exhibition Rörelse i konsten (Movement in Art) at Moderna Museet in Stockholm earlier that year. Östlihn and Fahlström were immediately accepted in the artist circles in New York and quickly became friends with several of the leading representatives of Pop Art, among them, for example, Swedish-born Claes Oldenburg (1929 – 2022). Another important figure, facilitating the couple’s rapid integration into the circle of American artists, was Billy Klüver (1927 – 2004, Swedish engineer who collaborated in various art projects with Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol [1928 – 1987] and Jean Tinguely [1925 – 1991]).

During the first months of Autumn 1961, Östlihn stayed in a room at the residence of the Swedish consul general at Park Avenue, high up on the Upper East Side, and took daily walks down to the studio on Front Street at the southernmost tip of Manhattan, which later became her home. Annika Öhrner PhD (who wrote her doctoral dissertation [Barbro Östlihn & New York: konstens rum och möjligheter, Uppsala university, 2010] about Barbro Östlihn) writes (in Barbro Östlihn. New York Imprint, exhibition catalogue, Gothenburg Museum of Art, 2022):

She took many walks. The more she walked, the more she artistically liberated herself from the last remnants of the Swedish modernist tradition of building up visual space with volumes and struck a new path. […] During the 1960s, Östlihn’s paintings are subordinate to the proportions of the buildings or façade designs. The canvas is dependent on something outside itself; the format is such that the relationship between length and breadth in the painting is decided by the structure of the architecture. This is apparent in Royal Pavillion but also in works such as New York Steam Company (1962) and 299 Grand Street (1963), and several other paintings.

Through Klüver, Östlihn and Fahlström had access to a loft, that Rauschenberg had recently left, located in the same building where Rauschenberg’s former partner and lover Jasper Johns worked: 128 Front Street. Öhrner, again, writes (in Barbro Östlihn - liv och konst, exhibition catalogue, Norrköping Museum of Art, 2003):

At first they used it as Fahlström’s studio, but from the spring of 1962 it served as a studio and residence for both. […] Barbro Östlihn worked in the outer of the two rooms, which was also the entrance hall, kitchen and bedroom. Ever since their arrival, she had held a high pace of production and had taken up an artistic stance towards the new environment, which she was to keep during the whole of her stay in New York. Her many walks in her new hometown were central to her, walking with her Kodak camera in hand. The photographs of New York facades were the basis of her new work. […] After she had photographed a building and possibly also made a sketch of a section of the facade, she returned to the studio where she worked at night using the photograph and sketch as her only models.

In March 1962, when Daniel Cordier, whose Paris gallery Fahlström worked with, came to New York to look at Fahlström’s recent work, he became interested in Östlihn’s paintings as well. Preliminary plans were drawn up to include Östlihn’s work in a group exhibition at his branch in New York (Cordier & Ekstrom) in the summer. Even though these plans never materialized, they led to something far better: a solo exhibition in November 1963. The exhibition included more than twenty paintings from the period 1961 – 1963, including the first frontal ‘house paintings’.

Reviews and paragraphs in The New York Times and The New York Herald Tribune referred to sensitivity and “immaculate purism”. Dore Ashton (in Studio International Art) commented that Östlihn was strangely able to combine ornamental precision with the massive silhouettes of skyscrapers and bridges. Barbara Rose (in ‘New York Letter’, Art International, January 1964) compared Östlihn to Agnes Martin (1912 – 2004), who was simultaneously exhibiting at Elkon Gallery, saying that the two painters contradicted all simplifying generalizations as regards to ‘lady painters’: ‘Neither weak nor fussy nor cute nor sentimental, their work has a seriousness and profoundness that commands respect.’

In terms of art history, as pointed out by Annika Öhrner, the review by celebrated artist Donald Judd (1928 – 1994) in Art Magazine (January 1964) is interesting. He was one of the first people to note the influence of René Magritte (1898 – 1967) in the disciplined form of Östlihn. The exhibition was also warmly received by New York artists: Jasper Johns hosted the opening party and paintings were acquired by fellow artists. Star (1963, oil on canvas, 28 x 23 cm), for instance, was bought by Arman (1928 – 2005) and Subway-Lock (1963, oil on canvas, 23 x 28 cm) by Östlihn’s friend Roy Lichtenstein (1923 – 1997).

The following year, Östlihn participated in group exhibitions at Allan Stone Gallery, where fellow artist Frank Stella (1936 – 2024) acquired Fan (1962, oil on canvas, 69 x 76 cm) and Cordier & Ekstrom, where 299 Grand St. NYC made its public debut. Östlihn’s relationship with the latter gallery soon became complicated when Fahlström ended his cooperation with Daniel Cordier and went to Sidney Janis Gallery. On Östlihn’s own request she was free to make arrangements with other galleries if she wished.

299 Grand St. NYC is a stunning example of Östlihn’s frontal ‘house paintings’ from her, extremely, important time in New York. The painting, acquired by Daniel Cordier’s business partner Arne H. Ekstrom, clearly illustrates the impressive development that Östlihn’s painting underwent during these significant years in, what was then, the absolute center of art in the Western hemisphere, as pointed out by Öhrner (Barbro Östlihn. New York Imprint, exhibition catalogue, Gothenburg Museum of Art, 2022):

In the space of a few months she created, almost without intermediary steps, the visual scheme that she would follow during the coming decades and until her death, the architectonic motif, the large format, the interplay between micro and macro formal elements, the focus on surface. […] During the years on Manhattan, Östlihn painted at night. Between 1961 and 1967, she worked in the studio she had taken over from Rauschenberg on Front Street, and later in her combined studio and residence on 2nd Avenue further north, in Bowery. The photographs she selected for a work show a certain façade or building. The house’s contours or the façade design were transferred to the canvas in a mathematically calculated grid, in which she early on decided the colour of every square. Each such section contained a kind of intensification of a colour. 

Provenance
Cordier & Ekstrom, New York.
Arne H. Ekstrom Collection, New York.
Galerie Baudoin Lebon, Paris.
Björn Springfeldt (director of Moderna Museet, Stockholm, 1989 – 1996) Family Collection, Stockholm.
Bukowskis, Stockholm, sale 642, Contemporary Art & Design, 26 October 2022, lot 317 (consigned by the above).
Firestorm Foundation (acquired from the above).

Exhibitions
Cordier & Ekström, New York, For Eyes and Ears, 1964.
Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Barbro Östlihn. Målningar från New York – Stockholm – Paris 1962 - 1983, 21 January – 4 March 1984, no. 5.
Sven-Harrys Konstmuseum, Stockholm, Party for Öyvind, 9 September 2021 – 23 January 2022.
Museum Tinguely, Basel, Switzerland, Party for Öyvind, 16 February – 1 May 2022.

Literature
Öyvind Fahlström, ’Det extatiska huset’, article in Konstrevy, 1966, mentioned p. 154.
Öyvind Fahlström, ’Barbro Östlihn’, article in Art International, February 1968, mentioned.
(Ed.) Annika Öhrner, Barbro Östlihn - liv och konst, exhibition catalogue, Norrköping Museum of Art, 2003, mentioned p. 48 and illustrated full page, p. 53.
Annika Öhrner, Barbro Östlihn & New York. Konstens rum och möjligheter (Academic dissertation for the Doctor of Philosophy degree in Art history, Uppsala University), 2010, mentioned p. 45, 58, 70 and 249.

Annika Öhrner, Barbro Östlihn & New York, 2010, illustrated full page, p. 33.

Gunnar Lundestam, Party for Öyvind, exhibition catalogue, Sven-Harrys Konstmuseum, Stockholm / Museum Tinguely, Basel, Switzerland, 2021, mentioned and illustrated full page in colour, p. 104-105.

Annika Öhrner, ’Barbro Östlihn. Royal Pavillion’, article in (Ed.) Per Dahlström, Barbro Östlihn. New York Imprint, exhibition catalogue, Gothenburg Museum of Art, 2022, mentioned p. 22.

Copyright Firestorm Foundation