Den röda vallmon (The Red Poppy)

Den röda vallmon / The Red Poppy (one of two similar paintings bearing the same title) is part of Lena Cronqvist’s remarkable suite The Painter and Her Model from the early 1980s. Back then (starting in 1982), Cronqvist worked on several larger canvases, mainly executed in tempera partly mixed with oil.

The artistic theme of the artist and his (or her…) model recurs frequently in art history. A handful (of countless) known examples are to be found in celebrated works such as Johannes Vermeer’s (1632 - 1675) The Art of Painting (c. 1666 - 1668, oil on canvas, Kunsthistoriches Museum, Vienna); Alfred Stevens’ (1823 - 1906) The Painter and His Model (1855, oil on canvas, 92 x 77 cm, The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, Maryland, U.S.A.) and Lucian Freud’s (1922 - 2011) Painter and model (1986 - 1987, oil on canvas, 160 x 121 cm, private collection). As is well known, Pablo Picasso (1881 - 1973) also returned to the theme several times during different periods of his artistic career, in works like Painter and his model (1928, oil on canvas, 130 x 163 cm) and Painter and his model (1963, oil on canvas, 130 x 161 cm, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid).

The theme was thus well established when Lena Cronqvist, in the early 1980s, embarked on her acclaimed suite on the theme of the painter and her model. Sune Nordgren (born 1948, Swedish museum director and art critic; director of the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, Newcastle, United Kingdom [1998 - 2002] and director of the National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Oslo [2003 - 2006]) writes (in Lena Cronqvist, 1990):

Lena Cronqvist likes to see herself as part of a long artistic tradition. She draws freely from her vast store of visual impressions and establishes dialogues with her predecessors. Epochs and styles, directions and -isms do not exist for an innovative artist. It is the art historian’s tool for dealing with the chaos that is the main inspiration of many artists, an inexhaustible source with constant inflows. […] The question is whether 1984, without the slightest allusion to Orwell, is not the most productive and varied year of Lena Cronqvist's artistic eighties. It marks the end of the important series The Painter and Her Model, in which she so definitively consolidates her role as a professional artist, even to herself. She creates a self-confidence and a technical certainty that quickly leads to surprising results.

When Firestorm Foundation acquired the painting the auction catalogue entry stated the following:

Ever since her debut in 1965, at Galerie Pierre, Stockholm, Lena Cronqvist has fascinated and moved people with her powerful depictions of what it means to be human. Her paintings leave no one untouched. It is from her own experience and private life that Lena Cronqvist draws her inexhaustible source of inspiration. As an artist, she has painted her way through the rollercoaster of life and through her own experiences has touched upon something deeply human. We encounter our own dreams and fears in her work, we encounter memories, hopes and fears. At the same time, Cronqvist takes her place as part of a long artistic tradition, using her own impressions and experiences in dialogue with her artistic predecessors. ‘The Red Poppy’ depicts the relationship between a couple and the complicated power play that can take place in the meeting between man and woman. A man is stretched out on a bed, with one eye open, and in front of the bed stands a naked woman, seemingly completely unaffected. Her pose is proud and rigid, her face inscrutable. The whole scene is bathed in a cold and wintry milky white light that blurs the contours. In contrast, the petals of the giant poppy the woman holds in her hand glow blood red. The symbolism is clear. Historically and in our time, the poppy has been associated with the remembrance of loss, memories, comfort and hope. The viewer becomes a spectator to the silent chamber play that is going on and which the artist also explores again and again during the year 1984.

Nina Weibull, PhD (born 1947, Swedish art historian and author) pays further attention to the symbolic meaning of the poppy in her article ‘Rum för magiskt skapande’ (in Lena Cronqvist, exhibition catalogue, Prins Eugens Waldemarsudde, Stockholm, 2020):

After another ten years, Lena Cronqvist paints another pair. The room where the poppy glows is white and cold as a morgue. [...] The woman watches, alone, with a womb like a girl and greying hair that reveals that life is passing. [...] What does the poppy signify? The rose and the lily, the violet and the lily- of-the-valley, the peony and the common columbine, the daisy and the lesser periwinkle, the cowslip and the Brompton stock, the cornflower and the wild strawberry flower, all metaphorically reflect the qualities of the Virgin Mary. With its blood-red colour, the poppy is a negation that evokes the suffering and death of Christ and can signify sleep, ignorance and indifference. Opium is extracted from the poppy, a pharmakon and a drug. It is the flower of quiet pain and deep rest, but also of forgetfulness, transience, dissolution and death. Around Ophelia’s head floats the poppy flower.

It should be clarified here that Weibull, initially, refers to Cronqvist’s legendary double portrait, based on Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait (1434, oil on panel, 80 x 60 cm, National Gallery, London), of herself and her husband Göran Tunström (Trolovningen, oil on canvas, 169 x 125 cm, Värmlands Museum, Sweden) from 1974 - 1975. It is also worth pointing out that when Weibull writes ‘Around Ophelia’s head floats the poppy flower’, she, more than likely, refers to Sir John Everett Millais’ iconic painting Ophelia (c. 1851, oil on canvas, 76 x 112 cm, Tate Britain, London). Weibull’s analysis of the motif then leads to comparisons with ancient Greek mythology:

Is it Psyche who has lit her candle here and is now watching the sleeping Eros? In the ancient myth, she breaks the vow she has pledged to keep, and she sees his divinity. At the same moment, he wakes up and disappears. They part ways, each with a wound of their own. Her candle has burnt him, and she has scratched herself on one of his arrows. Driven by the desire for the god of love, she searches day and night along a path filled with trials. It leads her to the kingdom of death. Only at death’s door does Eros meet her and lead her into immortality where they are finally united. But in Den röda vallmon [The Red Poppy] there is no promise of marriage. Rather than Eros, the lover of the soul, the slumbering one resembles a satyr, a creature of fantasy that embodies unbridled desire. Untouched by the icy cold of the room, he rests, disenchanted, on the magical picture plane of Lena Cronqvist’s visual world.

Although Weibull’s discourse is based on the other version of the painting (Den röda vallmon, 1984, oil and tempera on canvas, 185 x 150 cm), her words also, very much, apply to the painting in the Firestorm Foundation collection.

Signed and dated (lower right corner): ‘Lena Cronqvist -84’.

Provenance

Galerie Belle, Västerås, Sweden.

Private collection, Sweden.

Bukowskis, Stockholm, sale 662, Contemporary Art & Design, 15 - 16 April 2025, lot 210.

Firestorm Foundation (acquired at the above).

Exhibitions

Galerie Belle, Västerås, Sweden, exhibition 293, 1987 (under the title Vallmon [The Poppy]) .

Liljevalchs konsthall (Liljevalchs Public Art Gallery), Stockholm, Lena Cronqvist, 2 September - 16 October 1994, no. 33.

Literature

Sune Nordgren, Lena Cronqvist, 1990, compare Den röda vallmon (1984, oil and tempera on canvas, 185 x 150 cm), illustrated full page in colour, p. 27 as well as in black and white interior photo from Lena Cronqvist’s studio, full spread, in the beginning of the book.

Ingela Lind, Lena Cronqvist. Målningar 1964 - 1994, 1994, compare Den röda vallmon (1984, oil and tempera on canvas, 185 x 150 cm), illustrated full page in colour, p. 125.

(Eds.) Karin Sidén and Catrin Lundeberg, Lena Cronqvist, exhibition catalogue, Prins Eugens Waldemarsudde, Stockholm, 2020, compare Den röda vallmon (1984, oil and tempera on canvas, 185 x 150 cm), illustrated full page in color, p. 39.

Copyright Firestorm Foundation