August Strindberg
De la mer au cosmos

The Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne, is presenting the first-ever retrospective of Strindberg’s art in Switzerland, where he stayed on a number of occasions. This is a rare opportunity to see his main masterpieces brought together in a single exhibition.

From the early 1870s to the first years of the 20th century, Strindberg worked intermittently at his painting and photography, creating vigorous, powerful works that had no real equivalent at the time: landscapes in which, amid the unleashing of the elements, sea and sky seemed on the verge of disintegration. At the same period he was developing a new theory of art whose main text, «The Role of Chance in Artistic Creation», prefigured the ideas of the Surrealists. In photography, his quest for truth initially found expression in self-portraits and portraits of his friends and family, but in the early 1890s he adopted a more experimental approach, seeking to capture the invisible – the soul and the sky – on paper or glass.