Greta Knutson

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Portrait of Knutsons by Birger Simonsson , undated

Greta Knutson (born November 10, 1899 in Stockholm ; died March 6, 1983 in Paris ) was a Swedish artist who lived in Paris.

Life

Greta Knutson's father was a businessman and an artist who was unable to work, and Greta's relationship with him was tense. Her brother became a doctor in Stockholm. She studied in Stockholm in 1918/19 at the painting school with Carl Wilhelmson and the following year at the Royal Academy of Art . She read the German romantics like Jean Paul and Novalis and contemporary philosophers like Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger . In 1920 she went to Paris, attended André Lhote's art school and had a studio on rue Ernest-Cresson.

Knutson's Maison de Tristan Tzara in Paris

In 1924 she met Tristan Tzara after a performance of his play Mouchoir de nuages in the La Cigale theater , and they married on August 8, 1925 in Stockholm. Her mother refused the Jewish son-in-law. With their parents' money, they had Adolf Loos build the "Maison de Tristan Tzara" for them in Montmartre in 1926/27 . The building is now identified with Tristan Tzara. For financial reasons, they rented the lower three floors and only lived in the upper two themselves. Her study was retrofitted, the architect hadn't planned one for her. The house became a meeting point for the Parisian surrealist scene, in which the partners were considered muses and erotic ideal, but were not perceived as artists. The son Christophe was born in 1927, after which Knutson fell seriously ill.

Knutson did not paint in the style of the Surrealists, rejected their dogmatic, self-proclaimed leader André Breton and was picky about her friends. In 1926 and 1928 she exhibited paintings in the style of the Fauvists and Cubists at the “Optimists” in Stockholm and Gothenburg, and in 1928 she had a solo exhibition in the gallery of Leopold Zborowski in Paris . Her models were often her son Christophe, her cat and herself. Since 1929, she took part in the “Salon des Surindépendants” , often with Yves Tanguy and Alberto Giacometti . In 1932 she had a solo exhibition in Stockholm. In 1935 she took part in the "Artists' international association antifascist exhibition" in London.

In 1937 she took part in the exhibition Les femmes artistes d'Europe exposent au Jeu de Paume . In 1930 Tzara dedicated the volume of poetry L'Arbre des voyageurs to his wife . Since 1933 the marital relationships worsened to "Strindbergschem extent" ( Alice Halicka ), both partners tried to practice a surrealist libertinage , she for a time with Pablo Neruda and then with René Char . In 1938 she filed for divorce, and Tzara moved out of and into an apartment on Rue de l'Odéon, the divorce took place in 1942. After the German conquest of France , she went to unoccupied France in Aix-en-Provence in 1940 with her son and Char , and both worked for the Resistance , they led a resistance group. Knutson was briefly arrested by the Gestapo . Tzara saw her there in 1942 when he was expelled from Saint Tropez by the Vichy government .

After the war, she was politically disappointed with the return of the collaborators in France. She wrote as an art critic under the pseudonym Christine Carennac for Albert Camus ' short-lived magazine Empédocle . In 1946, a travel bag was stolen from her in the metro , which contained her unpublished poetic manuscripts, which were thus permanently lost.

From 1949 to 1968 she worked in her house in the Vaucluse department for most of the year and changed over the years from an initially figurative art, also in sculpture, to surrealist narratives in painting and poetry. With Gunnar Ekelöf , she translated literary texts into Swedish and French. In 1981 she published her first book with stories that she herself translated from French into German, under the title Bestien .

Works

  • Beasts . Translation from French by Greta Knutson. Brigitte Classen (ed.). Berlin: Medusa-Verl. Wölk u. Schmid, 1980
  • Lunaires . Paris: Flammarion, 1985.

literature

  • Henning Repetzky: Knutson, Greta . In: General Artist Lexicon . The visual artists of all times and peoples (AKL). Volume 81, de Gruyter, Berlin 2014, ISBN 978-3-11-023186-1 , p. 52 f.
  • Knutson-Tzara, Greta . In: Hans Vollmer (Hrsg.): General Lexicon of Fine Artists of the XX. Century. tape 3 : K-P . EA Seemann, Leipzig 1956, p. 73 .
  • Daniela Büchten: Greta Knutson , in: Britta Jürgs (Ed.): A little water in the soap: Portraits of Dadaist artists and writers . Aviva Verlag, Grambin 1999, ISBN 3-932338-06-5 , pp. 127-146
  • Matilda Sjöblom: Greta Knutson och surrealisms: en study of Greta Knutsons senare stilperiod utifrån verken La Surprise, Feu dans la maison och Det stulna brevet. Dissertation University of Södertörn , Institutions for culture och lärande, 2014
  • Cristina Politano: Dethroning the Madonna: Greta Knutson, Julia Kristeva and the Search for a Post-Virginal Discourse on Jouissance . Thinking Gender 2014. UCLA Center for the Study of Women, 2014 Link (interpretation of the text La vierge noire (1984))
  • Penelope Rosemont: Greta Knutson , in: Surrealist women: an international anthology , London: Athlone Press, 1998, p. 69
  • Madame Tzara? Greta Knutson and Tristan Tzara . Romanska Cultural Institute, Stockholm, 2007
  • The Tzara house . In: Bauwelt . Gütersloh: Bauverl. BV., 1981, pp. 1896-1897
  • Marius Hentea: TaTa Dada: the real life and celestial adventures of Tristan Tzara . Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, 2014

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d Marius Hentea: TaTa Dada , 2014, pp. 205–213
  2. ↑ Maison de Tristan Tzara see French Wikipedia fr: Maison de Tristan Tzara (Paris)
  3. ↑ Maison construite en 1926 by l'architecte Adolf Loos pour l'écrivain Tristan Tzara et sa femme, le peintre Knitson ( Maison de Tristan Tzara . Monuments historiques at Culture.gouv ). The spelling "Knitson" is indicative of the history of the hotel's reception
  4. ↑ Unda Hörne : The real women of the surrealists: Simone Breton, Gala Éluard, Elsa Triolet . Mannheim: Bollmann, 1996, epilogue, p. 215
  5. ↑ Marius Hentea: TaTa Dada , 2014, p 241
  6. ^ Exhibition Les femmes artistes d'Europe exposent au Jeu de Paume, see French Wikipedia fr: Les femmes artistes d'Europe exposent au Jeu de Paume
  7. ↑ Marius Hentea: TaTa Dada , 2014, p 216
  8. ↑ Marius Hentea: TaTa Dada , 2014, p. 234
  9. ↑ Marius Hentea: TaTa Dada , 2014, p 252
  10. ↑ Marius Hentea: TaTa Dada , 2014, p 259


personal data
SURNAME Knutson, Greta
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Knutson-Tzara, Greta
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Swedish artist
DATE OF BIRTH November 10, 1899
PLACE OF BIRTH Stockholm
DATE OF DEATH March 6, 1983
Place of death Paris