Torsten Billman

Torsten Edvard Billman (6 May 1909 – 6 April 1989) was a Swedish artist who worked as a printmaker, illustrator, and buon fresco painter.

It's social, not in attitude or trend, but with objectivity and revealing sharpness in the human portrayal that sometimes seems almost brutal - repulsive, but sadly true.

During a drawing lesson with a substitute teacher Torsten had on a piece of blotting paper drawn a detailed composition, which was supposed to represent an Indian with his tent and utensils.

As he crestfallen rose to return to his own desk he was further rebuked by the teacher, who ordered him immediately to fling the drawing in the red-hot stove.

With white school chalk he drew caricatures of his fellow seamen and officers on the soot-blackened walls and bulkheads of the stokehole.

Torsten Billman's cousin on his mother's side Nils Svahn (1890–1936) was an editorial cartoonist at the newspaper Social-Demokraten, in Stockholm 1920–29.

[12] Artistically he was "the complete savage", but he became interested when he saw reproductions of Frans Masereel and Käthe Kollwitz and when he later saw lithographs by Honoré Daumier it was a stirring experience for him.

[15] Upon the recommendation of a German woman in Kullavik he gained admittance in 1931 to The Industrial Arts School in Gothenburg, with Hjalmar Eldh as a teacher.

A good example of woodcut making from this period is A Fiddlers Burial (1931), inspired by a poem from collection of verse Black Ballades by the Swedish poet Dan Andersson.

One morning in April 1932, on the train from Kullavik to art school, Billman wrote to his sister about expensive water colours he can't afford to buy.

[17] In the spring of 1936 the Swedish composer Gösta Nystroem, that was curator at Göteborgs Konsthall 1934–1936, organizes a scholarship to Billman.

In London he entered a planned marriage of convenience with a Jewish woman from Germany who intended to flee via Sweden.

In mid-August 1939 Billman biked to Paris (from Gothenburg) to try to persuade Kristina to return to Sweden, when a major war in Europe seemed to be coming closer by the day.

[20] After the Valand period Billman worked sporadically as a drawer for Göteborgs Handels- och Sjöfartstidning 1934–1940.

In a letter of November 1937, to art historian Gunnar Jungmarker (1902–1983) at the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm, Billman reveals that he is in an artistic crisis.

Some shining grisaille woodcuts are French Restaurant (1940), Artist Family (1941), Wilderness Kitchen (1942), Around a Guitar Player (1942), Stairway in the South (1942), Stormy Day, Dieppe sept. 1939 (1944) or Tropical Harbour (1945).

Art critic Tord Baeckström in Göteborgs Handels- och Sjöfartstidning wrote about the grisaille woodcuts: "Billman concentrates the expression of a picture with remarkable assurance - with a few jabs of his iron he can summerize a face which speaks the poet's own language, an interior that breathes a hopeless misery, or a suggestion of a wintry street scene so that one feels the pull of Dostoevsky's prose.

"[27] The publisher, collector and art connoisseur Gerard Bonnier (1917-1987) said about Billman's Dostoevsky-images: "I find them to be some of the best book illustrations made in Sweden during the 1900s.

When Billman 1943 was asked, by the ombudsman Knut Ring at Swedish Seafarers' Union and the art historian Carl Nordenfalk at Gothenburg Museum of Art, if he wanted to carry out a buon fresco on two walls of 20 metres in the New Seamen Homes ceremonial room, Billman had just worked with woodcuts and small ink illustrations.

[30] But 1943 Billman start to work on his first buon fresco painting To Sailors - Workers at Sea (1944) in Seamen's Home in Gothenburg.

The buon fresco portrays key processes in Swedish history, from the 1870s (Modern Breakthrough) to the end of World War II.

Billman have placed the socialist agitator August Palm (1849–1922) in the center of the fresco as a criticism to the labour movement's establishment about their forgotten history and heritage.

The buon fresco In Front of Smålands Taberg (1949) in The People's House in Norrahammar (outside Jönköping/Sweden) is Torsten Billman's work to the honour of labour.

With realism, poetry and local colour Billman portrays a recognizable everyday work among the foundry workers in Norrahammar.

Billman use his developed grisaille-technique in prints such as: The Murder of Lee Oswald (1964), The Warren Commission (1964), Indian Appeals to Lincoln (1965), Mozart's funeral (1965),[32] Party (1967) and Tear Gas in Paris (1968).

In The Murder of Lee Oswald and The Warren Commission Torsten Billman incisively commented events in the wake of the assassination of president John F. Kennedy.

The Murder of Lee Oswald uncovers, in the condensed black satire, complex links people only could sense but, then, couldn't put into words.