Inner Worlds

In his seminal essay New Arts! Or The Role of Chance in Artistic Production, Strindberg sets out his theory of the role of chance in art – prefiguring the automatic techniques of the Surrealists by some twenty years. He describes the creation of the 1894 painting Wonderland. Initially, the area in the middle of the canvas represented the sea, with a forest in the foreground. But when he stepped back, he could not see any sea, and the forest had become a dark underground cave, blocked off with brambles.

Later, between 1901 and 1905, Strindberg produced a series of works harking back to this composition. These later paintings look out as if from a wood or cave into a clearing or towards the sea. The mood varies. In The Child’s First Cradle, the womb-like cave suggests safety and comfort; elsewhere, there is a sense of claustrophobia and entrapment – contradictions that perhaps illustrate Strindberg’s complex attitude to women.

Particularly dramatic is Inferno, one of the paintings that he himself rated most highly. Here, the placid light at the centre of Wonderland has been transformed into driving rain, and the surrounding foliage is dark and oppressive. 'Inferno' is the word Strindberg used to describe the period of intense psychosis that he suffered in the 1890s; and this painting is an attempt to recapture that mood.

Series of paintings, like these, are a recurring feature of Strindberg’s art: he would work through a motif by returning to it repeatedly. Another series from the same period focuses on waves breaking in an open sea. Sometimes Strindberg explores the play of light on the waves. Elsewhere, the breaker seems to be sandwiched between sheer walls of dark green sea and sky, with just a chink of light on the horizon.