The colorful and foreign
-on Nína Tryggvadóttir
Nina Tryggvadottir arrived in New York City at the age of thirty and just two years later had her first New York solo exhibition. An independent artist who had found her own way, she had already had solo shows in Reykjavik, and Copenhagen. Her eyes impregnated by strong and clear colors of her native land she felt right at home in the crazy and chaotic melting pot that was New York in the 1940s, breathing in the company of other newcomers interweaving in a slow but constant process of translation, all of them in their own way creating an abstraction of the impossible.
Born in Seyðisfjorður Iceland in 1913, Tryggvadottir moved to New York in 1943 where she died in 1968. After studying with the most skilled and respected artists of Iceland including Asgrimur Jonsson and Johann Briem, Tryggvadottir continued her studies at the Royal Academy in Copenhagen. She traveled to as many museums as possible throughout Europe to see firsthand the old masters she so admired. Inspired by what she saw in Europe, she decided to expand further west to witness and experience a world being born in new colors of thought.
The streets of New York were arteries in which flowed the exciting unknown. Looking back now, the galleries that were on Fifty-Seventh Street in the 1940s represent a turning point in Twentieth Century art. Notable galleries such as Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century (where Jackson Pollock had his first solo show), Betty Parson’s gallery, Sam Kootz’s gallery, Sidney Janis’ gallery (the art collector turned gallery owner), were all showing artists who later would become known as the Abstract Expressionists. Two of the older more established galleries on Fifty-Seventh Street were the Julien Levy gallery – showing Frida Kahlo, Joseph Cornell, Arshile Gorky, and Matta, and, located at 41 East 57th Street in the Fuller Building, was J.B. Neumann’s New Art Circle – showing Paul Klee, Marc Chagall, Wassily Kandinsky, Max Beckmann, Georges Rouault, and Nina Tryggvadottir. She was the first woman of the New York School to have solo shows in such fine company. She had two solo exhibitions at The New Art Circle Gallery, first in 1945 and then in 1948.
Tryggvadottir married Abstract Expressionist artist Alcopley in 1949 in New York. Together they belonged to a select group of artists, writers, philosophers, and composers who shared a passion for discovery and were open to long discussions lingering late into the nights. All of them experimenting with abstract thought and expression, each creating in their individual way: Bill and Elaine de Kooning, Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner, Mark Rothko, Franz Kline, Barnett Newman, Ad and Rita Reinhardt, David Smith and Dorothy Dehner, John Cage, Hans Richter, Hannah Arendt and Heinrich Blucher, Frederick Kiesler, Edgard and Louise Varese, and their many other friends. In 1949, Alcopley was one of the seven founding members of “The Club”, where an intense examination of the pulse of the new world on crossroads of currents took place.
Tryggvadottir, a hard and disciplined worker, always had several works in process at any given time, patiently adding layers upon layers in her paintings. Her creative drive saw her working in many methods of expression: watercolors, drawings, collage, book-works, beautiful cut-out children’s books, fabric designs, stained glass windows, mosaics·. In1946, Tryggvadottir designed the sets, the costumes, and the poster for the historic Dimitri Mitropoulos New York production of Stravinsky and Ramuz’s “A Soldier’s Tale” and she was one of the first artists to design sets and costumes for the newly opened National Theater of Iceland in 1950.
In 1952 Tryggvadottir settled in Paris with her husband and their daughter Una Dora. Tryggvadottir had been forced out of the U.S. late in 1949, an unfounded victim of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s red scare. In Paris, she and Alcopley founded “Le Club”, the French branch of “The Club” and also a vital place of intense discussions on art and ideas. In 1957, they moved to London where they remained until December 1959, when she was permitted to return to the U.S.
During her exile in Europe, Tryggvadottir returned every year to the nightless nights in Iceland, where there was a growing understanding of the new arts. She came as a fresh wind into the Icelandic art scene, full of wit and humour, playing her accordion and spending time with artists and friends trying to open the times for the foreign. She was frequently asked in interviews “what is the meaning of abstract art?” and she would respond by inviting the viewer into her works, explaining that they weren’t necessarily caught up in the distinction between abstract and figurative but could be seen as literature, philosophy, poetry, or scientific explorations; A research of the realms within, a journey into the unexplored perception of space.
Because of the ideas and spirituality evoked by her paintings, they are not easily put into words. But perhaps there is a way – an impossible way – which makes descriptive words humbled by the presence of her works: stacked blocks of color, burnt umber striations, sedate ochre and playful blue, shapes suspended in the background grounded by elements anchored onto the edge, the black ground showing through with light emanating from within, a dance of floating shapes in fields of consistently foreign and unlikely colors vibrating, undulating collection of forms writhing and moving quickly, a viridian green light onto a mystical center of interlocking shapes.
When Tryggvadottir finally returned to New York, it was as if her works had themselves overcome the distance and were breathing deeply in reassurance and joy. The intimacy of a dear moment included the whole journey and the paintings had become homes for insatiable wanderers.
Tryggvadottir’s paintings are the product of an explosion from within, a joyful energy shared in a disciplined and mature way. To experience this with her and to understand her ways, one must dwell in her paintings and in between them, as to let them permeate into one’s being, letting the blocks of color settle onto one’s eyes. Being prepared for a journey to an abstract place where colors have regenerated the elsewhere.
Oddný Eir Ævarsdóttir, author.
(originally written for an exhibition of Nina Tryggvadottir’s work at David Findlay Jr. Fine Art – in the Fuller -Building – New York in 2006 and revised in 2012)
- · Two of her mosaics are at display at Icelandair Natura Hotel
my second novel Home to my heart was the book of the month some months ago… or was it years ago?
“I lie in bed in a sanatorium, struggling to resist sleep, but then I recall that I’m allowed to fall asleep; I’ve got a sleep certificate, a stamp on my bum: Burnt Out. The reason for my condition remains unknown, but I believe that my quest for an understanding of love, which I see as my life’s work, has had a traumatic effect on me, because I could not fine-tune my heart. I came here in search of help, with the remnants of my worn-out heart in a brown paper bag.”
Eir 