The Surrealism Website
Wilhelm Freddie (1909-1995)


Foremost amongst the Scandanavian surrealists must be Wilhelm Freddie. His first pieces were abstract as in Landscape of 1932, but he quickly adopted the figurative language of Dali with his 1936 Meditation on the anti-Nazi love and another anti war painting from the same year Psycho-Photographic Phenomenon - The Fallen of the World War. Also painted in 1936 was one of Freddie's more explicit sexual images.
In 1937, his exhibition in Copenhagen, Sex Surreal: Take the Fork out of the Butterfly's Eye, outraged the press. On the pretext that his collage of that name was pornographic, the police closed the show and confiscated the works. He was arrested and spent ten days in jail. These two paintings were seized and only returned to him twenty six years later in 1963.
Freddie was very productive and able to create original images. Thus The Prayer of 1940 is very different from many of his works of the period.
Later in his creative life he turned to more abstract forms as we see in La Dolce Vita of 1966.