How Dick Bengtsson found rot in Sweden’s fairytale

If you know anything about the Swedish enfant terrible Dick Bengtsson, you will know he painted swastikas. He painted them everywhere. In a picture depicting the small drama theatre of the infamous Kumla Prison, one of the few high-security incarceration centres in Sweden, he painted a black-on-white swastika flat on top of a row of chairs. It looks like a brand logo for an advertisement. In his landscapes of Scandinavian idylls, the kinds of rural places which look as though there can be no conceivable crime, nor conflict, nor crisis of any kind, he painted tiny swastikas on the exteriors of farmhouses and posh villas, as if to say: “yes, you’ll find that here, too.”

One of the central challenges of Bengtsson’s work is the ambivalence of his visual language. By incorporating such symbols of ideological power and violence – symbols we associate with history, but may not be consigned to the past – is the artist critiquing the ideas that hide behind them? Is it possible that he offers them up as a warning sign? If nothing else, Bengtsson’s swastikas jolt us into seeing the world as a suspicious place rife with concealed tensions, a place where hate hides in plain sight. “My pictures are largely about forged reality”, he reflected in a 1983 interview, “about the idyll that is not what it appears to be.”

An exhibition of his work, entitled ‘The Unseen’, has been on show this spring and summer at the Sven-Harrys Konstmuseum, located deep in Stockholm’s Vasaparken, where healthy and beautiful Swedes exercise. Founded by the Swedish builder and art collector Sven-Harry Karlsson in 2011, the museum is a fascinating labyrinth clad in a gold-tinted alloy designed not to darken when exposed to oxygen. The challenging exhibition brings together many of Bengtsson’s canvases from the 1960s and 1970s. Many of these works obliquely deal with the legacies of the Second World War and the Holocaust, during which “neutral” Sweden was seen to emerge without blood on its hands. Bengtsson wonders whether that self-conception of the “good Swede” was honest and true or a myth to keep a fragile society together. Many of the paintings depict the dark side of happy-clappy communities: Tourists in Hawaii (1975) appears joyful enough, as hula dancers serenade paradise at dusk, were it not for two sickly guest workers awkwardly thrust into the foreground of the scene.

Bengtsson has rarely been shown in Sweden, and almost never outside of it. Stockholm’s Moderna Museet held exhibitions in 1983 and 2006. It is therefore not quite true to say that Bengtsson is a “lost” or forgotten artist, but his reputation is not exactly wide-reaching. Born in 1936, Bengtsson was an autodidactic “artist’s artist” who had a cult following in Sweden and, in the 1980s, his work was reappraised by a new generation of iconoclastic painters at art schools in northern Europe. Figurative artists like Jens Fänge saw something in Bengtsson’s provocative stance on maddening historical amnesia, as well as his playfulness with the conventions of realism, as a way out of the formal dead-ends of modernist painting. But it was also his unflinching approach to subject matter as he confronted politics and history in nuanced ways that stood out, especially in a postmodern age when most artists were either hammering their flags to the mast or else running away from political responsibility altogether.

In the exhibition’s most arresting painting, Hitler and the Dream Kitchen (1974), Bengtsson depicts a small group of high-ranking Nazi officials chit-chatting in a deserted landscape under a chemical blue sky. Adolf Hitler, in the centre, has a thought bubble to a modest prefabricated kitchen, an archetypal room of the Million Programme, launched in 1965 as a large public housing programme designed to offer universal, affordable and high-quality housing to all Swedes. Is Hitler dreaming of a secure home in a safe community, just like everyone else? Or is there something subtly fascistic in the Swedish social democratic utopia? Bengtsson painted the era of IKEA’s heyday during the postwar boom. It was held up as the perfect society. Was it all not a little too cosy?

Bengtsson was an eccentric character who struggled with the conformity of Swedish society, and who suffered throughout his life from alcoholism, sometimes found himself homeless, and worked odd jobs to sustain bursts of sensational creativity. He was also a restless and meticulous innovator. He had to be. Like Basquiat, he was obsessed with encyclopaedias and mined them for historical symbols and unexpected facts. On grid paper, he traced photographs from newspapers before transferring the images onto a canvas. He moves seamlessly back and forth between historical references. There’s a remarkable moment in Mountain Hikers (1974), a scene of three young and intrepid hikers traversing a rugged mountaintop, who wouldn’t look amiss in a propaganda poster for the Hitler Youth. However, if you look closer, part of the central figure’s back is fashioned with a Constructivist grid of red and black. A striking and bold modernist idea is incongruously thrown in to offset the otherwise Romantic scene of youth and nature. You think you are looking at one political vision, and then immediately you are thrown into another.

Often unable to afford studio space, Bengtsson regularly worked on the floor of his small kitchen. Most fascinating of all, he assaulted the surface of his finished paintings with a hot iron before applying layers of varnish. As the curators note on the wall text: “This was a bold, postmodern approach, which had the paradoxical result of both aging and protecting his work.” For a spell, Bengtsson worked for the Swedish Post Office and became fascinated by the insignia of stamps on envelopes. It’s easy to look past the visual quality of things like stamps; they represent something functional and “everyday”. People who collect them are often held up as avatars of the dull and dreary. However, like banknotes, another dying out object circulating through civic life, they remind us of who a society should venerate – monarchs, statesmen, the great and the good. But more than anything else, he enjoyed how stamps looked, how we used them but ignored their symbolism, and how they held up a kitschy mirror to a society that celebrated conformity and the principles of the Swedish ideal of “lagom”: “everything in moderation”.

But for all his references to kitsch and folklore, stamps and landscapes, Bengtsson returned to the swastika the most. As much as anything else, he was drawn to its formal possibilities and mathematical proportions. Dan Brown fans will know that the Nazis – who called it a Hakenkreuz, or “hook-cross” – did not invent the swastika symbol. In The Da Vinci Code, Professor Robert Langdon – played by a sweaty-palmed Tom Hanks – asks an audience to tell them what the swastika means; they fall into his trap and shout things like “hate” and “evil” before he informs them, in smug “gotcha” fashion, that the swastika is used in South Asia as a symbol of good luck or spirituality. Its etymology is derived from the Sanskrit, svastika, meaning “well-being” or “fortune”. So, the Nazis stole the swastika, then Bengtsson stole it again. In The Domburg Suite (1974), he continues a swastika into a successive vertical structure so that the symbol looks more like a rudimentary Mondrian grid, and we are reminded that even the most striking and iconic of symbols can easily morph into something else. “I play signs out against a painted reality”, Bengtsson once said, “which brings about an irrational encounter that ‘creates’ a meaning by itself. The viewers themselves create that meaning.”

For many critics, curators, and culture warriors, the recuperation of “lost” artists has been an obsession for some years. Often, this effort has been driven by the increasingly tired logic of identity politics. In this view, to discover a “lost” artist means to offer some kind of reparative justice for a figure who has suffered some kind of institutional neglect, and who captures something of the zeitgeist in our own times. What to do, then, about Bengtsson’s ambivalence in a new age of resurgent fascism? Have we found him or has he found us? At a time when Sweden, like much of the rest of Europe, has turned its back on the postwar foundations of social democracy and the welfare state, and as the Sweden Democrats (a nationalist party with fascist roots) offer confidence and supply to the increasingly right-wing government, the home of IKEA doesn’t seem so cosy anymore.

But it is a trap to overdetermine his work too much in the light of the present. Had Bengtsson not died isolated and sick from alcoholism at the age of 53, his legacy would almost certainly have been different. Bengtsson believed in the strength of figurative painting to leave clues in landscapes and question the enduring appeal of symbols throughout history. It’s high time his work was better known outside of Sweden.