KARL KVARAN Karl Kvaran is a representative of that generation of lcelandic artists who adopted the ideology and methods of geometric abstraction, Concretism, during the fifties. This art movement carved a place for itself in lcelandic art history, when strong influences from Paris reached here after 1950. Karl has continued to work in the spirit of this movement and developed a personal and independent artistic style founded on its principles. Thus it is of interest to trace the career of an artist such as Karl Kvaran who became fascinated by the fundamental ideas of geometric art without, however, going to Paris himself and coming under direct influences of this art movement. In the beginning, his works were based more on the ideas of the De Stijl group. They are a shining example of how a rather restrictive movement can lead to an extremely felicitous development towards a more powerful and definitive art. This retrospec- tive exhibition of his works which the National Gallery of lceland is now sponsoring gives us a perfect opportunity to illustrate this development. I After the last world war a new movement began to make itself felt in Paris, based on the principles of the Abstraction-Création group founded by Auguste Herbin and Vangongerloo in Paris in the thirties. This movement was built around regular exhibitions of the Salon des Réalités nouvelles in the Musée Moderne from 1946 and around exhibitions of the Galerie Denise René.1 Around 1950 there were many lcelandic artists in Paris and they were strongly influenced by this group and also the magazines Art dAujourdhui (which Galerie Denise René published) and Cimaise. The last two exhibitions of the lcelandic group “September” foreshadowed future trends, and in 1952 there were many works to be seen in the spirit of geometric art by Karl Kvaran, Þorvaldur Skúlason, Hjörleifur Sigurðsson and Valtýr Pétursson. In 1953, a special group formed here whose aims were to promote geometric art, but it split up and that year two exhibitions were held. In the spring of 1953 a collective exhibition was mounted where such works were exhibited. Those who exhibited were Ásmundur Sveinsson, Þorvaldur Skúlason, Gerður Helgadóttir, Valtýr Pétursson, Benedikt Gunnarsson and Hjörleifur Sigurðsson. In the autumn yet another collective exhibition was held in which only geometric paintings were exhibited. Participants in this exhibition were Eiríkur Smith, Hörður Ágústsson, Sverrir Haraldsson and Karl Kvaran, in addition to Svavar Guðnason who was a guest of the exhibition. Others who followed this movement were Jóhannes Jóhannesson, Nína Tryggva- dóttir and Guðmunda Andrésdóttir. The Abstraction-Création movement owed its roots to the ideas of the De Stijl group and the Russian Constructionists and Suprematists and these ideas were based on a well-constructed ideology. On the other hand a characteristic of post world war geometric art was less emphasis on an ideological background, and indeed this movement had a more immediate 17

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