Ásmundur Sveinsson

Biography

The gavel with which the President of the United Nations General Assembly opens sessions was made by an Icelander. In English it is called “Thor’s gavel”, and its maker, Ásmundur Sveinsson, spent most of his life in a house he had designed himself.

He was born on 20 May 1893 on the farm of Kolsstadir in the Miðdalir valley, in Dalasýsla in western Iceland. He lived there for the first twenty-two years. In 1915 he moved to Reykjavík, enrolled in the Technical College of Iceland and spent four years as an apprentice to the sculptor Ríkarður Jónsson.

In 1919 Sveinsson went to Copenhagen and from there to Stockholm, where he enrolled in the Academy of Fine Arts. He stayed in Sweden for about six years, spending much of the time studying with Carl Milles. By one account he studied in Stockholm from 1920 to 1926; by another, the whole Swedish period lasted six years, beginning in 1919. In 1924 he married the sculptor Gunnfríður Jónsdóttir, but they divorced a few years later. After leaving the academy he moved to Paris and in 1926–1929 worked under Charles Despiau.

In 1929 Sveinsson returned to Iceland. His first works of this period remain figurative, but the figures are already strongly simplified. The subjects come from labour: “The Blacksmith”, “The Washer Women”, “The Water Carrier”. In the 1940s he moved further and further from human and animal forms, and by the 1950s he was producing almost entirely abstract work. Some speak of a strong influence from Henry Moore; to my mind it is indeed visible in the later period, though it is hard to check from descriptions alone. Like many Icelandic artists, he drew his subjects from native tradition. In 1939 his sculpture of Guðríður Þorbjarnardóttir and her son Snorri was shown at the New York World’s Fair. Casts of his smaller original were installed in Iceland, at Glaumbær and Laugarbrekka, and were also given to the Canadian government and the Vatican. His other works include “Trollwoman” (1948); “Head Ransom” (1948), based on a poem that Egill Skallagrímsson is said to have composed to save his own life; and “Hel-Ride” (1944), taken from the Prose Edda of Snorri Sturluson. “Sæmundur and the Seal” stands in front of the main building of the University of Iceland in Reykjavík.

Sveinsson believed that art should not belong to a narrow circle of connoisseurs, and he was glad to place works where everyone could see them. In Reykjavík his sculptures can be found in Laugardalur, on Snorrabraut and on the hill of Öskjuhlíð near Perlan. His statue of the poet Einar Benediktsson was moved in 2015 to a spot near Höfði house, where the poet had lived. At the farm of Borg á Mýrum near Borgarnes stands an abstract sculpture, “Sonatorrek”: the saga hero Egill with his dead son in his arms. The title refers to Egill’s poem in which he mourns the death of his sons. The house in Laugardalur was built from 1942 until about 1958, in three parts, to designs by the sculptor himself, an admirer of the Bauhaus style. He lived there for most of his life with his second wife, Ingrid Sveinsson. The building is slightly reminiscent of Le Corbusier and his chapel at Ronchamp.

Sveinsson died in Reykjavík on 9 December 1982. Today the house is Ásmundarsafn, a branch of the Reykjavík Art Museum, and the sculpture garden beside it is open to all free of charge.