Nína Tryggvadóttir

Biography

In 1949 Nína Tryggvadóttir, recently married in New York, went to Iceland for a short visit. She was not allowed back into the United States: she was suspected of sympathy with Communists. Some sources say she nevertheless tried to return and was briefly expelled; according to others, entry was simply refused.

She was born in Seyðisfjörður, in eastern Iceland, and was baptised Jónína. Sources differ on her birth date: it is usually given as 16 March 1913, sometimes as 13 March. Her father was a merchant in Seyðisfjörður, and her mother was a seamstress. In 1920 the family moved to Reykjavík, and Nína attended the Reykjavík Women’s School. The family’s neighbour was the landscape painter Ásgrímur Jónsson and, it seems, it was he who encouraged her early interest in painting; according to some accounts he was also a relative on her father’s side. Her parents at first wanted her to become a cook.

She began systematic study at twenty, first with Ásgrímur Jónsson, then with Finnur Jónsson and Jóhann Briem. In 1935 she went to Copenhagen, and in 1939 she graduated from the Royal Academy of Art. She then spent several months in Paris, and the city made a strong impression on her. The outbreak of war sent her back to Iceland.

Her first solo exhibition took place in Reykjavík in 1942. In those years she painted portraits of the poet Steinn Steinarr, designed a book of his, and illustrated his anti-war poem “Tindátarnir”, published in 1943. She also wrote poems and stories herself, wrote and illustrated children’s books, and wrote scripts for ballet, film and radio.

In that same year, 1942, she moved to New York with the artist Louisa Matthíasdóttir. There she studied with Fernand Léger and with Hans Hofmann, who taught many American abstract painters, attended the Art Students League of New York, and became part of the city’s art scene. Her first solo exhibition abroad opened in 1945 at the New Art Circle gallery on 57th Street. At it she met the physician and artist Alfred Copley, who painted under the name Alcopley. She also took part in a film made at Columbia University. In 1947 several of her works were shown at the “September Exhibition” of young Icelandic artists in Reykjavík; in Iceland it was considered almost revolutionary, because abstract art was being taken seriously there for the first time. In the autumn of 1948 there was another exhibition at a New York gallery.

After being refused entry to the United States, she lived in various places in Europe, Iceland among them. In 1951 her daughter, Una Dóra, was born in Reykjavík. The family settled in Paris, and in 1957 lived in London, where an exhibition was held that year; she also exhibited in Wuppertal, at the Galerie Parnass, at that time. They returned to New York in 1959. Throughout those years she kept exhibiting in Iceland.

Painting remained her main work, but she also worked in paper collage, glass and mosaic. She often built her compositions on impressions of nature: the Icelandic landscape and the northern light are noticeable in them. To my mind this is seen best in her late works, though I have not seen any documents that would confirm it.

In 1963, after an exhibition in Reykjavík, she was commissioned to make the altar mosaic for the new cathedral at Skálholt. She also made a stained-glass window for the National Museum of Iceland. Another large mosaic, for the Hotel Loftleiðir in Reykjavík, was executed to her designs after her death, in 1968, by her husband.

Nína Tryggvadóttir died in New York on 18 June 1968.

In 2012 a crater on Mercury was named after her. In 2018 the Reykjavík City Council signed a declaration of intent with Una Dóra Copley and her husband Scott Jeffries to set up a museum dedicated to the artist: the couple donated their collection to the city. In 2023 her work was shown at the Whitechapel Gallery in London in the exhibition “Action, Gesture, Paint”.