“At the beginning of the 50’s, after a year’s military service in a bunker 50 meters below ground, I got such a claustrophobic feeling that when I got out of this hole, I went straight to the highway and hitchhiked to Madrid.”
That’s how the artist Jan Liljeqvist wrote on his website. Drastically, directly. He himself gets to set the tone to this text about his life.
I met him during the late 1980’s, later also his dearest Margareta Gröné. The conversations with Janne threw themselves wild, evocative, no agreeing, no rubbing the right way. He could throw out opinions sometimes taking my breath away, animated with the fist in the table making plates and food jump. If you invited him for dinner, you never knew what could happen. If the consent around the table was too big, he threw out a really ugly opinion in pure provocation. I always felt expanded and refreshed after the conversation. Like flushed. Fresh air!
He told almost nothing about his life, he was secret. But even though he did not talk about himself, he always spoke from himself.
Because of the secret of his life, this text is based largely on material from his brother Hans Liljeqvist and his wife Ulrika. There I find, among other things, an article from 1971 in Östersundsposten, where Janne says ”Social-minded, what is that?” And aiming in which direction? ”
Typically Janne. The in-word of the time, social-minded, lacked real commitment and meaning according to him. I continue to browse the material. And find his birth year, which he also kept secret. But I had already seen it. Secretly. We met on Renstiernas gata and got stuck as usual, talked about good movies, books we read, and politics. He had had his heart attack, just got from the pharmacy and waved with a bunch of cans with pills. On one of the labels I saw 1932. Of course, I said nothing.
Jan Liljeqvist was thus born in 1932 in Stockholm. The father was a decorative painter. Both parents were interested in art, the mother sang and played the piano. They lived at Lilla Essingen, where the Elektrolux and Primus factories were located and a shipyard. Lots of stuff to find, which Janne did and dragged into the apartment.
The family moved in 1940 to Ås in Jämtland, when Janne was seven years old. Now, the father Anders wanted to finally work as an artist full-time. And the children, Janne and his brother Hans, got used to a tight economy, no more school than the compulsory elementary school. Janne tried the Hermods correspondence courses, but rather went out into the forest with the dog, thought about becoming a forest officer, gatecrashed to get on the train to Östersund to visit the library and study the world literature on his own. Like he later learned different languages in Europe. I find the signature ‘Hell’ in Östersundsposten. He wrote about Janne’s trips in 1958. I quote freely from his text:
”— When Jan Liljeqvist traveled to Spain for the first time in 1953, he had gone to an elementary school in Ås, worked in the woods and had gone through his recruit training. He was there for five months and then home again. In March 1954 he returned. It took him six days to hitchhike to Barcelona, then heading for Malaga. He was wandering around in Malagas surroundings during daytime listening to the flamenco singing in the evenings, painted, drawed, met people, gypsies, fishermen, upper class, all different kinds.
From Malaga he went to Melilla in Morocco. Stayed for a while in a small Arab city, made a trip to Tetuan and Tangier and back to Spain and Madrid. There he stayed for nine months and went to the Academia de San Fernando and visited Museo del Prado. Now, he spoke Spanish fluently and had many friends among Madrid’s intellectuals, all of them opponents of Franco and the Catholic Church.
From Spain to Florence, where he hired a studio, studied at the Academy and above all, the painters Giotto and Botticelli. In Italy he stayed for a year. Not only in Florence. He also lived in Lerici, a small town outside Spezia, in the old hostel Castello Lerici. During Christmas time he hitchhiked to southern Italy and on Christmas night in 1955 he walked more than two miles in the winds and cold through a desolate Calabrian landscape without having a roof over his head. In August 1956 he was back in Ås. ”
Janne spoke very little about his formal education. To me he said that he was self-taught. In his own creating the result was the most important. To talk about his education when people could see the work themselves, he thought was unimportant. Not because he looked down on education and professional skills. He was also one of the few artists who read a lot of fiction. The source was there without him mentioning it nor quoting it. One felt the presence of it.
Once, Janne and I spoke about Spain, some winters I used to take a cheap ticket to Malaga. He said that he lived there in the 1950’s. Yes, of course, he did not mention the year. He had rented a house together with other artists and writers down there. Do you know the author Axel Jensen? Said Janne. Do you mean the guy who wrote my favorite novel ‘Line’ long ago? I said. Sure, he lived in the house, said Janne. And then he told a bit about the different crimes passionels that took place in the house.
And Paris. In total, he lived in Paris for about three years. As long as I knew him, it was like he got ants in his body during the spring, longing for Paris, easier to breathe there, he said, meaning culturally. Came home with a full sketchbook. And long before I knew him he was there, for instance during the Algerian war with constant demonstrations and riots. Janne told me ”And revolutionary romantic as I am, I once participated in an assault of the Parliament.” Many people sang the national hymn, shouted and screamed, and one speaker after the other came out with bombastic phrases. I was arrested by the police, was held in prison for one day, but things sorted themselves out in the end.”
You can say that all these stays abroad was his “school”. Daily, nightly walks in the cities, museum visits to van Gogh (in New York) ”even if you put out the light in there, van Gogh’s paintings came to light the room,” he said. Also Goya, especially ”Los Desastres de la Guerra”, El Greco, Munch, Hill, Kylberg. During the trips he painted a lot, always drawing.
He settled in Stockholm again, lived in houses to be demolished and other scanty premises, could live on almost nothing, met Greta Belfrage, lived with her for 15 years and painted and painted. Constantly. When I met him in 1989 he lived in his studio at Glasbruksgatan. The most important thing was not to live well, but having the money to paint and time for himself. He had his buyers, yes, he actually lived on his art, which not many artists can do without any work besides. But that, you had to pull out of him.
Stockholm was now the base. He disappeared to Paris during the spring. During the summer to Ås. He barely spoke about Ås. Yes, that he walked a lot, something about the light, that he borrowed a house there and that he looked after cows up there when he was young. Only after his death, I saw Ås, walked on the road to his house the early morning after the funeral, peeped into the little house, into the kitchen and the room, saw his childhood home in the house next door, visited the cows and the larks, saw the light, the vast expanses, the mountains and understood. Here he was happy.
Then his Margareta died in 2001, only 50 years old. During her illness, he got a heart attack. And saw the much talked of light in the tunnel. With great doubt, he told what he had seen, the shady big hall and at the end a small door with a dazzling light, that pulled him. He started walking, but turned. You can almost see that light in his paintings. Before he experienced it himself.
In 2003, the light took him into the big darkness. After a walk in the mountains in Jämtland. He was sitting in the garden with some friends and one of them talked about trafficking, he threw out his arm dramatically, said ”depressing” and fell straight down the table and died. A death completely in his taste. In the middle of.
Janne was often angry at the cultural establishment’s non-existent response to his art over the years. He would indeed burn his paintings, drawings, throw in a container and quit forever. If I do not get a word in ‘Dagens Nyheter’ or ‘Svenska Dagbladet’ about my exhibition now, then it’s over, he said. No one wrote. But he neither burned, threw nor stopped. Until 2003.
That he must die first, before a big retrospective exhibition was created is tragic. All good art is discovered today I thought. There is no such thing as undiscovered good art. But maybe it’s more about the center and the periphery. Janne’s art was in the periphery. He stood outside the artistic networks that counted. With that said, I do not want to romanticize the ”exclusion”. It’s not at all romantic, just frustrating. He wanted his art to be visible in the public, knew he was good, wondered about his situation and cursed. It even darkened him.