Nina Tryggvadottir is a rare entity: an abstract painter of the New York School generation from Iceland where she lived and studied art in Reykjavik until 1935. After subsequent study in Copenhagen and Paris, she eventually made her way to the United States in 1943 via a grant from the Icelandic government.  In New York she studied with Fernand Leger and Hans Hofmann.  She had two solo shows in 1945 and 1948 at J. B. Neumann’s New Art Circle Gallery on 57th street (coincidentally the gallery was also in the Fuller building where David Findlay Fine Arts is located).  Given her unique background and the strength of this work why is she not better known in this country?  The answer is that, thanks to the anti-communist lunacy of the McCarthy years, she was wrongly labeled a communist and subsequently blacklisted from this country throughout the 50s. She was not able to return to the United States until the early 60s.  Meanwhile she was well received throughout Europe during the period where her work was and is well known.

Nina Tryggvadottir, Abstraction (58/03), 1958, oil on canvas, 13 x 16 in

Nina Tryggvadottir, Abstraction (997), 1956, oil on canvas, 16 x 13 in and Abstraction (1407), 1956, oil on masonite, 14.75 x 12 in

Its a shame that these circumstances kept her out of the country when the New York School was going full throttle and the city was in the throes of achieving art capital status.  Her work reflects a strength and tenacity that is perhaps derived from her ordeal with the U.S. government along with the remote and physically intense place she grew up.  You see this in how these paintings are often self-possessed of a stark, ‘take it or leave it’, quality.  There is a hint of Leger’s influence but it’s really an overwhelming sense of hard scrabble loneliness that is expressed. This is further supported by a primarily

Nina Tryggvadottir, Abstraction (1289), 1955, oil on Masonite, 23.75 x 38.25 in