Dick Beer - Portrait of Gabriele Varese

Dick Beer (1893–1938) Sweden, born London

Portrait of Gabriele Varese (in Italian Uniform), 1919

stamp signed
oil on canvas laid down on panel
unframed 116 × 90 cm (45.7 × 35.4 in)

Provenance:
Within the Beer family until the present day

Exhibited:
Solo exhibition, Stockholm, November–December 1917
The Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Stockholm, 1973
Åmells Konsthandel, En internationell kubist, Stockholm and London, 2008
Hälsinglands Museum, 2011
Millesgården, Dick Beer – Impressionist & Kubist, 2012

Essay:
Dick Beer was born in London in 1893 as Richard Beer, the youngest of five brothers. After the early death of both parents, he came to Sweden as an orphan in 1907. He began his artistic training at Althin’s painting school in Stockholm in 1908 and continued at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts from 1910 until 1912, where his teachers included Gustaf Cederström, Oscar Björck and Alfred Bergström. In September 1912 he left Sweden for Paris, rented a studio near Montparnasse, and followed instruction at the Académies Colarossi and Grande Chaumière.

The years that followed were decisive for his development. In 1913 he worked in Pont Aven and held his first solo exhibition in Stockholm under the French title Exposition des tableaux de Bretagne et autour de Paris. In 1914 he undertook an extended study journey through Italy, Tunisia, Morocco and Spain, returning thereafter to Paris. The outbreak of war marked a profound rupture. Beer volunteered for the French Foreign Legion and in 1915 suffered severe head injuries in a grenade explosion, resulting in permanent hearing loss and nervous complications that would affect him for the rest of his life.

After the war his art underwent a marked transformation. Around 1918 and 1919 Beer began to experiment with cubist painting, creating a number of ambitious large scale compositions. Unlike a purely analytic cubism, his was personal, emotional and highly charged with movement. He absorbed the formal language of faceting and structural fragmentation, yet retained a strong attachment to the human figure and to psychological presence. During the years that followed in Paris, he was instructed by André Lhote, whose studio offered an environment in which modern form could be explored freely while still subject to disciplined critique.

The present portrait of Gabriele Varese belongs to this crucial moment in Beer’s career. Varese was part of Beer’s Paris circle, which also included Manuel Ortiz de Zárate and the sculptor Frédéric de Fréminville. Several of these friends were portrayed by Beer, and the present work is among the most compelling examples of his portraiture from the immediate postwar years. The sitter is shown in Italian uniform, his figure constructed through angular, interlocking planes that break the body into sharply defined facets. The treatment of the jacket is especially striking, turning cloth into structure and volume into rhythm.

Yet the painting is far more than a formal exercise. For all its cubist compression, the portrait retains a vivid human immediacy. Varese’s face, turned toward the viewer, carries a direct and searching expression. The hands, tense and active, reinforce the sense of alert presence. Beer’s achievement lies precisely in this balance between formal invention and psychological intensity. He does not dissolve the sitter into abstraction, but rather redefines portraiture through a modern pictorial language.

This portrait should be understood within the broader context of Beer’s international modernism. Active largely in France, and moving between impressionism, pointillism, cubism and later more expressionist and naturalistic modes, he remained difficult to classify within a single national narrative. That complexity may partly explain why he was long overshadowed. Today, however, works such as the present portrait make clear that Beer occupies a distinctive place within early twentieth century Scandinavian modernism. Portrait of Gabriele Varese stands as an important document of his cubist period and of the cosmopolitan milieu in which it was formed.

Sources
Millesgården, Dick Beer – Impressionist & Kubist
Onita Wass, introductory essay and biographical material
Exhibition chronology and family archive material
Norrköpings Konstmuseum and Moderna Museet references to Dick Beer