Recent scholarship has begun, finally, to rightly suggest that the Swedish modernist painter, poet, thinker, and sculptor who is the subject of Martin Sundberg’s new book might have a significance to art history. That is, a significance apart from the fact that the most recognisable part of her name was famously created in Zurich by one Samuel Rosenstock, a Romanian poet and playwright, who in co-founding the Dada movement created the alter-ego Tristan Tzara. Indeed, this handsome but quite slight monograph—the first in the English language on Greta Knutson (she dropped the ‘Tzara’ when she divorced Tristan in 1942)—alludes to the undoubtedly sexist suppression that has hampered critical appreciation of her work. ‘Greta Knutson? Oh I see, Greta Knutson Tzara – the woman who was married to Tristan Tzara.’

This question is perhaps even more pointed when one understands that Tzara’s output was ephemeral in comparison with his ex-wife’s extremely varied and prolific career. In judging the quality of this book today, in 2021, it’s hard not to think of the Bechdel test, particularly given that the subject is an artist whose career began in the male-dominated avant-garde scene of 1920s Paris. Sundberg, a curator at the Norrkopings Konstmuseum, generally does a pretty good job of excavating Knutson the artist from a period within which it must have been difficult to be an artist who happened also to be female, even one as seemingly effortlessly brilliant and talented as Knutson.

Born in Stockholm in 1899 to a well-to-do bourgeois Swedish family, Knutson, who had a talent for languages, had originally wanted to study linguistics; her father, whose career as a concert pianist had been thwarted by health problems, forbade it and encouraged her to study art instead. As the book demonstrates in its earliest pages, Knutson was a skilled draughtsman as well as an intellectual. Right from the start she ploughed her own furrow.

Post-cubist 1920s Paris was obviously the place to be for an aspiring artist, but instead of going to study with Fernand Leger like most people, she went to study with Andre Lhote, citing the latter’s interest in continuity with the past as mirroring her own, while finding the ‘rhythmic stomping of cities and industries’ that characterised Leger to be passé and even surreptitiously ’Marxist’. It would be overly simplistic to infer from this that Knutson was a conservative compared to her onetime husband and sometime collaborator Tzara, who, following the horrors of WWI, wanted to implicate and undo Western civilization through Dada. Knutson simply believed that if you want to make anything of real quality as an artist, politics should flow out of production, and not the other way round.

Indeed, the house that Knutson’s money built is a case in point. Although they apparently sought advice from Le Corbusier on where to find a good site, they rejected his glass and steel aesthetic and instead employed the Viennese Adolf Loos, who apparently said of the building that ‘only the owner of the house could give it meaning’.

There was a depth to both Tzara and Knutson that fuelled their relationship, at least in the beginning. He studied the provenance of African and Oceanic artefacts in libraries and museums rather than simply appropriating it, as was common in the avant-garde at the time; she found the sexist Surrealists laughable and the Negrophilia and Primitivism that had swept through 1920s Paris unnecessary, correctly opining that Europe had its own access to the Primitive through medieval art. She was also very interested in phenomenology, devouring the philosophy of Husserl and Heidegger.

The differences between the couple were, however, in the end too great. Knutson was a painter and a sculptor before she was a revolutionary. Tzara handled most of the day-to-day stuff with the building of the house while Knutson, who fell pregnant during the build, divided her time between Sweden and the south of France. By the time the house was finished it had a vast, full-plot width, a south-facing ‘atelier’ as its centrepiece, and no studio for Knutson. Greta responded by putting up a wall in the salon to make her studio, an act which so infuriated Tristan that he left the house and stayed away for several weeks.

Knutson’s life continued to be dramatic after she divorced Tzara in 1942 – she was an active member of the French Resistance, and aided refugees attempting to escape Nazism through Spain. But what of the art Knutson produced?

Sundberg usefully and concisely discusses the various phases and aspects, from the earlier ‘musical’ post-cubist works of the 1940s inspired by Lhote’s teaching, to the Surrealist poetry, indirectly inspired by Tzara and Andre Breton (who frequented their house), to the French medievalist sculpture of the 1960s and her ‘oneiric’, or dreamlike paintings of the 1970s, related more to her reading of Husserl than Surrealism. A deliberately unchronological approach is adopted by Sundberg, which begins to make the reader aware of not only the complexity of this deeply interesting artist, but also the complexity of a period that has in the past been presented as a straightforward stop on the journey from backward pre-modernity to a progressive contemporary.

At the end, Sundberg raises the question as to why Knutson seems to have been ‘forgotten’ as an artist. He points to difficulty in categorising her work, given that it is so varied and wide ranging, but also because it doesn’t support canonical history. The oneiric paintings may be about forty years too late for Surrealism, but does that matter? One might also point to the fact that it appears that Knutson seemed to allow herself—in spite of protestations to the contrary—to be influenced by so many others during the course of her career. Is this a weakness or a strength?

I’m reminded of the Confucian maxim that only the very wisest and very stupidest can never change. Ultimately, the most useful part of the historian’s work is not the dry research per se, but the awareness of one’s entrenched attitudes and prejudices, and the garnering of the openness required to allow them to be challenged and changed if necessary. It is as part of just such a movement for ‘historical correction’ that we can rediscover Greta Knutson’s work.