As reaction to my tweet concerning the birthday anniversary of Marie Sklodowska-Curie on November 7 I received a comment from a Swedish gentleman Henry Köhler (Authorportrait) saying: ‘’I donated my father’s painting (Blanche &Marie) to the Maria Sklodowska musem in Warsaw.’’
My curiosity of course forced me to research this story thoroughly and contact Henry. Many mails and messages followed and I studied more and more the paintings by Henry’s father Carl Köhler. Carl Köhler made portraits of Marilyn Monroe, Michael Jackson, Edith Piaf & Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett, Maria Sklodowska Curie and many more.
The more I looked at them, the more curious I got about Carl’s exquisite talent to look deep in people’s soul and his son’s mission to share his father’s artistic legacy with the rest of the world in a pretty unconventional way. Carl Köhler, a Swedish neo-modernist painter was so much more than a painter, he was a philosopher translating his deep thoughts into art.
Soon my interview about the Swedish painter Köhler, his son Henry and about his grandparents. Three Swedish generations with love for art, unlimited passion for discovering its depth, living life without conventional limitations.
Cover: Self-Portrait from 1945
Author: Beata Bruggeman-Sękowska is an award-winning international journalist, TV correspondent, author, chief editor of international journalism centre, Central and Eastern Europe Centre, president of the European Institute on Communist Oppression and a sworn translator. She was born in Warsaw, Poland and has also Armenian blood and roots in Lvov, which is part of Ukraine. She has been living in Heerlen, the Netherlands since 2005.