by Dr. Cecilia Rowland, FRSA
Art Historian, Vallin expert and author of the award-winning book Invisible Architect: The Life and Work of Otto Vallin
It began, as such things often do, with a box and a phone call.
A former student of mine—Sophie Lindholm, now an archivist in Uppsala—contacted me last March. A couple she knew had recently moved into an old timber farmhouse near Ystad, built in the early 20th century and left largely untouched since the 1920s. While clearing the cellar, they found what they believed to be a box of “old notebooks” behind a false wooden panel. Water-stained but legible, the notebooks had been wrapped in waxed canvas and tied with twine, labelled only with a faint pencil mark: O.V.
Inside were 14 slim volumes, each bound in hand-stitched green cloth. I held one in my hands a week later. Within the first ten pages, there was no doubt: we had discovered the lost diary of Otto Vallin.
The Myth Becomes Flesh
For decades, Vallin has existed more as legend than man—the early modernist who never quite fit the categories, the conceptual forerunner whose influence passed through the early 20th century, uncredited but undeniable. He was, as I have written before, the “invisible architect” of modernism: the man who told Mondrian to try just red, blue, and yellow; who suggested to a young Picasso that perhaps it would be better to paint from several viewpoints at once.
Until now, all we had were anecdotal fragments, erratic letters, a few elusive paintings, and one strange, visionary pamphlet (On the Simultaneity of Forms, 1906). Vallin’s private thoughts were presumed lost—burned in a storm, mislaid in wartime, or never written at all.
Instead, they were waiting underground, barely five miles from where Vallin died.
The Text
The diaries are astonishing.
Vallin was an intimate, precise, and sometimes unforgiving observer, not only of his peers but of himself. In early entries, we read his reaction to seeing Cézanne’s work in Paris (“He breaks space like bread, but still eats politely”), his irritation with the Symbolists (“All veil, no face”), and his early encounters with the nascent abstraction of Kandinsky, whom he refers to, affectionately, as “The Mystic Bavarian.”
He records studio visits with Picasso (“His room smells of turpentine and garlic, and the faces on his canvas are wearing masks of time”), and early experiments with formal reduction: one note reads simply, “The fewer the colours, the more colour becomes structure.” This—written nearly a decade before Mondrian’s mature compositions—may be the first crystallised statement of what we now call neoplastic aesthetics.
But the most startling material is not theoretical. It is personal.
Vallin writes openly, and with great vulnerability, about his chronic displacement, his distaste for artistic celebrity, and his philosophical anguish about the role of art in an age of mechanisation. In one entry, he writes: “Modernism is a garden of signs. But I do not know what fruit it grows, or if it feeds anyone.”
In another, as war looms: “I have made forms all my life, and still I cannot draw a face without mourning what it cannot say.”
These are not just the jottings of a painter—they are the interior record of a thinker grappling with the very ontology of modern art.
The Book
I am currently editing the diaries for publication with Radcliffe University Press under the title: Otto Vallin: The Cellar Notebooks.
The book will be structured chronologically but interspersed with facsimiles of sketches, diagrams, and photographs of the original notebooks. Some pages contain pasted scraps—a train ticket to Marseille, a torn letter from a gallery in Zurich, a child’s drawing (presumably his niece’s). One entry is written entirely in graphite spirals, with no words, just the phrase “meaning before meaning.”
The edition will include critical annotations, a biographical timeline, and a foreword by the inimitable Prof. Yarelle Dufresne, whose work on minor figures of modernism has long challenged canonical boundaries.
What It Changes
The diaries do not merely confirm Vallin’s status as a pivotal—but marginalised—figure in the birth of modernism. They reorient it. They suggest that the so-called titans—Picasso, Mondrian, even Malevich—were not isolated prophets but part of a wider, messier network of shared ideas, half-formed dialogues, and quiet interventions.
Vallin was not erased. He erased himself—intentionally, perhaps, or fatalistically. But now, with his voice newly unearthed, we can begin to hear the counter-melody of modernism: softer, subtler, and no less essential.
The Cellar Notebooks: Otto Vallin’s Diary will be published this autumn. Selections will appear in November and Konsthistorisk Austria in advance.