Few artists have been as productive in so many different contexts as Carl Johan De Geer. Carl Johan De Geer has made films, photographed, designed, painted paintings, played music and much more. Among Carl Johan De Geer’s most famous works are his TV series The Cake, his provocative artwork The Failure of the Fatherland and, not least, his colourful designs from the 1960s.
Short facts about Carl Johan De Geer
| Born | 1938 |
| Mrs | Marianne Lindberg De Geer |
| Awards | Chaplin Prize (1979), Guldbagge (1990), Ture Sventon Prize (2001), Stockholm City Bellman Prize (2002), Nordic Film Prize (2004), among others. |
| Number of children | 4 |
| Last updated with | The great misconception (Thielska Galleriet) |
Carl Johan De Geer’s children’s programme
Carl Johan De Geer has made several successful children’s and family television programmes. The programmes are characterised by a childlike playfulness mixed with unconventional characters and a large dose of humour. Probably the most famous of Carl Johan De Geer’s programmes is:
- The Cake (1973)
- Doctor Krall (1974)
- Kant the private detective (1983)
Cake and sofo bakery
The cake is about three brothers who go ashore after a life as sailors and instead focus on running a bakery. The sailors are as original as they are ignorant in baking. But the will is there in the brothers and each one is working hard for their new bakery. In the series, Carl Johan De Geer plays a monkey who occasionally causes trouble.
When the series first came out, it was rather heavily criticised, but today Carl Johan De Geer’s The Cake is loved by many and is almost a cult series. In 2018, Carl Johan De Geer exhibited black and white photographs taken at Sofo bakery on Folkungagatan in Stockholm.
The cake was made by Carl Johan De Geer together with Håkan Alexandersson, who has directed the TV film Nils Olof Andersson. The film that had the original title: Nils Olof Andersson N.O.A. was written in collaboration with Krister Broberg and Gert Fylking.
Carl Johan De Geers pattern
Wherever Carl Johan De Geer works, creativity abounds. This is especially true of Carl Johan De Geer’s colourful designs, which he developed in the 1960s. What soon became a typical motif for Carl Johan De Geer were playful and perhaps somewhat naïve shapes and figures with strong colours that Carl Johan De Geer wanted to use to break the otherwise common trend of muted, often brown and murky motifs.
Carl Johan De Geer has retained this playfulness throughout the years, even when he makes satirical and ironic works, such as the screenprint The Defiled Flag, which shows a flag burning accompanied by incitements and sex words. Carl Johan De Geer was convicted and fined. However, the work had already been distributed and has been printed in several editions, although it is unclear how many of the original works remain.
Carl Johan De Geer’s settlement with the family history
Carl Johan De Geer and his siblings grew up in a family with a long tradition of nobility, where Carl Johan De Geer’s father Louis De Geer was a relative of the family’s original noble figure, the Walloon industrialist Louis De Geer, who was knighted in 1641.
Carl Johan De Geer doesn’t describe his family in the brightest of tones, and he is often clear about what he thinks of his mother, who has long suffered from mental illness. On the other hand, Carl Johan De Geer had a great love for his grandmother, who, however, had a troublesome political viewpoint. She was a convinced Nazi.
Carl Johan De Geer has come to terms with his past in a film adaptation in which he depicts his strange relationship with his grandmother in the usual unusual Carl Johan De Geer way. You can now watch the short film that Carl Johan De Geer calls Grandma Hitler and I. An 18-minute short film that gives an insight into the remarkable life of this artist.
