and earthly, this earthiness reinforced by its primitive design. As Granath's concept explained, Lundquist's coffee cup radiated and illuminated by its own inner virtue which only highlighted its inherent simplicity. Lundquist's 1972 Kaffekoppen is an example of this theory/motif. The cup seems indeed alive, and its whiteness produces its own world of color that illuminates the canvas and radiates outward. Director and writer Bengt Lagerkvist asked his readers if they could imagine any object as simple as a coffee cup becoming the central motif in a work of art. Yet, Lundquist had done it successfully, bathing the cup in glistening light, "as secretive as that around Rembrandt's Bohemian Glass ". Moderna Museet’s curator Fredrik Liew views Lundquist's work as a "union of opposites, most frequently between what is fixed and monumental on the one hand, and delicate and transient on the other[...]" He asserts that the viewer is compelled to view the work as a complex dynamic and should focus on the divergent elements in the painting and how they relate to each other. For Liew, the works sway between "the motif to the painterly process and back again." It is a process by which the motif and the artistic process maintain independence, while throughout the work there remains the underlying constants of "monumentality" versus dissipation and fragility. Lundquist's painterly contractions and equivocations establish him not as a "bourgeois artist who portrayed the light and timeless motifs in the classical tradition", but as a fundamental artist of his era and one that continues to guide artists of modern times. Lundquist was discovering the complex inner virtues of the most mundane of objects. He was using the hues of his impasto, his motifs and brushstrokes to create a rich and complex pictorial language of conflict/resolution between "monumentality" and that of dissipation and fragility. To some, his "violent" potent brushstrokes and his use of color drew comparisons to de Kooning and Dubuffet, though Lundquist was recognized as being "independent" from them. Even so, some of his ardent supporters, while appreciating the aesthetics of his works, had not gone "beyond" the surface of the works; they lacked understanding, or often a concept, of the potential subtexts held within the works. An example of this narrow interpretation can be found in the description of Lundquist's work by the Guggenheim Foundation. In 1964 the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation presented Lundquist with an award and the