Erik Olson
Untitled
Erik Olson was born at the very dawn of the modern age. Industrialism, socialism and modernism were among the forces shaping a society very different from that of his parents’ generation.
Although he grew up in a working-class home, Erik—like his brother Axel—knew from an early age that he wanted to become an artist. Together with their cousin Waldemar Lorentzon, the three formed the artists’ group Gnistan in 1915.
A decisive turning point for the three young artists came in 1919, when the group Gnistan, exhibiting at an amateur show in Halmstad, caught the attention of the engineer Egon Östlund. He introduced them to his protégé Gösta Adrian-Nilsson (GAN). GAN was already internationally established and became the one who showed the young Halmstad artists the path towards the European avant-garde. It was also GAN who provided them with an entry to Léger’s Académie Moderne in Paris, where Erik Olson travelled together with Waldemar Lorentzon in early 1924. The two cousins managed to rent an apartment in the centre at 86 rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, where they became neighbours with both GAN and Grünewald. On the ground floor was Léger’s academy, which now gained Erik and Waldemar as new pupils.
Under Léger, Erik Olson became acquainted with Otto G. Carlsund, who introduced the two young Swedes to Parisian nightlife and the meeting places of the avant-garde, such as Le Dôme, La Rotonde and later La Coupole. Erik felt as though he were in paradise, absorbing the new currents sweeping through Paris—the Mecca of avant-garde art. Despite living on the brink of poverty, he not only studied under the master Léger but also took every opportunity to travel across Europe, eagerly studying everything from the monumental art of Giotto and Cimabue to Kandinsky’s abstract paintings.
Estimate: 600 000 - 800 000 SEK
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At the end of 1924, Erik Olson managed to negotiate additional financial support from his patron, Dr Oelrich, in order to continue his stay in Paris. With funds secured, however, he changed his plans and travelled to Italy instead. There he lived in extreme austerity, yet remained highly productive. This period is described by Egon Östlund in the book Halmstadgruppen:
“Italy meant for Erik Olson a time of worry over food and lodging. Oelrich considered that he had acted recklessly and against their prior agreement, and therefore refused further support. The small sums he managed to scrape together in other ways did not last long. Yet Erik stayed—and starved. He worked feverishly on his own compositions and on copies. In the end, however, it could not continue, and he returned home!” (Egon Östlund et al., Halmstadgruppen, 1970, p. 17).
In the painting featured in this auction, one clearly sees inspiration from the Italian masters he encountered in Florence, where he visited the Uffizi Galleries among other places. He himself described these experiences in a letter to his brother Axel on 12 December 1924:
“…Towards the afternoon I saw the Uffizi Gallery—first a mass of Baroque oil paintings, dreadful monsters and Dutch ones alike, dull and tedious. I rushed through endless corridors of portraits, as unhappy as I had never expected to be—until I reached a few rooms from whose walls heaven itself shone: Cimabue, Giotto, Monaco; the primitive Italians […] Life is in most cases harsh, but it can melt into gold and sunshine and blue skies before just a few small pictures from the Museo di San Marco. I was there today, wandering through Fra Angelico’s beautiful dream world, surely among the most unblemished that has ever existed.” (Viveka Bosson, Erik Olson – En sökares vandring, Part I, 2001, pp. 82–83).
These travels and encounters laid the foundation for Erik Olson’s position as one of the most important Swedish artists of his time, and his refined paintings from the 1920s are among his most celebrated works. Works from this period rarely appear on the auction market, and the present painting was purchased directly from the artist in Halmstad and has remained in the same family ever since.
Erik Olson at Modern Art & Design
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