After studying in Copenhagen and Berlin, GAN returned to Lund in August 1914. During his years abroad, he was influenced by the ideas of Cubism, Expressionism, and Futurism. Artistically renewed, he now began the purposeful work of developing his own artistic practice. Early results of the formal experiments that would characterise his subsequent production were already shown in 1915 at the exhibition Schwedische Expressionisten at Herwarth Walden's famous gallery Der Sturm in Berlin.

However, it was not until September 1916 that GAN exhibited in Stockholm for the first time, at Carl Gummeson’s gallery on Strandvägen. The following year became one of his most productive. Particularly prominent was the sailor's painting, which culminated in a series of powerful compositions at the exhibition Sailor's Compositions at Gummeson's art hall in January 1918. In his own preface to the exhibition, GAN distances himself from established labels such as Impressionism and Expressionism – or, as he writes, any "overarching -istic meaning." Today, his artistic practice clearly appears as something that eludes conventional categorisation and can only be understood on its own terms. Museum director Jan-Torsten Ahlstrand has rightly called him "the modernist pioneer from Lund."

GAN's belief in the future, despite recurring setbacks, is expressed in the concluding passage of his preface: "For if a new beauty can be won by breaking an inherited prejudice, then this prejudice shall be broken, for such is the law that the reluctant humanity has always had to be forced to listen to and – ultimately – to gratefully acknowledge as a gift."
Yellow Figure, created during the exceptionally productive year of 1917, is a central work from this period. The composition unites Futurism's studies of movement with Cubism's fragmented pictorial space. The yellow figure emerges as an idealised symbol of the essence of masculinity, flanked by sailors – motifs that exerted a strong allure on GAN, both artistically and personally. The clear, unmixed colours stand in immediate and powerful contrast to the almost black background. This colour dramaturgy, which creates both luminosity and tension, would become one of GAN's most recognisable characteristics.

The impression of Kandinsky's Composition 6, which GAN saw at the Erster Deutscher Herbstsalon in Berlin in the autumn of 1913, is believed to have had particular significance for his subsequent use of colour. Ahlstrand emphasises that this was GAN's first direct encounter with a completely abstract painting – an experience that likely had a significant influence as he laid the foundation for his modernist pictorial world during these crucial years.

Yngve Andrén
Shortly after the end of the First World War, two gentlemen in Tomelilla, Skåne, the hardware merchant Yngve Andrén (b. 1885) and the folk high school teacher Theodor Tufvesson (b. 1884), decided to start an art association and organized a first exhibition in 1922 with the intention of spreading art to the people. A couple of years and a few exhibitions later, they decided to build up a public art collection in Tomelilla in combination with an institutional framework for exhibition activities. Together with the artists Anders Olson and Bror Ljunggren, they formed the Tomelilla Art Collection society. The slogan became Art for the rural people! Together, the four founders traveled around to scout out the new art in Skåne in Yngve's "adventure car," the village's first automobile.

The upcoming exhibitions were to have great significance in highlighting Skåne and Österlen in an artistic context with proximity to both Paris, Berlin, and Copenhagen. Thus was born a radical artist community with a progressive view of art and artists, a community that still lives and develops. The Tomelilla Konstsamling, which today operates in foundation form, owns and manages about six hundred works of art, mainly painting but also drawings, sculptures, textiles, and graphics.

Yngve Andrén was a good friend of many of the artists whose works are included in the collection. He got to know GAN already in the mid-1910s, when he was still a relatively unknown artist. Yngve supported GAN financially by buying his works.