In this harbour composition from 1928, we encounter the visual world that GAN made his own during the 1920s: ships, rigging, cranes and working bodies brought together to form a dense, almost architectural pictorial space. In the foreground, a man in a blue shirt and light-coloured trousers kneels, absorbed in his work, a pose reminiscent of GAN’s recurring depictions of sailors and dockworkers—bodies engaged in concentrated movement rather than individuals rendered as recognisable portraits. To the left, an exotic flower blooms in the brown, sandy ground, an unexpected intrusion of untamed nature into the industrial harbour setting. Meanwhile, a ship with its sails lowered and a locomotive-like crane trolley stand out against a night sky, where a glowing, dimly veiled sun or moon casts the background in shades of red and orange.

For the artist, the sailor and the harbour environment were not merely external subjects but recurring vehicles through which he explored his own fascination with the masculine, working body, developing this visual language consistently throughout the 1920s. Several interrelated impulses lay behind this fascination. Most prominent was his homoerotic attraction to sailors—the “blues”—which GAN expressed both in his paintings and in his diaries. Alongside this was a more formalist interest: the strict geometry of uniforms spoke directly to the artist from Lund, whose visual language had been shaped by Futurism and Cubism. Finally, there was a romantic dimension: in the sailor, GAN saw adventure, the dream of distant and exotic lands, of leaving Europe behind and sailing out across the world’s oceans. During a stay in Gothenburg in the autumn of 1919, he even attempted to sign on to a ship bound for South America or the South Seas. His longing to escape what he perceived as a dying European civilisation would resurface in his artistic practice many years later.

Instead, GAN went to Paris, where he lived from 1920 to 1925, interrupted by two extended stays in his native Sweden, in 1922 and 1923. Early on, he sought out Fernand Léger, one of the leading figures of the post-Cubist avant-garde. Their encounter encouraged GAN in his move towards a more unified and balanced form of Cubist painting, a direction in which he was already heading. Yet GAN could never be reduced to a mere follower of his French role model. The Synthetic Cubism he developed in Paris was distinguished by a richer, more personal palette and a far greater level of detail. A storyteller at heart, he also incorporated a kind of coded visual language into his Cubist paintings, in which his homosexuality and attraction to sailors often emerge in veiled form.

GAN’s paintings from this period rank among the high points of Swedish Modernism—powerful and innovative.