Axel Salto and the Northern Spirit David Whiting
Axel Salto working on the decoration of the facade in the inner garden of Thorvaldsens museum. Courtesy of the Salto Family Axel Salto,woodblock print. Courtesy of the Salto Family
The Danish artist Axel Salto (1889-1961) was one of the great sculptural potters and designers of the twentieth century. His highly individual, unusually baroque style resisted the plainer functionalist norm in so much contemporary Scandinavian ceramics and design, right through to his death at the beginning of the 1960s, when ‘Danish Modern’ was so in vogue. His powerfully expressive work was inspired by natural forms, by gourd shapes and seed pods, buds and opulent fruits bursting forth, all expressing a sense of growth and movement. It was nature’s inner force that intrigued him. As he stated: “It is of greater importance for an artist to create in the spirit of nature than reproduce its outer manifestation”. His work, certainly ahead of its time in the inter-war years, investigated an almost unearthly and preternatural world, and anticipated some of the sculptural developments in European and American ceramics from the late 1950s, work which moved away from traditional shapes to vessels and sculpture that explored new types of organic structure. The originality of his work is all the more remarkable because it was produced largely in small factory-made editions, showing just how open the Danish workshops could be to progressive artistic ideas. Salto studied at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen from 1909-1914, before travelling to Paris where he met Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, conversations which confrmed Salto’s avant-garde ambitions in art, realised not only in ceramics, but in painting, graphic design and illustration. He soon returned to work in Paris for long periods, and formed a group based there with other experimental Danish artists. Salto also established a short-lived but infuential art journal The Blade, which was to pioneer the discussion of Modernist art and theory in Northern Europe. His practice of a variety of diferent art forms epitomised the interdisciplinary characters of Scandinavian art and design, as well as its active collaboration with the factories.
UK_Design_Nordic_Sept16_Release 2_56-101.indd 57
25/08/16 08:50