Gösta Adrian-Nilsson

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 Art Collection, 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. "Snälltåg/Schnellzug" was acquired by Yngve directly from GAN in 1917.

Gösta Adrian-Nilsson (GAN) was the only significant Swedish artist of the Swedish avant-garde to study in Berlin rather than Paris before World War I from 1914 to 1918. In Berlin, he met Herwarth Walden, the dynamic head of the magazine and gallery Der Sturm, and was profoundly influenced by the new modernist art exhibited at the gallery. He was most impressed by Der Sturm's exhibition of the European avant-garde at the epoch-making Erster Deutscher Herbstsalon in the autumn of 1913. There, GAN encountered French Cubism, Italian Futurism, and Der Blaue Reiter's Expressionism with Kandinsky and Franz Marc as the leading names.
GAN's period of poverty in Berlin ended happily in the summer of 1914 in Cologne, where he had been employed as a "künstlerischer Erklärer," a kind of supervisor, at architect Bruno Taut's famous Glashaus at the Deutscher Werkbund's major industrial art exhibition. However, his employment ended abruptly when the entire exhibition was closed on August 5 due to the outbreak of war in the beginning of the same month. GAN received a message from Berlin: "Sie können fahren wohin Sie wollen, die Sache ist erledigt" (You can go wherever you want, the matter is settled), as he later wrote in his memoirs.
The journey home was adventurous, but by mid-August 1914, GAN was back in Lund, filled with impressions from Berlin and Cologne. He rented a room on Idrottsgatan in Väster, the new industrial and working-class district in Lund. There, he could study young athletes at the sports field, and he passed the gasometer and a couple of factories on his walks to the railway station in the center. In his small apartment during the two years from 1914 to 1916, he created his revolutionary new Futurist-Cubist style, initially with athletes and smoking locomotives as preferred subjects.

In September 1914, he published two articles in the Sunday supplement of the newspaper Arbetet, which can be seen as his new Futurist-inspired manifesto. He envisioned a new type of serious artist who represents the future: "He loves power and light – the rapid movement of life around him. He loves the flight of the airplane as it rises above the earth and cuts through the sun's rays – he loves the singing automobile that flashes over the gleaming asphalt, and the flying, invisible words from the wireless telegraph poles. He loves the beauty of the mighty bridges, bridges of steel and human genius, the threateningly lifted giant cranes that carry loads as heavy as mountains, the electric searchlights that suddenly turn night into dazzling day."
In October 1915, GAN had his first modernist exhibition at Lund University's Art Museum. The 49-item exhibition included the painting Snälltåg (I), executed in a sparse color scheme of mainly brown, black, gray, white, and yellow. In early January 1916, GAN painted a second version of the speeding train in the dark but now in brighter colors of yellow, red, violet, dark blue, and green. In his diary, GAN referred to the two paintings as Snälltåg I and Snälltåg II, respectively. In the Sydsvenska Dagbladet on October 17, 1915, GAN wrote as a comment on the first version: "The express train rushing through the night became a drama in color of spouting light and passing houses and trees – a symbol of the essence of the times: iron and fire.”
The Swedish word "snälltåg" is derived from the German word Schnellzug, meaning express train or fast train. As early as in the Skånsk jul calendar in 1914, GAN published a drawing of a rushing train as an illustration to a novel he had written titled "Herrn med den tvåradiga ulstern" (The Man with the Double-Breasted Ulster). This drawing is the starting point for his futurist Schnellzug-paintings around 1915/…/ GAN lived near the railway and could see and hear the Schnellzug between Lund and Malmö rushing through the darkness like a luminous band on his evening walks. From a hill south of Lund, he could also observe the train on his nocturnal walks as it rolled across a bridge over the Höje River with a screech and a roar. Another source of inspiration was a black and white postcard of the Italian futurist Luigi Russolo's painting Zug in voller Fahrt, as it is called in the catalog for the futurist exhibition at Der Sturm in the spring of 1912 (however, GAN had not seen the actual painting because he did not arrive in Berlin until January 1913).
The speed and movement of the explosively luminous train are emphasized by the diagonal brushstrokes above and below the train. It looks as if GAN has "compressed" the locomotive with the carriages with their luminous windows in his futurist vision. These are not just any trains that GAN paints, but these fire-spitting monsters rushing through the evening darkness over the fields of Lund. With GAN, the trains take on a metaphysical and spiritual dimension, where the luminous radiation from the carriages seems to have interested him more than the movement itself. /…/
Jan Torsten Ahlstrand
Art historian, phil. Lic.