Eric Grate

"At the Green Lund of the past in Paris, Luna Park, in the late 1920s, the main attraction was an Austrian-born woman without arms and legs who was exhibited under the name Miss Violetta (fig 1.), displayed on a tray atop a pedestal and dressed in a bag-like light green casing. In her own way, she was so beautiful and alluring that she was repeatedly abducted by young gentlemen, more or less willingly, it seems, and certainly in collusion with her female accomplices. Among the spectators were a number of surrealist writers and artists - including Eric Grate. The poet Gunnar Ekelöf, who later heard about her, writes that she fascinated them because she was like "a beautiful French pear, as self-evident and natural armless and legless as any pear can be. She was a kind of living object..."

Eric Grate, for his part, viewed the whole thing from a broader perspective, weaving together elements from the primary sources of inspiration for his entire artistic career: nature, antiquity, and primitive cultures. Thus, he associated not only with the common abductions of women in antiquity (the Sabine women, Europa and the bull...) but also with similar occurrences that constantly unfold in the entomological realm; the insect world that he had loved to study and draw since childhood, alongside the plant world. In the multi-layered, ambiguous Entomological Abduction of Women that he conceived in 1928, he allows us to witness how in the relief's narrow stage a clearly feminine figure is abducted by two peculiar figures. One, who is fussily pointing the way, is coquettishly dressed in a skirt with ruffles while her head resembles the larvae of ants. Her companion, who virilely grabs the victim with antennae and suction pads, has features of a grasshopper larva. The abducted one herself is endowed with the body of an insect pupa and a head inspired by the stigma of flowers in its lobes. She is one-breasted like the Amazons of antiquity, and her flowing hair may also evoke the plume of these proud warrior women. These traits become even more pronounced in the sculpture from 1932 that Grate named Amazon Stigma, where the abducted woman appears in solitary majesty (fig 2.). Moreover, it is not without resemblance to certain primitive tribes' fertility idols.
Pontus Grate
"The Entomological Abduction of Women" fig 3, where "Amazon Stigma" is one of the figures, was executed between 1956 and 1958 and can be viewed on a four-meter-high granite pillar immediately outside the entrance to the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, fig 4."