Modern Art & Design Presents Gösta Adrian-Nilsson

This was not done in a flash, and it was not until the turn of the year 1913/14, when he was at home in Lund celebrating Christmas, that he painted what was probably his first purely modernist painting, ‘Elektrikern’, about which GAN connoisseur Jan Torsten Ahlstrand writes the following: ‘Regardless of whether the painting is an authentic portrait of an electrician or not, it is both stylistically and in terms of content an extraordinarily interesting GAN painting. "Elektrikern" (The electrician) is a portrait of the new man of the age in a futuristic spirit, a man of strong will and determination who, like a seer, looks into the future that belongs to him and the new technology.’ (GAN, Gösta Adrian-Nilsson, Signum, 1985, p. 46)

The period of starvation in Berlin ended happily for GAN in the summer of 1914 in Cologne, where he had been employed as an ‘künstlerischer Erklärer’, a kind of manager, in the architect Bruno Taut's famous Glashaus at the Deutscher Werkbund's major art industry exhibition. But his employment ended abruptly when the entire exhibition was closed on 5 August due to the outbreak of war at the beginning of that month. A message arrived from Berlin: ‘Sie können fahren wohin Sie wollen, die Sache ist erledigt’, GAN wrote many years later in his memoirs.

It was an adventurous journey home, but in mid-August 1914 GAN was back in Lund, bursting with the impressions of Berlin and Cologne; he had a number of drawings with him, but the documented paintings from his time in Germany are very few. In Lund, GAN rented a room on Idrottsgatan in Väster, the new industrial and labour district. There he could study athletic young sportsmen at Idrottsplatsen, and there he passed the gas bell and a couple of industries on his walks to the railway station in the centre. During the two years 1914-1916, in his small apartment, he created his revolutionary new Futurist-Cubist style, initially with athletes and smoke belching locomotives as his preferred motifs.