Viking Eggeling

Viking Eggeling
Unknown authorUnknown author, Public domain

Abstract film and rhythm.

Viking Eggeling from Lund was part of the Dada movement in Zurich and made one of the first abstract films, Diagonal Symphony.

Viking Eggeling was born in 1880 in Lund. As a teenager he left Sweden. He worked as a book-keeper in Germany, Switzerland and Italy, among other jobs, and studied art on the side, largely on his own.

In 1911 he came to Paris. There he mixed with avant-garde artists, among them Amedeo Modigliani and Hans Arp. During the First World War he lived in Zurich, where the Dada movement emerged in 1916. He became part of the Dada circle and met the German artist Hans Richter, who became his closest collaborator.

Eggeling wanted to create an art based on the same laws as music. He called his idea the thorough-bass of painting, after musical harmony. He drew long paper scrolls in which simple forms, lines and arcs change step by step, as in a piece of music. The step to film was a natural one, since film could show the forms in real motion.

In Berlin in the early 1920s he worked on transferring his forms to film. The work was painstaking, as every frame had to be drawn and photographed separately. The result was Diagonal Symphony, a short film in which white lines and forms move rhythmically against a black background. It was shown publicly in Berlin in May 1925.

Only a few weeks later Eggeling died, aged 44. Today he is regarded as one of the pioneers of abstract film and as one of the few Swedes at the heart of Dada.