Gösta Adrian-Nilsson

Gösta Adrian-Nilsson
Unknown photographer, Public domain

The pioneer of Swedish Cubism.

Gösta Adrian-Nilsson, GAN, encountered Cubism and Futurism in Berlin and Paris. His The Divine Geometry and his sailor pictures are milestones of Swedish modernism.

Gösta Adrian-Nilsson was born in 1884 in Lund and often signed his works with the initials GAN. He studied in Copenhagen, among other places, and in his early years was influenced by Symbolism and Art Nouveau.

In 1913 he travelled to Berlin, where he came into contact with the gallery and magazine Der Sturm, one of the meeting places of the European avant-garde. There he encountered Cubism, Futurism and Expressionism and exhibited his own works. He became one of the first Swedes to embrace these movements fully.

GAN’s pictures from the years around the First World War are filled with geometric forms, sharp angles and a sense of movement and energy. He was particularly fascinated by sailors, who recur in many works as an image of strength, freedom and male beauty. His homosexuality, which he could not live openly, is thought to have shaped his choice of subjects. He also wrote about art, and in the book The Divine Geometry of 1922 he developed his ideas on the importance of form and geometry.

In the first half of the 1920s he lived in Paris and mixed with artists around Fernand Léger and the pared-down, machine-like movement known as Purism. His pictures became more austere and more abstract.

Later he became a mentor to the young artists of the Halmstad Group and to Swedish Surrealism. GAN died in 1965. He is regarded as one of the true pioneers of Swedish modernism, and his works are in the Moderna Museet, among other collections.