STELLAN MÖRNER. Surrealist composition with Axel Olson's portrait.
Description
Oil on canvas, 71 x 60 cm. Signed Mörner -48. Dedication on verso to fellow artist Axel Olson.
PROVENANCE
Artist Axel Olson (1899-1986)
“In October 1924 I walk one late evening from my lousy workplace on Rue Campagne Première along boulevard Montparnasse towards the Dôme. In the large bookshop window is a small print, SURRÉALISME it says in large letters. The vignette is drawn by Robert Delaunay. The collaborators are Apollinaire, René Crevel, Pierre Reverdy. It is number 1. I'll go in and buy it. Therein is an unsigned “manifesteste du surréalisme”. Breton's name does not appear in this issue. I can't remember taking a more serious impression of the content of this magazine, but it was the first time I saw the word surrealism. And I have hidden it as a preciousness.”
(Stellan Mörner “Flashback”, Article in Art View no. 5/6 1967)
Stellan Mörner was the member of the Halmstad group who engaged most deeply in Surrealism. He was also given the role of the theoretical interpreter of the art direction in Sweden, and his detailed articles on surrealism in several journals were crucial to the impact of the art direction.
The painting in the auction is one of Mörner's most distinctly surrealist works, where the artist's combined experience of surrealism and great insights into its innermost essence come to the full. The year in which the painting is executed, 1948, is central to Stellan Mörner's surrealism. It is then that he debuts with the surreal autobiography “The Hours Before”. The book consists of recorded dream sequences and several of the dreams can be found in his paintings from the 1930s and 40s.
While the auction's painting is one of Mörner's most genuinely surreal works, it contains a subtle wink back to the artist's constructivist period. In the composition, Stellan Mörner plays in a very discreet way with geometric shapes, especially prominent in the circular shape of the vault and the cube shape against which his colleague Axel Olson's somewhat grotesque apparition is depicted, but there can also be read a form that is not directly visible. The eye removed from Axel Olson becomes, with its elevated position, a symbol of the “All-Seeing Eye”, the mind image of God's all-pervading gaze — an eye that in ecclesiastical art is depicted in the frame of a triangle, but in which Mörner effectually omits the triangle, well aware that many viewers would subconsciously project this triangle into the composition themselves.
More than anything else, however, one is struck by the fact that the painting is a full-fledged work of surrealism, in which one of the artist's dreams seems to be embodied. A dream with frightening, grotesque elements, which the artist in true surrealist spirit reproduces without hesitation or thought about how the art audience should react before them. While the surreal expressions of the members of the Halmstad group are usually more easily digestible - not to say censored - Stellan Mörner does not let any inhibitions in the present painting stand in the way of true surrealism. In this respect, he has a stronger connection here with Salvador Dalí, the central figure of the art direction, an artist who, perhaps more than anyone else, allowed the grotesque to take its place in his art - as, for example, in the monumental “The Riddle of Wilhelm Tell” from 1933 in the collection of the Moderna Museet. It can also be noted that in the same year that Stellan Mörner performs the painting for the auction, Salvador Dalí creates his famous work “Els Elephants”, in which - as with Mörner - The All-Seeing Eye is included as part of the composition, although it is much less prominent in Dalí's work than in Mörner's. Like Stellan Mörner, Dalí is also releasing a book this year, “50 Secrets of Magic Craftsmanship.”
Perhaps Stellan Mörner realized, after all, that painting would be too strong an experience for bourgeois homes, where the Halmstad group's art often took up residence. He chooses instead to give his work to its main owner, fellow artist Axel Olson, which in itself can also be perceived as a challenging move given the way he is depicted in the painting. However, the author was probably strong in his conviction that the high quality of the work of art and its importance as an exponent of genuine surrealism would also be appreciated by the initiated recipient, despite an all but embellished depiction of it.
In Stellan Mörner's surreal paintings, it is the dream and its unimaginable possibilities to surprise the viewer that play the main role. The motifs spontaneously emerge from the tension relationship between the real, the graspable and the supernatural, the infinite. In André Breton's first Surrealist Manifesto of 1924, surrealism is described as “a future dissolution of these two seemingly so incompatible states, the dream and reality, into a kind of absolute reality, in what one might call a superreality, a surreality”. Surrealism was not a style, it was about a posture and a new vision, where the artist turned inward instead of outward. One abandoned rational reality and embraced the irrational and the hidden sides of the soul.
Like André Breton, Stellan Mörner emphasized in his theoretical articles that Surrealism was not a quest for the renewal of form but that it was primarily an attitude of life aimed at the emancipation of man. Through surrealism, a new pictorial substance was created, the source of which was the world of dreams, memories and associations. Metaphors and analogies became important tools in the creative process. As an artist, however, one must be able to close one's eyes and abandon external observation in order to thus give way to the inner vision. Both the sleep dream and the daydream contained visual reminiscences that offered the basis for image creation. The dream image would be kept alive and healthy to be transferred to the canvas by the fully conscious and sleeping artist.
Stellan Mörner had already taken note of André Breton's manifesto when it came out in 1924, although at this point it did not concern him on any deeper level. He then spent a year back in Paris, where he studied at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. In 1925, Stellan Mörner returned to Sweden to study at the Academy of Fine Arts, which lasted until 1928. In the latter year he met Erik Olson for the first time and the two young artists found in each other a soul mate. The diligent correspondence of the following year contained in-depth discussions about the direction of art. It was through these discussions with Erik Olson that Stellan Mörner's interest in Surrealism was truly awakened. Constructivism's image-making with a passer and ruler had long come to feel too disciplinary and limiting to creativity. Stellan Mörner and Erik Olson longed for a freer approach, in which the imagination could be given free rein. The answer they found in Surrealism, but they found it difficult to accept the decrees of the art direction on the autonomous creation of images. On the contrary, they considered the creation of art to be a highly conscious occupation. Their goal became the union of realism and surrealism.
Stellan Mörner and Erik Olson showed the new Surrealist concept at the Halmstad Group's exhibition at Galerie Moderne in Stockholm in 1932. Two years later, the other members of the group had also embraced the ideas of Surrealism, as demonstrated by the Halmstad Group's exhibition in Helsinki in 1934. Stellan Mörner now had a leading role in the group and it was through his care that the exhibition came about. The truly momentous event, however, became the group's participation in the legendary exhibition “International Kunsthustussing — Cubisme = Realism” in Copenhagen in January 1935. Here the Halmstad Group presented themselves as surrealists in an international context. The preface to the exhibition catalogue was written by none other than André Breton, the founder and central ideator of Surrealism. Among the exhibitors were names such as Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, Alberto Giacometti, Paul Klee, René Magritte, Joan Miró, Man Ray and Meret Oppenheim. The Halmstad Group's participation was a result of Stellan Mörner being contacted in the summer of 1934 by Vilhelm Bjerke-Petersen, who sought support for the Surrealist movement in Denmark and offered to work in the journal Linien and participate in the upcoming international exhibition.
The fact that Stellan Mörner and Erik Olson were the leading surrealists in the Halmstad group with a bearing outside the Nordic countries was given proof when, in 1936, they were both invited to participate in the major surrealist exhibition “The International Surrealist Exhibition” at the New Burlington Galleries in London. They thus approached the international surrealist circle. Two years later, in 1938, Stellan Mörner and Erik Olson exhibited at the “Exposition Internationale de Surréalisme” at the Galerie-Beaux-Arts in Paris. On this occasion Esaias Thorén also participated. When Stellan Mörner performs the auction's painting ten years later, it can be seen as a perfect symbol of his significant contribution to surrealism — both in Sweden and internationally.
Supplementary image: Photograph by Axel Olson (Source: Svenskt Konstantslexikon, Allhems
publishers).Show more
Condition
Good fitness.
Resale right
Yes
Artist/designer
Stellan Mörner (1896–1979)
Sale price
Estimate
Time, Location
Auction House
Description
Oil on canvas, 71 x 60 cm. Signed Mörner -48. Dedication on verso to fellow artist Axel Olson.
PROVENANCE
Artist Axel Olson (1899-1986)
“In October 1924 I walk one late evening from my lousy workplace on Rue Campagne Première along boulevard Montparnasse towards the Dôme. In the large bookshop window is a small print, SURRÉALISME it says in large letters. The vignette is drawn by Robert Delaunay. The collaborators are Apollinaire, René Crevel, Pierre Reverdy. It is number 1. I'll go in and buy it. Therein is an unsigned “manifesteste du surréalisme”. Breton's name does not appear in this issue. I can't remember taking a more serious impression of the content of this magazine, but it was the first time I saw the word surrealism. And I have hidden it as a preciousness.”
(Stellan Mörner “Flashback”, Article in Art View no. 5/6 1967)
Stellan Mörner was the member of the Halmstad group who engaged most deeply in Surrealism. He was also given the role of the theoretical interpreter of the art direction in Sweden, and his detailed articles on surrealism in several journals were crucial to the impact of the art direction.
The painting in the auction is one of Mörner's most distinctly surrealist works, where the artist's combined experience of surrealism and great insights into its innermost essence come to the full. The year in which the painting is executed, 1948, is central to Stellan Mörner's surrealism. It is then that he debuts with the surreal autobiography “The Hours Before”. The book consists of recorded dream sequences and several of the dreams can be found in his paintings from the 1930s and 40s.
While the auction's painting is one of Mörner's most genuinely surreal works, it contains a subtle wink back to the artist's constructivist period. In the composition, Stellan Mörner plays in a very discreet way with geometric shapes, especially prominent in the circular shape of the vault and the cube shape against which his colleague Axel Olson's somewhat grotesque apparition is depicted, but there can also be read a form that is not directly visible. The eye removed from Axel Olson becomes, with its elevated position, a symbol of the “All-Seeing Eye”, the mind image of God's all-pervading gaze — an eye that in ecclesiastical art is depicted in the frame of a triangle, but in which Mörner effectually omits the triangle, well aware that many viewers would subconsciously project this triangle into the composition themselves.
More than anything else, however, one is struck by the fact that the painting is a full-fledged work of surrealism, in which one of the artist's dreams seems to be embodied. A dream with frightening, grotesque elements, which the artist in true surrealist spirit reproduces without hesitation or thought about how the art audience should react before them. While the surreal expressions of the members of the Halmstad group are usually more easily digestible - not to say censored - Stellan Mörner does not let any inhibitions in the present painting stand in the way of true surrealism. In this respect, he has a stronger connection here with Salvador Dalí, the central figure of the art direction, an artist who, perhaps more than anyone else, allowed the grotesque to take its place in his art - as, for example, in the monumental “The Riddle of Wilhelm Tell” from 1933 in the collection of the Moderna Museet. It can also be noted that in the same year that Stellan Mörner performs the painting for the auction, Salvador Dalí creates his famous work “Els Elephants”, in which - as with Mörner - The All-Seeing Eye is included as part of the composition, although it is much less prominent in Dalí's work than in Mörner's. Like Stellan Mörner, Dalí is also releasing a book this year, “50 Secrets of Magic Craftsmanship.”
Perhaps Stellan Mörner realized, after all, that painting would be too strong an experience for bourgeois homes, where the Halmstad group's art often took up residence. He chooses instead to give his work to its main owner, fellow artist Axel Olson, which in itself can also be perceived as a challenging move given the way he is depicted in the painting. However, the author was probably strong in his conviction that the high quality of the work of art and its importance as an exponent of genuine surrealism would also be appreciated by the initiated recipient, despite an all but embellished depiction of it.
In Stellan Mörner's surreal paintings, it is the dream and its unimaginable possibilities to surprise the viewer that play the main role. The motifs spontaneously emerge from the tension relationship between the real, the graspable and the supernatural, the infinite. In André Breton's first Surrealist Manifesto of 1924, surrealism is described as “a future dissolution of these two seemingly so incompatible states, the dream and reality, into a kind of absolute reality, in what one might call a superreality, a surreality”. Surrealism was not a style, it was about a posture and a new vision, where the artist turned inward instead of outward. One abandoned rational reality and embraced the irrational and the hidden sides of the soul.
Like André Breton, Stellan Mörner emphasized in his theoretical articles that Surrealism was not a quest for the renewal of form but that it was primarily an attitude of life aimed at the emancipation of man. Through surrealism, a new pictorial substance was created, the source of which was the world of dreams, memories and associations. Metaphors and analogies became important tools in the creative process. As an artist, however, one must be able to close one's eyes and abandon external observation in order to thus give way to the inner vision. Both the sleep dream and the daydream contained visual reminiscences that offered the basis for image creation. The dream image would be kept alive and healthy to be transferred to the canvas by the fully conscious and sleeping artist.
Stellan Mörner had already taken note of André Breton's manifesto when it came out in 1924, although at this point it did not concern him on any deeper level. He then spent a year back in Paris, where he studied at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. In 1925, Stellan Mörner returned to Sweden to study at the Academy of Fine Arts, which lasted until 1928. In the latter year he met Erik Olson for the first time and the two young artists found in each other a soul mate. The diligent correspondence of the following year contained in-depth discussions about the direction of art. It was through these discussions with Erik Olson that Stellan Mörner's interest in Surrealism was truly awakened. Constructivism's image-making with a passer and ruler had long come to feel too disciplinary and limiting to creativity. Stellan Mörner and Erik Olson longed for a freer approach, in which the imagination could be given free rein. The answer they found in Surrealism, but they found it difficult to accept the decrees of the art direction on the autonomous creation of images. On the contrary, they considered the creation of art to be a highly conscious occupation. Their goal became the union of realism and surrealism.
Stellan Mörner and Erik Olson showed the new Surrealist concept at the Halmstad Group's exhibition at Galerie Moderne in Stockholm in 1932. Two years later, the other members of the group had also embraced the ideas of Surrealism, as demonstrated by the Halmstad Group's exhibition in Helsinki in 1934. Stellan Mörner now had a leading role in the group and it was through his care that the exhibition came about. The truly momentous event, however, became the group's participation in the legendary exhibition “International Kunsthustussing — Cubisme = Realism” in Copenhagen in January 1935. Here the Halmstad Group presented themselves as surrealists in an international context. The preface to the exhibition catalogue was written by none other than André Breton, the founder and central ideator of Surrealism. Among the exhibitors were names such as Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, Alberto Giacometti, Paul Klee, René Magritte, Joan Miró, Man Ray and Meret Oppenheim. The Halmstad Group's participation was a result of Stellan Mörner being contacted in the summer of 1934 by Vilhelm Bjerke-Petersen, who sought support for the Surrealist movement in Denmark and offered to work in the journal Linien and participate in the upcoming international exhibition.
The fact that Stellan Mörner and Erik Olson were the leading surrealists in the Halmstad group with a bearing outside the Nordic countries was given proof when, in 1936, they were both invited to participate in the major surrealist exhibition “The International Surrealist Exhibition” at the New Burlington Galleries in London. They thus approached the international surrealist circle. Two years later, in 1938, Stellan Mörner and Erik Olson exhibited at the “Exposition Internationale de Surréalisme” at the Galerie-Beaux-Arts in Paris. On this occasion Esaias Thorén also participated. When Stellan Mörner performs the auction's painting ten years later, it can be seen as a perfect symbol of his significant contribution to surrealism — both in Sweden and internationally.
Supplementary image: Photograph by Axel Olson (Source: Svenskt Konstantslexikon, Allhems
publishers).Show more
Condition
Good fitness.
Resale right
Yes
Artist/designer
Stellan Mörner (1896–1979)
Sale price
Estimate
Time, Location
Auction House
