KunstenaarSwedish
Ossian Elgström
1 actieve items
Josef David Ossian Elgström was born on 19 November 1883 in Strövelstorp, a small parish in the Skåne countryside, into a family with strong artistic and literary inclinations. His sister Anna Lenah Elgström would become a writer and artist in her own right, and the two grew up sharing a household shaped by cultural ambition. This background pulled Ossian in two directions simultaneously: toward the cutting edge of contemporary art training, and toward the furthest margins of the known world.
His formal education took him through some of the most stimulating studios of early twentieth-century Europe. He studied at the Royal Swedish Academy of Arts in Stockholm from 1906 to 1907, then crossed to Copenhagen to work under the Danish painter Kristian Zahrtmann, whose studio attracted Scandinavian modernists from across the region. In 1908 he went on to train with the Norwegian realist Christian Krohg in Paris. This triangulation of Stockholm, Copenhagen, and Paris gave Elgström a technical foundation broad enough to support the unconventional path he would soon take.
Back in Sweden, he built a career as a magazine illustrator, contributing drawings and humorous work to Strix, Söndags-Nisse, and Puck, as well as writing for Svenska Dagbladet. But the pull of the far north was already overtaking commercial illustration. Beginning in the 1910s, he made repeated journeys to Lappland, Siberia, and Greenland, living among Sami communities and other Arctic peoples and recording their oral traditions, beliefs, and way of life. The resulting books, Lapska myther (1914), Lappalaiset (1919), and Karesuando-lapparna (1922), combined written ethnographic observation with his own illustrations and established him as a serious chronicler of northern cultures at a moment when those cultures were under increasing pressure from outside.
From the late 1920s onward, his artistic focus shifted decisively toward Norse mythology. The themes of the Edda, Ragnarök, Odin, and the Viking age began to dominate his painting and graphic work. In 1929, he exhibited at the Exposition internationale de Paris at the Jeu de Paume, showing paintings including Vikings Expeditions, The Deluge, and a Laponian Legend. The Edda series came to its fullest form when it was exhibited at the Konstakademin in Stockholm in 1938, the same year Bonniers published Ossian Elgströms Edda in a luxury numbered edition with both Swedish and English text, the English translation by Professor Bror Danielsson. He had entered work in the art competition at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, testimony to how seriously his painting was being taken in international circles.
Elgström died in Båstad on 20 May 1950. His work is held in the collection of Moderna Museet in Stockholm. On the Nordic auction market, his prints, watercolors, and mixed-media works appear regularly at Swedish regional houses. The highest recorded sale on Auctionist to date is a depiction of Odin at Gro's grave, which reached 6,100 EUR, while works from the Ättestupa and Edda series have also sold in the thousands. A total of 29 works have been offered at auction through Auctionist, with the strongest interest from Crafoord Auktioner Stockholm, Karlstad Hammarö Auktionsverk, and Stockholms Auktionsverk.