Johan Axel Holmström 1870-1954

Famous Swedish engineer whose numerous patented inventions brought him renown throughout the first half of the 20th century, Johan Axel Holmström is today primarily known as one of the main pioneers of Scandinavian aviation. The rediscovery of two important paintings by him invites us to reconsider his artistic work in a significant way, placing him at the heart of the European avant-garde of his time.

Born in 1870 in Gävle on the Baltic coast of Sweden, into a family of merchants, Holmström displayed early talent for drawing, as well as a strong aptitude for science and mathematics. Just before turning twenty, he received a scholarship to attend the School of Decorative Arts in Stockholm and later continued his training in Germany, studying successively in Berlin, Munich, and Düsseldorf. He also undertook a study trip to Paris, which had consolidated its position as the world’s art capital following the success of the 1889 Exposition Universelle.

In 1889, Holmström served as sergeant-major in the Gävle corps of the Salvation Army, becoming a lieutenant in 1890 and joining the editorial office at its Stockholm headquarters. There he met Augusta Härnström, whom he married in April 1892, and with whom he had four children between 1893 and 1898.

As a father of a large family, Holmström worked as a portraitist, poster designer, illustrator, and photographer. He founded his own advertising agency in Gävle and achieved considerable success working for major Swedish industrial clients, producing numerous commercial signs. In 1896 and 1897, he painted a series of large canvases depicting the interior of the Sandviken forges, as well as a panoramic view of the factory. These works combined aesthetic concerns with industrial techniques, perfectly illustrating Holmström’s dual creative vision.

An ingenious advertiser, Holmström drew particular attention at the 1901 Industrial and Agricultural Fair in Gävle by presenting, on behalf of the Gefle glassworks, a twenty-meter-high beer bottle composed of thousands of empty bottles.

At the same time, Holmström developed as a self-taught engineer, focusing primarily on the emerging field of aviation. Among the early pioneers of aeronautical research, he developed several innovative aircraft models with rubber engines as early as 1897 and experimented with the first rocket-propelled prototypes. In 1901, he patented a machine that revolutionized engraving and image reproduction processes. Known variously as the Axel, Sirius, Mignon, or Axelette machine, it was distinguished by an oil-lubricated mechanism in which blades precisely applied the engraving liquid onto the plates. Distributed in Germany and the United States, it achieved global success and quickly became a market leader, a position it maintained for several decades, supplying the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune from 1905 onward.

This engraving machine quickly made Holmström a wealthy man and allowed him to devote himself more freely to painting. At the beginning of the century, he undertook several extended stays in France and Italy, adopting a pointillist technique for his palette, inspired by the Neo-Impressionists and Italian Divisionism. From 1903 onward, he participated in the international exhibitions in Rome, attracting the attention of the Italian art critics. In fact, in his review of the 1904 Roman Mostra published in La Tribuna, the Italian critic Primo Levi described Holmström as an “extraordinarily talented” painter from the “Nordic youth,” who had gradually established himself among the leading modern painters of his country. In the critic’s view, his paintings exuded “the freshness of Grieg, the complexity of Björnson, and the depth of Ibsen.”

Pointillist in technique, Holmström’s works of this period, with their suggestive atmospheres, were often imbued with symbolism drawn from Scandinavian literature. Shortly after returning to Sweden, he moved with his family to Stockholm. While he once again turned his attention to aeronautical engineering, he continued, according to his biographer Jan Malmstedt, to exhibit his paintings and to build a reputation as an innovative artist.

Thus, in October 1913, during the launch of his famous seaplane, the Havsörnen (the first fully Swedish airplane), the newspaper Norrlandsposten emphasized that Holmström was not only an engineer and exceptional inventor but also “a great artist.” Nevertheless, it becomes clear that over time, the engineer gradually took precedence over the painter, as Holmström increasingly set aside his brushes to focus on the inventions that had brought him wealth. He continued improving his engraving machine and established a factory in Philadelphia, United States.

In the following years, Holmström cemented his reputation as an inventor by filing several new patents, including the first bomb specifically designed to be dropped from an airplane, one of the earliest multi-cylinder engines, and a revolutionary air-cooling system, a forerunner of modern air conditioning.

Dated to 1903 and set in Rome, the painting under discussion here constitutes a very rare testimony to the body of work produced by Holmström during his Italian sojourn. In a vertical format striking for its imposing dimensions, the artist presents a decidedly unusual subject, depicting underwater depths where mermaids and fish coexist within a setting dominated by the ruins of a submerged city covered in coral. Although the obelisk in the foreground seems more closely related to ancient Rome, it is tempting to see in it an evocation of Atlantis, the vast and mythical island whose submersion beneath the waves by Zeus was described by Plato.

It is also highly probable that the painter is alluding to Scandinavian and North Germanic mythologies, from which the two sirens (legendary and malevolent creatures occupying the center of the composition) originate. In any case, it is noteworthy that Holmström appears to be as fascinated by the conquest of the skies as by the exploration of the ocean depths. While his aeronautical projects were very real, his entirely pictorial vision of the underwater world belongs to a far more poetic register, in which fantastical imagination takes precedence.

Beyond the originality of its subject, this work stands out for its technique, combining the fragmented brushwork characteristic of Divisionism with a very dark chromatic range dominated by gradations of green and blue, only punctuated by the vivid orange of the corals. In this respect, the painter applies in an unusual manner, within a submarine landscape, his personal interpretation of the scientific research of Michel-Eugène Chevreul and Ogden Rood on color perception, principles he most likely absorbed through contact with the Neo-Impressionists in Paris.

This canvas was very likely among the works submitted by the artist for his first participation in the 1903 International Exhibition in Rome. Indeed, among the exhibited works appears a painting titled Le Secret de la Mer [7], whose subject seems to correspond directly to the mysterious and distinctly Symbolist atmosphere of the work discussed here. While very few paintings by Axel Holmström have survived to this day, the present work has the particular distinction of having been photographed by the artist himself in his studio in Gävle shortly after his return from Italy (fig. 2), alongside other works, one of which (of imposing horizontal format), can most likely be identified as the painting titled Le flot des vagues, also shown at the 1903 International Exhibition in Rome.

Fig. 2: Johan Axel Holmström, View of the Artist’s Studio in Gävle (with Le Secret de la Mer on the far right), circa 1905, albumen photographic print, private collection.

[1] Malmstedt, Jan, Vingar på vattnet. Boken om uppfinnaren, flygpionjären, konstnären Axel Holmström [Wings on Water. The Book of the Inventor, Aviation Pioneer, and Artist Axel Holmström], Trafik-Nostalgiska Förlaget, 2014, pp. 57–58.
[2] Edvard Hagerup Grieg (1843–1907) was a Norwegian composer and pianist of the Romantic period. His discovery of Norwegian folklore and peasant dances in 1863 made him throughout his life an indefatigable advocate of a national musical art. A great harmonist, whose work would not go unnoticed by Claude Debussy or Maurice Ravel, his most famous orchestral works include the Piano Concerto in A minor and Peer Gynt, incidental music composed for Henrik Ibsen’s drama.
[3] Bjørnstjerne Martinus Bjørnson (1832–1910) was a Norwegian novelist and playwright, regarded as one of the greatest writers in the history of Norwegian literature alongside Henrik Ibsen. Author of the lyrics of the Norwegian national anthem, he received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1903.
[4] Henrik Johan Ibsen (1828–1906) was a Norwegian poet and playwright, considered one of the most important figures in Scandinavian literature, nominated three times for the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1902, 1903, and 1904.
[5] The engine of the seaplane known as Havsörnen (literally “The Sea Eagle”) was a 100-horsepower Argus engine, now preserved at the Technical Museum in Stockholm.
[6] Malmstedt, 2014, p. 58.
[7] “I Italien deltog Axel Holmström i sin första utställning med dukar som bar fantasieggande namn; man rar anta att namnen speglar motivens karaktär: Irrsken, Vågens saga och Havets hemlighet.”
[“In Italy, Axel Holmström took part in his first exhibition with canvases bearing evocative titles; one may assume that the names reflect the nature of the motifs: Evening Light, The Surge of the Waves, and The Secret of the Sea.”], in Malmstedt, 2014, p. 56.

Like Le Secret de la Mer, the painting presented here, dated 1903 and located in Rome, belongs to the body of work produced by Holmström during his stay in the Eternal City. The artist applies his Divisionist research to a panoramic landscape unfolded across an imposing horizontal format. Beyond the fragmentation of the brushwork, this large canvas also aligns itself with an Impressionist approach through its pronounced desire to capture atmosphere, translating the luminous effects of the end of the day.

The subject, however, remains mysterious and imbued with a certain symbolism. Holmström here associates a small boat resembling a Venetian gondola with what appears on the left to be a ruin entirely overgrown with vegetation, revealing the suggestive shape of a skull. In his recent biography of the artist, Jan Malmstedt notes that in an interview given to the press, Holmström claimed to be the inventor of his own pictorial technique [1]. While his method of applying small vertical and horizontal touches is indeed quite distinctive, it nonetheless recalls the Neo-Impressionists he may have observed in Paris, and above all the Pointillist works of the Italian painters Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo (1868–1907) and Giovanni Segantini (1858–1899), who had died a few years earlier but whose work Holmström was certainly aware of.

This canvas was also very likely among the works submitted by the painter for his first participation in the International Exhibition of Rome in 1903. Among the works exhibited was a painting bearing the Old Swedish title Irrsken [2], which has no direct equivalent in French but may be translated as Evening Light - the opposite of Norrsken, meaning Aurora. The luminous atmosphere of the present landscape clearly evokes evening, and acquires a symbolic dimension through its association with the human skull. Death appears here as the terminus of a journey (by gondola) illuminated by the final glimmers of daylight. While very few paintings by Axel Holmström have survived to this day, the work presented here has the particular distinction of having been photographed alongside the artist himself in his studio in Gävle, shortly after his return from Italy (fig. 1).

Fig. 1: Johan Axel Holmström, Self-Portrait in the Studio in Gävle (with Evening Light at upper left and The Orphan’s Christmas on the right), circa 1905, albumen photographic print, private collection.

[1] Malmstedt, 2014, p. 56.

[2] “I Italien deltog Axel Holmström i sin första utställning med dukar som bar fantasieggande namn ; man rar anta att namnen speglar motivens karaktär : Irrsken, Vågens saga och Havets hemlighet.” [“In Italy, Axel Holmström took part in his first exhibition with canvases bearing imaginative titles; one may assume that the names reflect the nature of the motifs: Evening Light, The Surge of the Waves, and The Secret of the Sea.”], in Malmstedt, 2014, p. 56.