Axel Salto

Danemark

(1889-1961)

Consummate multi-talented artist, Axel Salto painted, created
numerous illustrations for poetry and children’s books,
designed textiles and worked wood; but it is as a ceramist
that he achieved international recognition. Trained at the
Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen, his meeting with
Picasso and Matisse in Paris in 1916 was decisive in his thinking
and his approach to creation, and in 1917 he launched the
art magazine Klingen with contributions by other designers,
as Poul Henningsen or Otto Gelsted. Despite a very short
2-year publication, Klingen remains today a reference, and the
modernity of the ideas presented thrust Salto into the limelight
of Danish design.
From 1923 to 1929, he worked for the manufacturer Bing
& Grondahl, for which he designed in 1925 a number of
stoneware pieces that earned him a silver medal at the Paris
Universal Exhibition, the first of a long series of awards.
From the mid-30s, he mainly worked for the prestigious Royal
Copenhagen manufacture, period coinciding with an evolution
of his production: more organic shapes, budding flowers or
fruits, chosen for their fertile energy. To use his own words, he
tended to “create in the spirit of nature rather than to imitate
its exterior”.