Carl Fagerberg understood athletic technique. His sculptures captured the powerful grace of elite athletes, with several of them submitted in art competitions for the Olympic Games.
Carl Fagerberg is one of Sweden’s most respected sculptors. After completing an apprenticeship in carpentry, he attended the Technical University in Stockholm and also the capital’s Kungliga Konsthögskolan, the Royal Art Academy. In 1906, he was awarded the prestigious Jenny Lind scholarship for three years, which allowed him extensive travel to France, Germany and Russia, where he received a commission from the Tsar for stucco work in the St. Petersburg railway station.
In 1908, he set up his own studio in Stockholm and two years later traveled to Italy, Spain and Tunis. As a young man, he was also keen on sports, including skiing.
Fagerberg worked in granite, bronze and porcelain, and the results enhanced many different venues. He embellished churches and public buildings. His decoration of the Swedish church in Paris, for example, and Goteborg’s telegraph office are two of many sculptures, which can be admired in Skelleftea, Gavre, Lulea, Örebro, Linköping and Eskilstuna, too. Fagerberg was also known for his animal sculptures. In addition, he designed medals and medallions, and worked as a painter.
His dynamic sporting sculptures, some of which can be seen in Stockholm’s Olympic stadium, were submitted for the art competitions in the Olympic Games. At the Los Angeles Games of 1932 Fagerberg received honorable mention for his skater, and at Berlin in 1936, his baton passing of relay runners was much admired but received no prize.
Fagerberg's sporting scenes were full of energy and action. And that is what makes his circa-1916 sculpted figure Skidlöpare—Skier—so powerful. The skier, in full athletic stride, is well balanced and in control as he
descends a slope. Fagerberg knew his ski technique.
Fagerberg’s work is also exhibited in the National
Museum in Stockholm and in the Kalmar Art Museum. When Fagerberg was working, Sundbyberg was just outside Stockholm’s city limits but now is in the northern part of the city. The Sundbyberg museum holds two skiing sculptures. One has an unusual subject: a woman bending down trying to get her bindings just right.
Curt Stoopendaal was the son of the more famous Swedish painter Jenny Nyström (1854-1946) who made a name for herself portraying Tomte, a Santa Claus figure, on literally thousands of Christmas cards. Tomte, a white-bearded gnome, is always doing the right thing: making presents, fixing things, cleaning stables, pouring milk, making friends with pigs, and all done with a heavy dependence on Scandinavian folklore. Her son, Curt, for the most part followed his mother’s style.
Stoopendaal had begun to study medicine but switched to Althins Målarskola, Carl Althin’s painting school that prepared students for entry to the Konstakademien, the Royal Swedish Academy of Arts in Stockholm. He also studied at Wilhelmson’s painting school before working in advertising and then moving into his own art world. He painted for Axel Eliasson’s Konstförlag, Sweden’s leading producer of postcards. This illustration of a foursome of well-to-do holiday merry-makers was published by Eliasson’s company, headquartered on Drottninggaten, in Stockholm’s old center, and now a
pedestrian way.
The 1936 painting is correct in its ski detail, with skiers in dark colors, as befits serious sportsmen and women. The outfits contrast favorably with the white of the snow, with none of the garish fashion colors of later decades. It appears those long skis, back ends tucked under the spare wheel cover, had to be held in by hand during transport (by skiers in the unheated rumble seat). I have found no advertisements for ski racks. The Swedish sporting-goods company Thule, for example, sold its first car-top ski racks in 1962. The magnificent red of the large sports car gives the impression of wealth.
Stoopendaal got it right: The illustration indicates that Sweden was already moving on from that late 19th and early 20th century ideal of ski-idrott—skisport—to modern skiing.
The long-lasting popularity of Maksim Gaspari’s work is due to his ability to portray a traditional Slovenian rural culture as it moved into the modern world of efficiency. His images of the lasting joys of farming, of gathering mushrooms and fruits, of village characters—the world of yesteryear—still appear on calendars, and, in 1993, on a postage stamp.
His work is almost, it seems, an insistence to political leaders to not spoil those craggy hills up north on the Austrian border, to preserve the rolling meadows around Bloke and to enjoy Selšček, about an hour south of Laibach, Slovenia’s capital when Gaspari was born (now known as Ljubljana).
The image clearly shows Gaspari’s understanding of Bloke skiing, something that was known since Slovenian historian Johan von Valvasor’s 1689 description. Of particular interest is the detail of the short and wide skis, the single strap over the toe of the boot and the style of wielding the pole. The girl obviously has not got it right, and she is also slightly off balance on her skis. The simple winter clothing of the Bloke peasant gives the painting its folk aspect and is typical of Gaspari’s work.
As a postscript, a similar scene was also used as an advertisement for the Liebig meat company, and since a number of well-known artists were commissioned to illustrate trade cards with, often, historical and geographical themes, I suspect Gaspari was among them.
W. A. Rogers was best known as an American cartoonist and contributed illustrations to a number of popular magazines. He was already publishing images locally in Ohio when he was 14 years old. He studied at Worcester Polytechnic in Massachusetts and at Ohio’s Wittenburg College but did not graduate from either. It is said that he taught himself to draw. In 1873, at only 19, he was hired as an illustrator for the New York Daily Graphic and went on to Harper’s, taking over from the extremely popular Thomas Nash in 1877.
Over the years, he had illustrations and cartoons in Life, Puck and The Century and ended his career in 1926 at the Washington Post. He also illustrated children’s books, and in 1922 he published his autobiography, A World Worthwhile. The New York Public Library holds many of his drawings, cartoons and illustrations.
This illustration from Harper’s Weekly (March 4, 1899) holds particular interest since it is one of the few that depicts pre-1900 skiing in Oregon. While in the gold mining camps of Oregon’s Blue Mountains, he writes, “I find the use of skee,” as many women, men and children fetch supplies like bacon and flour. Here he shows the utilitarian aspect of skiing on a shopping trip of mother and son—nothing exciting here, just a very accurate drawing showing Harper’s readership just what “skee-running” meant on these new-fangled foreign boards, which included a “clever device”—a “round wooden block, like a wheel, that slipped over the lower end of the balance pole” to prevent it from sinking down when thrust into the deep, soft snow. — E. John P. Allen
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W. A. Rogers was best known as an American cartoonist and contributed illustrations to a number of popular magazines. He was already publishing images locally in Ohio when he was 14 years old. He studied at Worcester Polytechnic in Massachusetts and at Ohio’s Wittenburg College but did not graduate from either. It is said that he taught himself to draw. In 1873, at only 19, he was hired as an illustrator for the New York Daily Graphic and went on to Harper’s, taking over from the extremely popular Thomas Nash in 1877.
Over the years, he had illustrations and cartoons in Life, Puck and The Century and ended his career in 1926 at the Washington Post. He also illustrated children’s books, and in 1922 he published his autobiography, A World Worthwhile. The New York Public Library holds many of his drawings, cartoons and illustrations.
This illustration from Harper’s Weekly (March 4, 1899) holds particular interest since it is one of the few that depicts pre-1900 skiing in Oregon. While in the gold mining camps of Oregon’s Blue Mountains, he writes, “I find the use of skee,” as many women, men and children fetch supplies like bacon and flour. Here he shows the utilitarian aspect of skiing on a shopping trip of mother and son—nothing exciting here, just a very accurate drawing showing Harper’s readership just what “skee-running” meant on these new-fangled foreign boards, which included a “clever device”—a “round wooden block, like a wheel, that slipped over the lower end of the balance pole” to prevent it from sinking down when thrust into the deep, soft snow. — E. John P. Allen
Leonetto Cappiello has been called “the father of modern advertising” because he broke the norms of poster art. Early advertising tended to look like a painting, too cluttered sometimes. Cappiello often depicted individual figures in motion. In this ski travel poster, he was not afraid to leave the white slope open. It intensified the illusion of speed.
Cappiello was born in Italy but mainly lived and worked in Paris. With no formal art training, he had his first exhibition in 1892. Today, some of his paintings are displayed in the Museo Civio Giovanni Fatori in Livorno. He then worked as a caricaturist for the most popular humor magazines in France, Le Rire, Le Sourire, L’Assiette au Beurre and Femina. In 1896 his first collection of caricatures was published.
From 1900 on, he painted posters that came to revolutionize advertising. This was the era when Paris walls were plastered with posters advertising just about everything. Cappiello realized that he had to distinguish his work from the others. Speed was one of the ingredients of modernization; wasn’t Citius—Fastest—the first of the three goals of the modern Olympics? Altius and Fortius, highest and strongest, came second and third.
This 1929 illustration promotes Superbagnères-Luchon in the French Pyrenees. It has that art deco look in which speed is symbolized by the flying scarf and the swirl of the ski tracks on those vast open snowfields. And how to reach Superbagnères? Look at the top to see the Chemins de Fer du Midi, the railway line that will get you to the palatial hotel.
For those interested in the mechanics of the poster business, look at the bottom left, and you will see the word Devambez. Monsieur Devambez was what can be best described as an agent for poster artists. He would contact clients with whom he would put artists like Cappiello in touch. Cappiello was favored by such big-name businesses as Campari, Pirelli tires, Mistinguett at the Casino de Paris and others. It was a successful arrangement.
And Cappiello’s 1929 ski poster was influential enough to be followed in 1932 by a similar design for the same resort. This time there was one figure, not three. It was by the lesser-known artist R. Sonderer.
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Leonetto Cappiello has been called “the father of modern advertising” because he broke the norms of poster art. Early advertising tended to look like a painting, too cluttered sometimes. Cappiello often depicted individual figures in motion. In this ski travel poster, he was not afraid to leave the white slope open. It intensified the illusion of speed.
Cappiello was born in Italy but mainly lived and worked in Paris. With no formal art training, he had his first exhibition in 1892. Today, some of his paintings are displayed in the Museo Civio Giovanni Fatori in Livorno. He then worked as a caricaturist for the most popular humor magazines in France, Le Rire, Le Sourire, L’Assiette au Beurre and Femina. In 1896 his first collection of caricatures was published.
From 1900 on, he painted posters that came to revolutionize advertising. This was the era when Paris walls were plastered with posters advertising just about everything. Cappiello realized that he had to distinguish his work from the others. Speed was one of the ingredients of modernization; wasn’t Citius—Fastest—the first of the three goals of the modern Olympics? Altius and Fortius, highest and strongest, came second and third.
This 1929 illustration promotes Superbagnères-Luchon in the French Pyrenees. It has that art deco look in which speed is symbolized by the flying scarf and the swirl of the ski tracks on those vast open snowfields. And how to reach Superbagnères? Look at the top to see the Chemins de Fer du Midi, the railway line that will get you to the palatial hotel.
For those interested in the mechanics of the poster business, look at the bottom left, and you will see the word Devambez. Monsieur Devambez was what can be best described as an agent for poster artists. He would contact clients with whom he would put artists like Cappiello in touch. Cappiello was favored by such big-name businesses as Campari, Pirelli tires, Mistinguett at the Casino de Paris and others. It was a successful arrangement.
And Cappiello’s 1929 ski poster was influential enough to be followed in 1932 by a similar design for the same resort. This time there was one figure, not three. It was by the lesser-known artist R. Sonderer.
Edgar Wittmark's bold, color-blast style hit the sweet spot for mass-entertainment pulp magazines.
This American artist grew up during the period when magazines published thrilling entertainment, including fiction and tales of high-action sports, for an increasingly literate population. Many stories, as this cover shows, were geared to youth. In 1910, 72 percent of American kids attended school. By 1930, all 48 states required students to complete elementary school. The newly educated readers bought these magazines with their bold illustrations and content varying from serious literature and reportage to pulp fiction.
Wittmark, born in New York City in 1895, spent three summers working on a farm in Montana, then served in France during World War I. He later studied at New York’s Art Students League and in 1925 returned to France to enroll in the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris. This school allowed students to experiment rather than follow the academic rules for painting enforced at the more famous École des Beaux-Arts. It was at the Grande Chaumière that he began to develop what critics later called his “retro-futuristic” style that promised “potential reality.”
When Wittmark returned to New York, his bold and colorful action paintings, usually in oil, became staple covers for the well-known American Boy, Collier’s, Outdoor Life, Saturday Evening Post and Scientific American magazines. He also did covers for pulp magazines like Adventure, Frontier Stories and West, probably echoing his farm life in Montana as a young man.
The 1937 cover illustrated here portrays a youthful, healthy, sporting male America getting out of the Depression, the “potential reality” of what was possible. Those with available wealth had a choice of two of the most physical and exciting sports then captivating a steadily recovering United States.
It is unusual to choose a medalist as the subject for this art column. In this case, I’m not talking about an Olympic or World Championship medalist but about an artist who creates medals: Helmut Zobl, the Austrian who designed the 100-schilling coin, illustrated here, in commemoration of the 1976 Winter Olympics in Innsbruck.
Zobl was born in Schwarzach im Pongau, about an hour south of Salzburg, in 1941. His art training began in a Kunstgewerbeschule, the arts and crafts school in Steyr. From 1960 to 1965 he studied at the prestigious Akademie der Bildenden Künste—the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. In 1961, he took a summer course with Oskar Kokoschka, best known for his expressionistic portraits and avant-garde literature.
Zobl worked as an assistant in Ferdinand Welz’s medaling master school, a department of the Academy of Fine Arts. Welz was renowned for his many schilling coins and commemorative medals, and Zobl followed his master.
In 1970, Zobl started freelancing. The following year he joined the Vienna Secession group and about 20 years later he took membership in the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Medaillenkunst, the German Society for Medal Art. In 1976, he designed the 100-schilling coin for the Olympics. At the time, a 120-schilling ticket, for example, would get you up to Axamer Lizum ski area, 10 kilometers out of Innsbruck, to watch the men’s giant slalom.
Besides the lettering around the edge of the coin—XII Olympische Winterspiele 1976 Innsbruck—the face depicts a skier going full speed. The stylized figure is made more powerful by the well-defined “squares,” which give the skier solidity as he powers down the hill. It presages Franz Klammer’s wild ride in the downhill on the Patscherkofel at Igls, when he beat Bernhard Russi by a third of a second to take the gold medal in those 1976 Winter Games.
Adrian Allinson’s woodcut of a speeding skier first appeared in Der Winter, the publication of the German Ski Association, in 1928. Oddly, because he was a well-known mountaineer and skier, it is his only known image of skiing. The woodcut certainly impresses with its depiction of action and speed.
Allinson had begun following his father into medicine but switched to the Slade School of Fine Art in London. Graduating in 1910, he promptly left for Paris and Munich. His paintings, many pastoral scenes, became well-known before the Great War. His most prized was a 1915-16 interior depiction of the Café Royal.
As one of a group of artists who were conscientious objector during the Great War, he was often hounded by Londoners. He joined the Bloomsbury Group, a liberal and loose-living set of artists and writers. Besides the many landscapes, he did opera sets, and his series for London Transport and the Imperial Marketing Board are among his best-known works. He has left an account of his artistic life in manuscript form, held in the archives of the McFarlin Library of the University of Tulsa.
A lifelong skier, Allinson was a member of the Kandahar Club, captained the British University Ski Club downhill team, and came second in the 1925 Bernese Oberland Challenge Shield, beating such luminaries as Barry Caulfeild. In the first Inferno at Mürren, in 1928, he finished fourth. Teamed with Arnold Lunn, he won the first Scaramanga Challenge Cup, in which skiers are roped together in pairs as if crossing a glacier. Lunn said that Allinson only stopped racing when he and Lunn were tied for first place two years in a row in the Scaramanga.
It is not often you can say more about the skiing of an artist than the actual art, but Allinson knew what he cut in the wood—it typified Schrei der Zeit, the cry of the times: speed.
Otto Barth was a sickly child. To gain strength, he was taken to the mountains at age 16. The same year, he was admitted to the Viennese Academy of Fine Arts. Two years later, he teamed up with his artist friend Gustav Jahn for serious mountaineering. He died, probably of lead poisoning from his paints, at age 39.
Turn-of-the-century Vienna rivalled Paris with artistic experimentation. Barth socialized with a group of artists who rebelled against the progressive Secession movement to form the more radical Hagenbund. Going further still, he joined the short-lived Phalanx, which exhibited post-Impressionist and Jugendstil (art nouveau) paintings.
In 1910 Barth won the commission for the poster of the Salzkammergut resort region. The telemarking skier is shown in fine form, and in the correct Norwegian blue outfit. What’s striking is the use of color and shadow, as well as the depiction of snow itself.
Poster turned into promo stamp, 1912.
The other illustration is the poster turned Werbemarke (advertising stamp) for the Wintersport-Ausstellung, the Winter Sport Exhibition of 1912. The image of a skier descending from the mountains is center stage, again using those hints of shadow. This was an important exhibition, organized by army officer Hermann Czant (Czant was an acolyte of Matthias Zdarsky and trained thousands of Imperial Army skiers), under the patronage of the Grandduchess Zita, who would become the last empress of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
The exhibition was divided between the business of winter sports and the physical aspects of the sport itself. The top Vienna sporting goods shop, Mizzi Langer, was represented, as was Staub of Innsbruck. Norway sent representatives, and Norwegian ski outfits and British winter sports clothes dominated. One critic was thankful there were no new bindings (controversy then raged over binding design for Alpine skiing). On the resort side, Semmering showed a model of its ski jump, and there were other displays from Triberg, the Schwarzwald, the Arlberg and Innsbruck. The trail marking from the Erzgeberge was singled out positively.
There was also a good collection of winter posters and some paintings, too. The best of those were by Jahn and Barth. I like to think that the telemarking skier was one on view; it was painted before the year of the exhibition.
