428. CHRISTIAN BERG. Torso-26 I, polished and dark patinated bronze, height 39 cm.

CHRISTIAN BERG 1893–1976 Torso-26 I Signed and dated Chr Berg 1926. Cast stamp Andro Fondeur. Paris. Polished and dark patinated bronze, height 39 cm. With black stone plinth 54 cm.

LITERATURE Sven Sandström: Christan Berg - livslinjen og formtankar, Malmö 1962, catalog no. 5, compare plate no. II Torvald Berg: Christian, Förslöv 1991, catalog no. B4, compare plate on page 185, also compare article facsimile from Höganäs Tidning 1928, page 81, picture 4 (Ex 1) Compare the National Encyclopedia under the search term Sculpture, volume 16, page 578, color plate (Ex 1) Christian Berg loved working with extremes. Polished bronze in sharp contrast to rugged metal. Convex and concave surfaces in complicated stresses. An organic sensuality versus an austere modernism. These contradictions are on full display in the work Torso, executed in 1926; the first completed abstract sculpture in Swedish art and a key work in the artist's output.

Christian Berg was born into a creative home in Förslövsholm in Scania. Already at an early age he showed an interest in art, and thanks to the proximity to the ceramics town Höganäs, his artistic dreams were linked to a ceramic business. In the fall semester of 1909, he started at the Technical School in Stockholm, where he mainly modeled in clay. Two years later, he continued to Althin's painting school and then the Academy of Arts, where he mainly experimented with animal and nature painting.

In the early 1920s, Berg settled with his wife in Paris, where he became an active part of the international art scene. The impressions were many and inspiration was found on every street corner. With zeal and frenzy, Berg tackled new currents. During the day he went to exhibitions and in the evenings he studied modeling at the free academies; such as the Académi Colarossi, and in the studios of André Lhote and Fernand Léger. The drawing of models offered resistance and to overcome the deepening in the form problems, he came up with the sculpture. The encounter with post-cubism, together with the model study, brought him closer to abstracting, organic design. During an intense summer in Paris in 1926, Berg completed a series of coherent works that led to the sculpture Torso, which personally embodies a summation of impressions and intentions from the first Parisian period.

"Torson is not an experiment, it is an urgent expression of my artistic endeavour. From a file drawing, I developed over a few months a long series of solutions in which I thought that in a more essential and condensed way the experience of the human figure is portrayed, and as an end point of that series stands the torso. Perhaps it is also not wrong to experience something akin to an ancient Venus and a goddess of victory, a Nike, when looking at the sculpture. The classical tradition was not essentially alien to post-cubism, and at least not to me.” (Torvald Berg, “Christian, my experience of the sculptor Christian Berg. An Illustrated Story of Father, His Life and Work', 1991.

When the sculpture was made, Berg was quite alone in striving for a modern ideal as a Swedish sculptor. In the sculpture, the neck and hair are hinted at in the form of some rounded screw threads over the shoulder down towards the back. They join with the right, raised shoulder where the hair falls down the side of the back like cinnamon buns. The shape of the chest is partially taken up in the discs of the shoulders, polished and cut from the upper part of the chest. The left wing crowns and continues the taut arc of the body side and gives lift to the entire solid body. The right bends outward instead. In the game of contrast, the polished parts also appear against the rough ones, the positive against the negative. From the front, the sculpture shows a taut, charged force; femininity and resilience, reminiscent of Nike, the goddess of victory. But from behind, Aphrodite, or Venus, reveals herself, a vegetative, soft and resting form.

Berg would return to Torso on several occasions later in his career and create new versions, which speaks volumes for the importance the artist himself attached to the work in question. Torso is also his first monumental sculpture. Even though it was first carved in granite in 1957, it was the artist's intention that it should already be executed in monumental size. Even as a smaller bronze sculpture, this one with its strength and mastery becomes a monumental force in the surrounding space.