Bacchus Antik: Part 1 Art Nouveau

Bacchus Antik – A Series of Themed Auctions
Bacchus Antik is the title for a series of ongoing themed auctions this autumn and spring, where large parts of Bacchus Antik’s rich and diverse inventory will go under the hammer. Owner Michael Strömquist has decided to scale back, and at Formstad Auktioner we are both proud and delighted to present these auctions in close collaboration with Bacchus Antik.
Bacchus Antik has long held a unique position among Stockholm’s antique dealers. The shop was established in Stockholm in 1994, after seven years in Kivik on Österlen, and has become a true meeting place for anyone interested in 20th-century design and decorative arts. It is the kind of place where one can step inside and immediately find oneself discussing anything from Danish lamps to Berndt Friberg’s exquisite ceramics. The shop has also served as a school of sorts for many aspiring collectors and dealers.
The atmosphere is refreshingly unpretentious. Exclusive design classics stand side by side with vinyl records in plastic crates. This coexistence between the everyday and the distinguished is rare in Stockholm, and part of what makes anyone who steps inside feel instantly at home. Perhaps this has to do with the owner himself always keeping his feet firmly on the ground. His father was an ICA grocer, as were his grandparents, who each ran their own store, one in Tommarp and the other in Gärsnäs. From that side of the family came the sense for buying and selling, while the love for objects themselves was shaped at home by his mother. When the choice was between a new teak table and an old farmhouse table, the latter always won – because that’s what she wanted.
Michael inherited the best of both worlds and became an antique dealer almost by destiny – one who acquired through his own passion, and who insists on “looking properly” at an object before letting it leave the shop. Some items, he admits, he still hasn’t finished looking at. “I was born a collector,” he says. “In a way, the shop is my collection. As a child I collected everything – film stars, matchboxes, spent rockets, movie tickets, coins, Merry bottle caps… I kept everything that was nice.”
Now, a significant part of all these “nice things” will be offered at auction, for you to bring home and look at yourself. It is a unique opportunity – one that will never come again.
Part I – Art Nouveau
The opening auction showcases Bacchus Antik’s broad collection of Art Nouveau objects. Art Nouveau – or Jugend, as it is often called in Sweden – was a style born at the end of the 19th century as a reaction against the so-called historicist styles (Neo-Renaissance, Neo-Baroque, Neo-Rococo, etc.) that imitated earlier epochs. Art Nouveau was, as the name suggests, something entirely new, rooted in and inspired by the simple and original forms of nature.
For Michael Strömquist, the passion for Art Nouveau began with a book:
“It was a long time ago, and I was helping out at a guy’s little antique shop. A Swiss customer came in and bought something, and gave the shop owner a book on Jugend. The shop owner said: ‘Here, you take it. I’ll never read it.’ But I was enchanted. I thought I had never seen anything so beautiful before. I was awakened – drawn away from the provincial. From that day I started buying Jugend. I understood the quality, the extraordinary craftsmanship. And back then, hardly anyone in Sweden understood it.”
This auction includes glass vases by Gallé and Karl Lindeberg, bronzes by Hugo Elmqvist, and a multifaceted selection of Swedish ceramics from the early 20th century by designers such as Alf Wallander, Nils Emil Lundström, and Josef Ekberg.