Svenskt Tenn celebrates Anna Petrus

Almost a century in the past, Estrid Ericson recruited fellow Swedish designer Anna Petrus (1886-1949) to create a sequence of designs for her fledgling pewter enterprise, Svenskt Tenn. The pewter and forged iron designs that emerged – together with a desk lamp, mirror, ornamental field, candle holders and vases – had been adorned with reliefs depicting bunches of grapes, feminine figures and a reclining lion amongst different issues. A handful of the designs, such because the Lion sculpture have been in steady manufacturing ever since, nonetheless manufactured in Sweden and nonetheless made utilizing the identical unique casting moulds. This month, Petrus’ items turned the main target of an exhibition, Sequence of Areas, at Svenskt Tenn’s Stockholm retailer.

To be a feminine designer within the early twentieth century took a mixture of guts, gumption, expertise and undoubtedly some economically lucky circumstances. Petrus, born in Uppsala, Sweden in 1886, had all in abundance. The daughter of Oskar Viktor Petersson, a professor of paediatrics, and Countess Maria Stackelberg, she studied on the Chelsea Polytechnic College in London earlier than persevering with her research at Tekniska Skolan in Uppsala, Althin’s College of Portray, and the Royal Academy of Fantastic Arts in Stockholm. As an early indication of her character, in London, Petrus marched with the suffragettes and was engaged within the motion for girls’s rights, which continued as a lifelong dedication.

Her huge break got here in 1925 when she attended the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes in Paris, the place she exhibited a sequence of conventional forged iron works she designed and produced with Näfveqvarn, one in every of Sweden’s oldest and most famous design and foundry firms. The feminine industrial artists of the period tended to work in textiles and ceramics, so working in pewter and forged iron – supplies thought of ‘masculine’ – was uncommon.

Exhibited within the Swedish pavilion and in the principle constructing, the Grand Palais, the forged iron items had been awarded a gold medal. Svenskt Tenn founder Estrid Ericson was additionally in attendance, exhibiting a few of her firm’s first designs, for which she additionally obtained a gold medal. The Swedish neoclassical type that emerged from the exhibition – a refined and restrained response to ornate historic kinds – was coined ‘Swedish Grace’ by British critic Philip Morton Shand, with Petrus turning into one in every of its figureheads. It was shortly after this that Ericson approached Petrus, marking the beginning of their transient however extremely productive collaboration.

In Sequence of Areas, Svenskt Tenn presents a choice of Petrus’s designs in pewter and forged iron, drawn from its intensive design archive, alongside sculptures on mortgage from the Petrus household’s personal assortment. To mark the exhibition, Svenskt Tenn has reissued a few of Petrus’s lesser-known early designs for the corporate. These embody the Lion desk lamp – a pewter desk lamp base that includes reduction decorations of feminine figures and grape clusters, and a considerable mirror body from 1929 that’s topped by a reclining lion – a motif that grew into Petrus’s signature and is seen all through a lot of her work.

Each of the reissues are manufactured by Humstorp Metall in Sweden, a long-time manufacturing associate to Svenskt Tenn. It continues to make a few of the firm’s most complicated pewter designs – the mirror, for instance, is solid in seven separate elements utilizing the unique everlasting moulds, that are then soldered collectively to kind a complete. The method calls for a excessive degree of experience – even the slightest impurity or miscalculation can result in the piece being scrapped and the pewter – a really tender materials – melted down and solid anew.

To accompany the exhibition, Svenkst Tenn commissioned Madrid-based artist Elvira Solana to create a sequence of work. Identified for murals and trompe-l’œil interventions that discover notion of area, at Svenskt Tenn Solana conjured a three-dimensional scenography that serves as a backdrop for Petrus’ designs.

Inspiration, the model says, was taken from Anna Petrus’s personal 1916 exhibition, when the designer showcased her sculptures alongside murals by Swedish artist Greta Ruuth.

‘As guests enter the exhibition within the Svenskt Tenn retailer in Stockholm, they are going to transfer by means of a sequence of areas that guides them from the extra inflexible, architectural landscapes originally of the journey in the direction of more and more natural and liberated ones,’ says Tora Grape, Advertising and marketing & Model Communications Director at Svenskt Tenn.