Swedish Prometheus: The Product Design of Erik Höglund

"We'll never be able to sell this," confidently declared the sales managers of Kosta Boda, one of Scandinavia's most prestigious glass art manufacturers. Before the seasoned market experts lay a new bright and colorful collection of glass pieces with unusual angular forms: vases and bowls. The author was a certain Erik Höglund. Kosta had never produced anything like it before.

I can say from personal experience that when you first see, or even better, hold Höglund's works, they don’t seem Scandinavian at all. This is a part of Scandinavian design that is less known worldwide.

However, production director Erik Rosén allowed this 21-year-old dreamer to continue his design experiments.

It was 1953. Europe had recovered from the war, the market was growing, the factory was expanding production, and new designs were needed to attract new customers. Among those hired during this expansion—albeit on a short six-month contract with a symbolic payment—was Höglund. This was a common story for that time.

A year later, the National Museum of Sweden became interested in the young designer's items and acquired several of his works. This was against the rules; usually, such things were not done. Today, by the way, 21 of Höglund's items are part of the museum's permanent collection.

Erik Höglund, the son of an auditor from the southern Swedish town of Karlskrona, spent his childhood during World War II—Sweden did not participate in the war, but it was not a peaceful time for the country. The anxiety was especially palpable in the southern borders of the peninsula, not far from Germany.

In one of his last interviews, Erik mentioned that he began creating art in childhood, with his first works being drawings of the war—the first impactful event in his life. Drawing defined Erik’s fate: at 16, he entered the Stockholm School of Art, where he studied painting, sculpture, and graphics.

Sweden was then rightfully called the Crystal Kingdom. The country had dozens of glass factories. The great Swedish designers of the early 20th century—Simon Gate, Edward Hald, and others—created in cold, somber tones and shades. This reflected the complex historical era and was an integral part of Swedish culture: poets, artists, and by the 20th century, designers, celebrated the twilight light of autumn and winter in northern cities and the transparent cold of Swedish crystal.

The masters created a canon of interior art: perfect forms and proportions, cool icy shades, transparent glass, and sparkling crystal. The names of the techniques they used with glass and crystal sounded grand: "The Grail," "The Ariel."

In just six months after graduating from art school, Höglund achieved the impossible: he brought bright color to Swedish glass design and revolutionized the concept of form. It seemed to me that this was a call of the times: pre-war culture in Europe had to be replaced by something fundamentally new, more human, and cosmopolitan.

Höglund's recognizable style would become warm, bright colors: amber, red, green; and bubbles in the glass, which were no longer considered a glassblower's mistake but added life to the material. Quite quickly, the versatile Höglund, as his friends called him, turned to sculpture. He worked with bronze, glass, metal, and was one of the first in Sweden to combine them in a single piece. Today, about 150 sculptures and compositions by Erik Höglund can be seen in Sweden and Germany.

Höglund's objects are distinguished by angular anthropomorphic forms: for example, decanters with torsos and heads as lids. The human body, embodied in glass, would become a constant theme in the author’s work. But these would not be bodies of classical form.

In 1954, the young designer traveled to Italy and Greece, where he discovered ancient pre-Roman art. In his objects, he transformed primitive ethnic motifs in depicting the body and face into a contemporary modernist style. Later, he would be inspired by the indigenous cultures of South America—resulting in his crystal figurines with Indian profiles, seemingly carved from stone.

In 1957, he won the Lunning Prize, the most prestigious award for Scandinavian designers in the 1950s-1960s, and became the youngest winner in the history of this prize at that time. He became popular: his designs filled Swedish homes and apartments. This was due to Höglund's character. Opening the last memorial exhibition of Erik's works in 2018, his widow Ingrid recalled that he was "wonderfully crazy at work."

Höglund would work at Kosta for 20 long years, becoming the main designer and artistic director. In 1973, he left because he wanted to realize himself as an author outside of a large production.

Towards the end of his life, Höglund could no longer walk due to a progressive illness but continued to draw from his wheelchair. Almost all the paintings of that time, as well as his last glass works, are filled with bright colors and a special zest for life. Like Prometheus, who gave people the fire of bright colors, Erik Höglund carried it in his hands to the end. "I always believed in what I did," he said in his last television interview.

More works of Erik Höglund can be found on our website via this link

First published in AD magazine