Eric Grate - Education

Education

Eric Grate studied at the Royal Academy of Arts in Stockholm between 1917 and 1920. Thereafter he undertook study trips to Germany, especially to Munich, and to Italy and Greece. He moved to Paris 1924 and stayed there for ten years. In France he lived in the companionship of a number of other Swedish artists. e.g. Nils Dardel, Isaac Grünewald, Sigrid Hjertén, Otto G. Carlsund and Otte Sköld. Between 1941 and 1951 he was a professor at the Royal Academy of Arts.

Grate has been commissioned for at great number of public works of art in Sweden. The most famous one in its time was The Ethymological Woman Theft which was raised outside the premises of the Karolinska Institutet, the Royal Institute of Medicine at Solna, a suburb of Stockholm, towards the end of the fifties. This was the start of one of the most fierce public debates of arts in Sweden during the 20th century. A majority of the faculty of the Institute protested against the sculpture as indecent and against the ethics of medicine. The controversy was not resolved until a decision by the Swedish Superior Court of Administrative Matters was taken in favour of the sculpture.

I have to admit that, and I do it with a great amount of pleasure, that this first contact with the great Greek sculpture as I experienced it in Olympia, for many years to come was of decisive importance for me. I got a sense that I had to start on a new course in constructing my sculptures. To reassess my whole platform. I believe this meant a chatarsis, a way of making the necessary starting points clear. —Eric Grate, quoted 78 years old about his study visit to Greece in his youth