This article was edited to contain a total or partial translation of Axel Törneman from the Swedish Wikipedia. Consult the history of the original page to see a list of its authors. (This notice applies to version 528726365 and subsequent versions of this page.) (partial translation only, other material in the translation was added outside of the original Swedish source material)
A fact from Axel Törneman appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 9 January 2013 (check views). The text of the entry was as follows:
Did you know... that Axel Törneman's friends were able to locate him by following the sketches he left in Paris cafés?
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You know, normally with a hook that cryptic one expects some clarification on the article. that is kind of the point, tease the reader with a mysterious statement like that and they will come to the article to find out more. except in this case there is no more, the wording is exactly the same as in the hook and offers no details whatsoever as to who exactly was looking for him and why they had to resort to such an odd means of locating him. I have to say whoever approved this for DYK did not do a very good job of making sure it made any sense. Please clarify these points. thanks. Beeblebrox (talk) 00:08, 10 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Hello Beeblebrox. It is an intriguing concept to be found by where one leaves one's creations, alas, the cited source provided no further information as to why that was so in Törneman's case, else I would have included it. Most artists would not find his actions unusual, but humorous. I can tell you that, in an artist's world, it is not unusual to leave sketches in places one has been, indeed, I have done so myself. But since WP isn't a crystal ball, I didn't synthesize an answer. Further information might be helpful for non-artists, but since the source didn't provide any, perhaps you would care to satisfy your curiosity by helping to research the issue further in a collegial effort to build an encyclopedia together? — Sctechlaw (talk) 13:41, 10 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I replaced the elucidate template with a couple of cites to references that may help to explain to the reader why an artist might leave their work behind. It doesn't explain why Törneman in particular did, or why his friends used those abandoned sketches as a 'trail of breadcrumbs'; however, given the peripatetic nature of artists like Törneman, it's probably not hard to understand the context. In 1905 Paris, an artist was unlikely to have either a telephone or a secretary, and many painters of the day were not 'studio painters', instead working outdoors or in cafés, similar to Törneman, van Gogh, and others. As a practical matter, it may well have been easiest to find a fellow painter by visiting her/his known haunts, just as now, and being unsuccessful, to look for clues as to where they might next go. Abandoned sketches provide good cues for that sort of thing, however, given there is no reference that I've found thus far to verify this in Törneman's case, the explanation will have to wait until other sources can affirm such conjecture. — Sctechlaw (talk) 01:00, 11 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Bravo/brava on this thoughtful and art historically reasonable answer. Yes, we can hope for further sources (which I have had hard time finding, but created the further reading section, in hope. Cheers. Le Prof 71.239.87.100 (talk) 16:38, 22 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]
It is actually in the article body and sources; and it could certainly be less intuitive and more explicit, however, the sources did not explicate, and so to be more explicit would require WP:OR, something we cannot do here. Most folks that are interested in art and reading the article may already know that Böcklin and Stuck were symbolists, thus intuiting the connection is not much of a stretch. Their mention was in the article in an order which may have made their placement less evident to you, so that has been rearranged for better continuity, thanks for noticing that.
As for Art Nouveau, Törneman and his contemporaries were living in a society saturated by it, again, an intuitive connection that adding dates together can verify, and an influence mentioned but thinly in the sources as well. The sources cited do mention his French influences to some extent, in particular Intermezzon och bagateller is a (well written) very entertaining and short muse on his years in Paris, artistic development, and meetings with French artists. In total, it has more specific information than most all the other sources. Also for an intuitive reader: it would have been very difficult to be an artist in Paris in 1905 and not run into the blue-chip competition; certainly, art history is replete with tales of expats there at the time seeking out the star artists of the day. However, none of this can go in the article more than obliquely without solid refs, of which there are very few as yet, and as the ones that are solid are in Swedish, I have included them.
As to languages, understand that, for a Swedish artist who is still not well-documented in his own language let alone ours, the sources which do exist are naturally and primarily in Swedish, thus, one must do the work of translating to slog through them, which I have done as time allows. You can do this too. It is not at all uncommon for a low-visibility turn-of-the-century artist to have scant documentation, and for those whose native language was not English, it is reasonable that existing documentation will also probably not be in English. Although this is the English language WP, this article and others like it will have most citations in non-English languages when the available sources are not in English, and that is not a fault requiring templating most everything, or a reason to not include what information we do have about the subject of the article.
When I created the article, the Sall source was not paywalled. It is still available via archive.org, so I changed the link so that people can readily see it, and this is something that all of us should keep an eye out for, as various sites come under financial pressure and begin paywalling everything, we can all check to see whether an archived version is available before getting too carried away with tagbombs. I am often not available to do a lot of editing, but I do check on things when I can. It's good you are such a stickler as the details do matter, but it would be more helpful to put that eye for detail to use in looking for solutions rather than tagging, as casual WP visitors who see a page full of extraneous tags will likely assume they should therefore take a pass on reading the article at all. — Sctechlaw (talk) 14:02, 17 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]
