Painting would remain the focus of his early career. In 1916 he traveled to Paris to further his education, and there met Picasso and Matisse. After returning to Denmark the following year, Salto established the avant-garde arts journal Klingen. It heralded new movements such as Cubism and Expressionism, and also published lithographs, articles, and poetry.

But it was as a ceramicist that Salto achieved international renown. He began working in that medium at Bing & Grondahl in 1923; between 1925-33 he collaborated with Nathalie Krebs at Saxbo, and in 1933 joined the Royal Copenhagen porcelain manufactory. There, he developed several new glazes, and began to experiment with colors foreign to the Danish palette such as bright turquoise. His work ran contrary to the prevailing taste among adherents of Scandinavian modernism for serene, cool, Asiatic ceramics. Salto's often oversize pieces were curiously organic—sometimes bristling with strange horn- or wart-like nodes—and he fashioned them using an equally curious technique: Instead of throwing his vases and bowls and forming them on a wheel, he constructed them like sculptures, sometimes working from the inside out. Page 2 >