Exhibitions | The merry 1920s come to life at a major Swedish exhibition with a room dedicated to the divine Greta Garbo

The Swedish Grace style trend has been overshadowed in Sweden. The Stockholm National Museum’s giant exhibition carefully lacks space.

Stockholm

When spinning in an exhibition that presents the culture of the so-called happy 1920s, the viewer knows very well that the joy only lasted for a moment. In the 1930s, other winds were blowing.

The happy 1920s did come in handy. Behind was the world war and the pandemic. In Sweden, the Spanish flu had claimed the lives of 40,000 people, in Finland around 20,000. The western neighbor did not have to experience a tragedy like the Finnish civil war, but the traces of the First World War were visible there as well. The spring of 1917, for example, was restless, there were hunger strikes and riots in the country.

And then you could live more freely. The image of the decade is related to polka-dotted, emancipated women, jazz music, the opening of doors to Europe, industrialization, liberating atmospheres.

In Sweden, the era was dominated by a style trend whose name is strange to many: Swedish Grace. The Swedish version of Art Deco drew from classicism and emphasized quality and craftsmanship.

The cover illustrations of Charme magazine were made by Agda Groth, the journalist and artist who founded the magazine, who preferred women who go and do things in her illustrations. Charme’s subtitle was den Moderna damtidningen, the modern women’s magazine. It was published between 1921 and 1933.

Stockholm’s Nationalmuseum’s display is handsome Swedish Grace -exhibition extensively tells about the decade that turned out to be a successful one for Sweden, especially in the field of design. But it also tells about the duel between stylistic trends, where modernism was the fighting partner of this tradition-based trend.

Overview of the Swedish Grace exhibition. The urn on the left is designed by Eric Grate, above it is Einar Forseth’s mosaic work Helios on the firmament (Puhl & Wagner, 1923).

Swedish Grace name coined to describe 1920s Swedish architecture and design in 1930 by a British critic Philip Morton Shand. He wrote an article about the great Stockholm exhibition, i.e. the Stockholm exhibition of 1930, for the English magazine The Architectural Review.

Swedish Grace’s flagships were the Stockholm City Hall completed in 1923 (architect Ragnar Östberg), round city library (1928, Gunnar Asplund), concert hall near Hötorget ( Ivar Tengbom, 1926) and the so-called Matchstick Palace, Tändstickspalatsen (Tengbom, 1928). The latter was built by a financial giant who got rich in the match business Ivar Kreuger, whose fortune later melted down and the happy 20s came to an end. Kreuger was found dead in his Paris apartment with a pistol by his side in 1939.

Edward Haldin’s Himmelsglob (1929–1930), crystal engraving, pewter stand. Orrefors glass factory production.

Swedish Grace can be seen not only in architecture but also in glass art, furniture design, clothes, films… The abundant and hopeful time was accompanied by jazz and revues and the stars of the new cinemas. A young person who was transferred from a pub department store to an acting school Greta Gustafsson began his path to international success and Hollywood, soon under the name Greta Garbo.

Arvid Fougstedt’s painting portrait of the Finnish-born Mauritz Stiller, watercolor, gouache and lead on paper, 1920s.

Garbo (1905–1990) is essentially also associated with a Finnish-born gentleman, namely the actor and director Mauritz Stiller (1883–1928). There is also a dandy-like portrait of Stiller, who died of tuberculosis at the age of 45, in the exhibition. In Finland, a journalist has told about Stiller Reuben Stillerwho lived his great uncle’s life in the documentary Stiller, Garbo and me (1988) directed by Claes Olsson and Alvaro Pardo.

Actress Greta Garbo has her own room in the Swedish Grace exhibition. Garbo was photographed by many famous photographers, including Edward Steichen. Ruth Harriet Louise and Clarence Sinclair Bull, photographers of the American film studios, were important.

Divine and Garbo, who was defined as a “great loner” and kept his private life strictly to himself, has his own room in the exhibition. On its walls, there is a cavalcade of photos and excerpts from a few of the star’s films, for example the silent film directed by Stiller Gösta Berling’s tale (1924).

There are not too many references to Finland in the exhibition, but there is, for example, the founder of the famous interior design shop Svenskt Tenn by Estrid Ericson portrait from 1924. Painted by Tyra Lundgren also worked a lot for Arabia in Finland. There are Lundgren ceramics, for example Kyösti Kakkonen in collections.

There where Finland’s international design reputation has long been based on great successes in the Milan Triennales, which started in the 1930s.

Read more: Artists, national heroes

Swedes started banging braces as early as the 1920s, especially thanks to the 1925 Great Art and Crafts Exhibition in Paris, or the World’s Fair.

world exhibition the biggest effort was to promote domestic art and industrial design. “The French architects and designers noticed that the Germans had taken worrying steps in the field”, write Alice Cousin and the collection manager of the Nationalmuseum, who curated the exhibition Cilla Robach in an in-depth exhibition publication, which sheds light on object culture in a broader sense of the era..

The objects and products brought to the Paris exhibition were required to be modern. In Sweden, modern things had recently been brought to the fore at the big Gothenburg exhibition, so the basis for the will to win had been created.

“We must, as in all international competitions, beat ourselves,” declared the Svenska Slöjdföreningens Tidskrift in 1924.

Sweden got it an extraordinary number of awards: 31 grand prix, 44 gold medals, 38 silver medals, 14 bronze medals and a total of more than 40 certificates and mentions, and ranked second in medals, just behind host France.

(Finland also participated, after an argument, and brought out, among other things, ryijys. The success was modest.)

Among the biggest winners was Swedish glass design. In the final report of the exhibition, international experts considered the quality of the glass objects displayed by Orrefors to be equal to that of the Venini glassblowing factory in Murano, Venice, and among the praisers, the world-famous French René Lalique (1860–945).

Among other things, Sweden was on display Simon Gate and Edward Haldin designed, skillfully engraved glassware, by Carl Malmsten and Uno Åhrénin furniture, Anna Petrus silver and plenty of paintings and sculptures.

Of course, there were always critics: The Swedish pavilion was criticized because the “land of comfortable huts” did not present nice wooden architecture, but had chosen an “un-Swedish” style that looked to antiquity. Swedish Grace also liked to use “exotic” stylistic borrowings from other places, especially Egypt, whose grave discoveries were in the news in the early decades of the 20th century, as well as China and South America.

No one understood to worry about cultural belonging yet.

The luxurious M/S Kungsholmen ocean liner operates from Gothenburg to New York. Its artefacts have been largely destroyed. The wrought iron fireplace designed by Anna Petrus has been remanufactured and looks great on display.

M/S Kungsholmen was launched in 1928.. A generous amount of money was used to decorate the luxury ship, and it can be considered one of the overall works of art of its era. The poster of the shipping company is shown in the picture.

By boat Visitors to the exhibition in Stockholm can update themselves on the shipping mood of the happy 1920s.

When emigration decreased as conditions behind the Atlantic improved, the shipping company had to find new means of income. Svenska Amerikalinjen decided to build a ship of ships.

M/S Kungsholmen was launched in 1928. In the exhibition, the ship is highlighted as one of the most significant interior design projects of the 1920s. Kungsholmen sailed from Gothenburg to New York until 1939. Of course Greta Garbo was also among the passengers.

The later stages of the ship were sad: during the Second World War, it was captured by the Americans. The US used it to transport its troops. The Swedish ships that have just been reported in the news come to mind and have been turned into apartments for refugees.

The entire carefully constructed interior of M/S Kungsholmen was a thing of the past. So was the carefree 1920s.

Swedish Grace, exhibition at the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm, 28.8. until.

Cilla Robach (ed.): Swedish Grace. Konst och design i 1920-talets Sverige. ss. 247 pp. The publication is also available in English.

#Exhibitions #merry #1920s #life #major #Swedish #exhibition #room #dedicated #divine #Greta #Garbo

Related Posts

Next Post

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Recommended