Tuesday, 28-May-2024
I’d wandered by the Nationalmuseum (yep, all one word) on Monday, sadly finding it to be locked and barred. Little did they know that I was a time-traveler, though, and mere “opening hours” couldn’t keep my peepers from paintings! I quickly sprang into action, traveling forward into the future at a rate of one minute… per minute!
Which is to say, I went to the national gallery / museum after having a lovely croissant and a latte for breakfast.
I’ll split the gallery into three segments, to avoid overloading my dear readers with too many arts all at once. Also, because the gallery sort of has three general themes to it: Sculptures, tableware, and paintings.
We’ll start with sculptures, as they were the first spot I started and are honestly kind of my favorites for this museum… something about these specific sculptures of the Norse Gods is just neat to me, how they’re so similar to the styling of Roman statues, but… you know, aren’t Roman? Also the display on how a detailed marble sculpture is made! Somehow I didn’t know this, even after visiting all those museums in Italy!
Next up, a subject that I very nearly skipped over, Tableware! The Stockholm Nationalmuseum has a whole exhibit discussing the evolution of “Services”, or table settings. It… seemed a bit vapid at first, to be honest, but after reading through the placards (my one true love, informational placards), I got a new appreciation for just how the style and materials have evolved over time.
Finally, we arrive at the traditional part of the tour – Paintings!
With no disrespect to Sweden, I found this gallery a little bit of a letdown after the raw glory of the Norwegian landscape painters. Which isn’t to say that it’s bad, by any means, just that Norway set such an unattainably high bar that I needed to step back a little bit. I enjoyed the selection very much, once I settled into the groove of it, and had a blast wandering around and seeing tons of interesting historical notes from an empire that was woefully under-represented in my schooling.
**CONTENT WARNING***
The next bit is a little bit of a rant, and contains quite explicit language. In my defense, the explicit language is from the artist, and not me, so… yeah.
There was one exhibit that I did specifically dislike, however, and while I don’t want to pontificate too much… this is my blog, and it’s my turn to talk, so…
The artist Vaginal Davis had an exhibit in the Nationalmuseum entitled “Naked on my Ozgoad  or: Fausthaus – Anal Deep Throat ”. It was… Okay, I guess I’m an artistic luddite or something, because I really didn’t get it. The whole “exhibit” was just pages from L Frank Baum’s books. Like, literally just books, in glass enclosures, turned to a specific page. And not pages that told a story either, just… pages. If there was an overarching theme, it was lost on me.
It just… Art should evoke feelings in people. Just throwing out semi-offensive words does, technically, meet that criteria I guess… but it just seems less. And quite a bit at odds with the general “showcase a country’s artistic history” role of a national gallery.
