Scandinavia House

9:00 AM

Registration

9:30 AM

Welcome and Opening Remarks
Edward Gallagher, President, The American-Scandinavian Foundation

9:45 AM

Morning Keynote: “Nordic Modernism in Stieglitz’s America”
Dr. Patricia Berman, Professor, Wellesley College; Adjunct Professor, University of Oslo
This talk discusses the reception of the 1912 Contemporary Scandinavian Art Exhibition within the context of the ways in which the curators shaped the exhibition and the way in which American critics perceived its messages of national and ethnic “authenticity.” Some of the cultural objectives of North American art impresarios were seemingly realized by the Scandinavians, in particular an attentiveness to local material culture and the intimate particularities of geography. The shared objectives of Nordic and North American artists, some of their points of intersection at European art colonies, and the local and cosmopolitan yearnings of their promoters, call into question the notion of “national schools” at the very moment that such an idea was being most strongly promulgated.

Narrating the North: The Visual Cultures of Nation Building

10:15 AM

“Memory, Modernity and National Identity: Nils Kreuger and Eugene Jansson in the Stockholm Night”
Dr. Tomas Björk, Professor, University of Stockholm
Eugène Jansson (1862-1915) and Nils Kreuger (1858-1930) walked through the city of Stockholm at night in the early 1880s, registering both familiar, historical sites and newly transformed urban places. These sojourns, in turn, became the material for nocturnal scenes from the city. This talk examines these “night pictures,” comparing the artists’ approaches and locating the works within the discourses of memory, modernity, and national identity.

10:40 AM

“Our Desolate Little Sandbank: Cosmopolitanism and Nation-Building in the Art of P.S. Krøyer”
Dr. Thor Mednick, Assistant Professor, Missouri Southern State University
Danish painter P.S. Krøyer (1851-1909) is largely remembered as a natural genius and bon vivant whose uncomplicated, hedonistic paintings helped to transform the remote fishing village of Skagen, Denmark, into a fashionable summer playground for the European bourgeois elite. Lost in this image of Krøyer is a deliberate artistic strategy motivated by the wish to rehabilitate Denmark's artistic and cultural profile on the European continent. The result was a peculiarly Danish form of cosmopolitan modernism.

11:05 AM

“Carl Larsson: A Home for a Nation”
Dr. Michelle Facos, Professor, Indiana University
Generally appreciated as affectionate and cheerful documents of Larsson family life at their summer home in Sundborn, Larsson’s watercolors, published in 1899 with the title A Home, had a larger purpose: social reform. This is clear from Larsson’s accompanying text, in which he described his vision of the future Swedish nation. In adopting a mass-market, populist approach, Larsson reached a broad audience and evidenced a savvy pragmatism arguably more modern than that of his National Romantic colleagues.

11:30 AM

Break

12:00 PM

“National Identity in Iceland in the Early 20th Century”
Ólafur Ingi Jónsson, Head of Conservation, National Gallery of Iceland
At the dawn of the twentieth century, the pioneers of Icelandic modern art were the painters Þórarinn B. Þorláksson (1867-1924) and Ásgrímur Jónsson (1876-1958) and the sculptor Einar Jónsson (1874-1954). Though they studied in Copenhagen, Denmark, they were all involved in “the making of the nation” of Iceland and contributed a great deal to the struggle towards Icelandic sovereignty from Denmark in 1918. Until then, Icelandic culture had mainly based its existence on its strong literary background, which was intertwined with Icelandic folklore; visual art, meanwhile, was of negligible importance. Nevertheless, these three artists brought something fresh and unique to the people of Iceland, with art rooted in traditional literature and history and the wild nature of Iceland. The lecture will focus on how these artists were influenced by the underlying dynamic of a nation struggling for independence, how the magnificent light and shadow of Iceland’s natural landscapes played an increasingly larger part in their work, and how they put the unspoken words of the common people into their pictures and gave them meaning.

The Making of the Modern

12:25 PM

“The Interiority of Danish Modernism in the Making—Between Exuberant Ornaments and Austere Simplicity”
Anne-Louise Sommer, Director, Designmuseum Danmark
Revisiting early Danish modernism at the turn of the century reveals an intrinsic ambiguity. Selected case studies within the fields of art, interior design and architecture illustrate tensions and dilemmas embedded in the notion of 'the modern project'.

12:50 PM

Break

2:30 PM

Afternoon Keynote: “The Mystic North’ Revisited”
Dr. Roald Nasgaard, Professor, Florida State University
This talk reconsiders the thesis of my 1984 exhibition, The Mystic North: Symbolist Landscape Painting in Northern Europe and North America, 1890-1940, that explored how, at the beginning of the1890s, landscape painters in Northern Europe almost overnight shifted their attention from the cultivated, inhabited landscape to depictions of untrod wilderness and distant mountain peaks. Their change of subject matter concomitantly required new abstract formal means to convey their new conception of the landscape, not as a place to inhabit, but as a realm of the imagination. The 1912-13 Exhibition of Contemporary Scandinavian Art served to transmit these aesthetic re-formulations to North American artists.

Women, Power, and the North

2:55 PM

“The Women of the 19th Century Modernist Movement”
Charlotte Linvald, Mag.Art., Independent Scholar, Denmark
The role of the Scandinavian women artists of the modernist movement in the 1880s and 1890s is a fascinating one. Although faced with very different educational, working, and social conditions than their male colleagues, the women did not let themselves be held back. This could be seen in their great national as well international engagement, which left a very visual impact on the art scene during the late 19th century.

3:20 PM

“Women and/in Finnish Nation-Building”
Janet Rauscher, Associate Editor and Interpretive Manager, Princeton University Art Museum
This paper explores the role that women artists played within the Finnish nation-building movement and considers nationalism’s impact on their careers. While women painters adopted overtly nationalist themes infrequently, women were active in the area of functional and decorative arts, and often incorporated distinctly Finnish traditions and motifs. Moreover, Finland’s women artists seem to have been largely free from the burden of expectation that demanded their male counterparts paint primarily national(ist) themes. How might this freedom have contributed to the careers of some of the nation’s most innovative Golden Age artists?

Luminous Modernisms across the Atlantic

3:45 PM

“Harald Sohlberg and America”
Dr. Øivind Storm Bjerke, Professor, University of Oslo
This talk traces the critical reception of Harald Sohlberg (1869-1935) in North America from his participation in the World’s Columbian Exhibition of 1893 and in the Exhibition of Contemporary Scandinavian Art in 1912-13, through exhibitions in the 1980s and ‘90s. His appeal is founded on his dual formal radicalism, which echoes that of Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986) and Marsden Hartley (1877-1943), and an almost “kitschy” sentimentality like that of Maxfield Parrish (1870-1966), but more profoundly on the ways in which his work resonates with an Emersonian philosophy of nature. The complex nature of his work, and its reception in the U.S. and Canada, reminds us of the heterogeneity of modernisms that characterized the international art world in the early twentieth century.

4:10 PM

“Zorn’s Legacy”
Johan Cederlund, Director, The Zorn Museum
During his lifetime, the Swedish artist, Anders Zorn (1860-1920) became a successful international portrait painter. Today, his enduring popular acclaim is also based on his nude paintings and genre scenes, as well as his etchings. The Zorn Museum in Mora, created by him and his wife, is today one of Sweden’s most visited art institutions.

4:35 PM

“Northern Lights on New Horizons: Scandinavian Artists and the Reception of Scandinavian Arts in the United States in the Early Twentieth Century”
Dr. Randall Griffey, Curator of American Art, Mead Art Museum, Amherst College
The great Exhibition of Contemporary Scandinavian Art in 1913 was both sign and symptom of an increasing embrace of Scandinavian culture in the United States throughout the early twentieth century. Birger Sandzen (1871-1954), a Swede, and Christian Peterson (1885-1961), a Dane, immigrated and found supportive communities for their work. Meanwhile, American cultural spokespersons and art critics often received art from the northern countries as paradoxically as both “primitive” and “modern.” This talk contextualizes the reception of Scandinavian culture in the United States in light of larger concerns regarding artistic expressions of racial and national identity.

5:00 PM

“Landscape and Narrative in Munch’s American Reception”
Dr. Jay A. Clarke, Curator, The Sterling & Francine Clark Institute of Art
Americans know Edvard Munch (1863-1944) less as a painter of landscapes than as a chronicler of the human condition. This paper will consider how public collections of Scandinavian art were built in America over the twentieth century and, specifically, how Munch figures into these trends. While U.S. museums have tended to collect landscape-based work by Scandinavian artists, Munch acquisitions have centered on narrative imagery. Given that the selection of Munch paintings for the 1912 Exhibition of Contemporary Scandinavian Art was half landscape, or landscape-themed, we will question why so little attention has been paid to this aspect of his oeuvre in American exhibitions and publications.

5:30 PM

Speakers Panel: Question & Answer Period

6:00 PM

Reception in Volvo Hall