50 years of gifts
50 years of gifts from the Friends of Moderna Museet
Eté en Suéde (Summer in Sweden) – a pointillist-inspired painting by Nils von Dardel which is a seeping flood of colour from the wartime summer of 1915 – flags a room of Swedish painting from four decades of the 1900s. These are only a few of the great number of paintings contributed by the Friends of Moderna Museet when the society was founded in 1953, with the express purpose of hastening the establishment of the museum itself. There is little abstract modernism among the paintings; more depictions of summer, people and towns. Stockholm has its own wall, indicating the museum’s current, though temporary, location with two specific markers: Otte Sköld’s Klara kyrktorn (Klara Church Tower) and Hilding Linnqvist’s Klara sjö (Klara Water). Otto G Carlsund’s On attend les invités (Waiting for the guests) was acquired as recently as 1999 while Vera Nilsson’s child study from 1927 was among the paintings donated in 1953. Nilsson’s pictures of children are far from the clichéd: “The children in her paintings are small figures that always relate something of how it is to be a human,” wrote curator Cecilia Widenheim in the Moderna Museet catalogue of 2002.
From there, straight into the 21st century. Two video works by Rosemarie Trockel of Germany can be viewed in the Auditorium. The Friends made sure that some of her work was kept for the museum following her exhibition in the spring of 2001 – among others, a video with Brigitte Bardot’s voice intimately whispering the lyrics to Mr. Sun. Although the weather appears anything but sunny: the pictures show a Sun brand kitchen oven. (See separate programme in the Auditorium.)
In the main exhibition room are some of the sculptures that have become signature pieces for Moderna Museet. A collective rubric such as Man, Language, Machine, Nature could encompass works like Jean Tinguely’s Méta-matic nr 17, Alexander Calder’s The forest is the best place, Eva Hesse’s Untitled and four objects by Marcel Duchamp, of which two are so-called ready-mades: Bottle rack and Fountain. In an issue of the Friends’ Bulletin in 1965, Swedish art maven Ulf Linde wrote of discovering the replica that became Fountain:
“A urinal was ripped out of the toilet of a restaurant favoured by artists; we kept it for a long time in an open courtyard in a tub filled with a notoriously harsh household cleanser. Finally, after two weeks, it stopped smelling. Earlier, I had done the rounds of companies selling bathroom fixtures, but could never find the right type. Finally, I asked the restaurant if I could take their urinal and replace it. They agreed. It turned out that the restaurant was able to replace it with an identical one – I have no idea where they got it! But the arrangement satisfied me; the copy that is in the museum, duly signed by Duchamp, has been ‘watered’ by generations of Sweden’s cultural elite.”
Rosemarie Trockel’s Untitled, 2001 (the car made from four kitchen ovens) is on its way to becoming a classic, but the mysterious Rullen (The Roll), the edging and skirting board by the trio of Rehnberg, Scott and Wroblewski, now sees the light of day for the first time since it was exhibited at the old premises in 1980.
It has become a recent habit to put on our Odd Week exhibitions in a space within the main room; the 70-square-metre white space marked out for that purpose has been nicknamed the Cabana. Now, finally, the Friends of Moderna Museet take over that central area: in the space, there is now a multimedia show cataloguing the generosity of the Friends over the last 50 years. There are a number of historic items among those shown. Posters and a parade of the society’s Bulletins (now called Tidskriften M/M Magazine – a double issue accompanying the current exhibition) complement the picture of a now middle-aged society that is as modish as ever.
The Friends of Moderna Museet number at present 3,500. At its birth in 1953, the society’s 250 members were prominent lobbyists for a modern museum in Stockholm. Historically, it was actually a name-change from the Society for Modern Art (founded in 1925). Three years earlier, the painter and professor of art Otte Sköld had taken over as director general of Nationalmuseum following a promise from the government that he could found a new museum for 20th-century art. The Friends showed their colours with a donation comprising 149 works, and five years later, in May 1958, Moderna Museet opened its doors.
After another five years, the society could celebrate its tenth anniversary with its membership now at 1,750. Time was ripe for the Friends, with Ulf Linde and others as figureheads, to make an ingenious move: they proposed that the museum borrow works it believed were needed for the collection and put on a show called The Dream Museum. This demonstration enticed the government to part with the then princely sum of five million kronor for acquisitions!
On a treasure hunt across Sweden and the Continent – in a commercial van newly donated by a local car sales company – scouts discovered a number of remarkable artistic chefs d’oeuvre. There were also valuable contacts in the United States, principally in New York. Since that time, Moderna Museet has boasted a collection that is amongst the world’s foremost of its kind. Acquisitions through grants and private donations from individuals and not least from the Friends have built on that foundation. Although the Friends’ initial donation was of Swedish art, their subsequent gifts have concentrated on art from other countries, allowing the regular subsidy from the Swedish state to take care of Swedish art.
If art is a way of increasing the pulse of our existence, it can be described as a tribute of life. And Moderna Museet is a tribute of art. And who brings tribute to Moderna Museet? The Friends do. Continuously.
With A TRIBUTE, Moderna Museet would like to propose a heartfelt toast – to old and new Friends!
Sören Engblom, curator