Art corner

The Moderna museet is a state museum for modern and contemporary art located on the island of Skeppsholmen in Stockholm. The museum opened on the 9^th of May 1958. Its manager currently is Daniel Birnbaum. This museum has one of Europe’s finest collections of modern and contemporary art, including art works by Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí or Andy Warhol.
This incredible collection of over 6,000 paintings, 25,000 graphical prints, 400 art videos by Swedish but also international artists covers the 20th and 21st centuries. However the 100,000 photos are from the 1840s until today.

The human size of this museum makes it really enjoyable; we visited it in the morning so it wasn’t too packed or noisy. It really was the perfect atmosphere to appreciate art in serenity. There were some really new and interesting concepts like a room you were stuck in, you had to stay still during few seconds in order for the door to open automatically.

 

I choose to talk you through “Marzella” a painting by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner.
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880-1938) was a German expressionist painter, printmaker and also one of the founders of the artists group Die Brücke (The Bridge), a key and leading group of Expressionism during the 20th-century art. In 1933, his work was considered as «degenerate» by the Nazis and in 1937 many (as more than 600 pieces) of his works were destroyed. In 1938 he committed suicide by gunshot.

 

This oil on canvas from the year 1910 portrayed a 14-year-old teenager called Marzella. She was a model for the group Die Brücke.

She is depicted naked, sitting, with her hands on her thigh. The background is mostly painted in a bright yellow, it represents Ernst’s studio. She has a childish white bow in her hair which contrasts with the striking red of her lips and her dark eyes. Her skin has red and yellow undertones, but surprisingly you can see stripes of green, blue and red on her skin, which are quite unusual colours for skin. Here and there we can catch a glimpse of unpainted canvas.

 

The group Die Brücke was against the “bourgeois” and fancy way of life and academic conventions, they deliberately avoided realistic proportion and perspective.
We can suppose that the nakedness could represent simplicity which stands against the “bourgeois” way of life. In my opinion, this painting’s main goal is to depict adolescence: these teen years where you’re not a child anymore but you’re not an adult quite yet. We can find in this painting elements of both childhood and adulthood.

Marzella's child-like body but also the white bow tuck in her hair awaken memories of childhood. On the contrary, her heavily made-up face (almost "cake-up") and mesmerizing dark gaze remind us of adults.

 

I chose this painting because of the vibrant colours and also because it was one of the only one who represented a youthful girl, if not the only one. I love the yellowish and greenish undertones but also the way Marzella is staring at us.

Elise

 

The Moderna Museet is a museum situated on the island of Skeppsholmen in central Stockholm, opened in 1958. Designed by Rafael Moneo, the Moderna Museet is composed of an exhibition place, divided in 2 sections. The large exhibitions redraws the evolution of modern art through the most well-known modern art masterpieces, from the 19th to nowadays, exhibiting paints and sculptures from the most important modern artists. Temporary exhibitions are also available to discover modern art in an other way.

I really love modern art in general so I particularly enjoyed the Moderna Museet. The rooms are huge, letting entering natural light, which are essential to appreciate the diverse works. I principally loved the large exhibition’s first rooms, about cubism and expressionism.

 

The paint I chose to focus on and to let you discover is named "Improvisation 2 – The Funeral March". Kandinsky painted it in 1909, at the beginning of his Blue Rider period. This paint is not that famous but take part of a serie of Improvisations, named because of the work’s spontaneity.

 

Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) is an influential Russian painter. He is the first artist to push painting towards total abstraction. Influenced by Russian and French culture, he started to study painting at the age of 30 in Munich. As a musician trainer, Kandinsky has the particularity to approach the color with a musician’s sensibility. The colour is really present in his work, reflecting the emotion instead of the shapes. He is quoted as saying, "Of all the arts, abstract painting is the most difficult. It demands that you know how to draw well, that you have a heightened sensitivity for composition and for colors, and that you be a true poet. This last is essential."

 

First, when we see the painting, we are strike by all the bright colours. A rainbow of light and colour appears to our eyes which we don’t see a lot in painting.

 

To describe the picture briefly, we can see two principal things : the characters and the colours.

The characters all have a different role and importance in the paint : In the middle, a woman and a child, side by side and, behind them, a person with a large hat. Another person is veiled by the shadow on the right background, and a man is riding a white horse at the opposite side. We can note that almost all the characters are wearing a kind of circle hat. I did some research and discover the Kokoshnik, a russian head-dress worn by women. We can conclud that the paint is composed of two men, two women, a girl and a horse. The characters don’t have faces, we can’t see their clothes because of the lack of details.

But the painting is principally made of colours and shapes. The colours are bright: orange, blue, green, white, yellow. They are mixed in the shapes, highlighted by black lines, drawed like a child. They represent nothing, or maybe just some walls but it’s hard to say so. We have the impression that the black lines are just there to seperate the different colours in the painting. We can see the brushstrokes.

Everything could let us think about a happy scene but, when we check the title, Funeral March, we realise we probably missed something and that we should probably have another look at the paintng. The contrast between the colours, the atmosphere, the light, and the title is surprising! We couldn’t expect such an upheaval. When we look at the painting again,  we then see the darkness all around the characters, the shadows represented by a dark blue. This still reminds us of a sunny day, thanks to the bright colour like orange indicate it to us, but the shadows, represented by dark blue let us think about a three-dimensional paint. It’s difficult to understand what we really see and what the painter wanted us to see in his work. The painting is really interesting in that way because we can imagine a lot of story from the paint.

 

Because of the title, we know the painting represents a funeral march, so someone’s death. The woman in the middle kind of has a sad look. Maybe she is the mother, or the wife of the deceased. She seems to be sad but tries to stay strong at the same time. The child besides her could be the daughter of the defunct. She is here, side by side her mother, but she seems to be in another universe, like she doesn’t realize what is happening. Behind them, a man seems to wear a mitre, like a priest. His role can be to lead the ceremony. He is hidden by the two women, he is not important. The person on the horse can be in the army because he wears a sort of kepi. The deceased was maybe a soldier. The crowd is represented by the person in the background. Her being in the dark stressed her lack of importance. She’s walking out the frame, as if she was fleeing the heavy atmosphere of this funeral march.

 

What attracted me in this painting was first the colours. I was really surprised by the contrast between the first look at the painting, this impression of joy, of well-being, and the title. The stories we could imagine from this painting and its simplicity, caused by the lack of details, is also really interesting.

Lucie

 The Moderna Museet is a modern and contemporary art museum located on the island of Skeppsholmen, in central Stockholm. Built to display new art collection from the 20^th century, the museum opened in 1958 after being a long-thought project. The museum finally developed into an international platform for the latest art trends and hosted major artists’ pieces of art such as Guernica by Picasso along with pieces from Van Gogh, Kandinsky, Andy Warhol, to name but a few. It was also the home to the famous “She” by Niki de Saint-Phalle. Designed by Spanish architect Rafael Monoe, the actual monument was built between 1994 and 1998.

Currently, the museum presents several temporary exhibitions along with the main collection which dives us into modern art. Among them is Objects and Bodies at Rest and in Motion, an interactive exhibition realised in collaboration with choreographers, where you become a part of the piece of art. If you are attracted by philosophy, you’ll certainly prefer The New Human, an impressive exhibition that questions human condition around several videos.

Why do I strongly advise you to go and visit this museum? Because it is a must in Stockholm and a must in modern art given that it houses multiple iconic works. Besides the environment is very pleasant since the rooms are vast, modern and bright. Not only you never get bored with modern art because of its provocation, irony and originality, but the temporary exhibitions are lively and full of surprise.

 

            Today, I’d like to present you a piece of art painted by Sigrid Hjerten. Born in 1885, this artist is considered a major figure in Swedish modernism. She studied at Matisse’s academy which influenced her work a lot, Matisse and Cézanne’s use of colours particularly inspired her. Her work received important critics in her beginnings. A few years after leaving for Paris with her family, she began suffering from mental illness which one can notice with the introduction of darker colours in her paintings. Her work was recognized very late and mostly popular after she died from schizophrenia in 1948. Her paintings are now seen as vehicles of emotions expressed through their rich warm colours.

            Let’s focus on View of Slussen, painted in 1919 by Sigrid Hjerten. This oil on canvas represents the city of Slussen seen from a window in 1919. In the foreground, a curtain, a little statue and a barrier indicate that the view is watched from a balcony. Behind is a road where people walk, we can see a horse-drawn carriage. Then different buildings are represented in the middle of places recovered by snow. In the background, a church’s bell tower raises in the sky represented by a gradation of blue.

The painting is very luminous and colourful since about all the colours are present, plus these colours are intense and the complementary colours are often situated in relation to each other.

The point of view, with a curtain hiding a small part of the landscape suggests someone is gazing at the scene.  The colourful buildings could suggest a full of life sunny place where the observer wants to go. The observer being the painting’s public, one could believe the artist is actually trying to take us into the town or trying to make us dream of the represented town, Slussen. All the movement given by the rounded building’s lines, by the moving curtain which lets us imagine the wind, all the light given by the numerous colours contribute in making the scene even more real and in convincing the viewer that he’s actually the one looking at the window.

            An other interpretation of this painting, completely opposed to the previous one, could be linked to women’s rights. The rounded lines could actually become twisted, the sky fuzzy and torn, all the movement and colour could actually be a sign of chaos, the landscapes could be seen as hidden and made smaller by the point of view. The balcony, the curtain could represent an imprisonment, someone condemned to stare at the city, condemned to watch other people live and walk in the streets instead of going in the streets herself. Indeed, at the time the women modernists often portrayed their city from a safe distance, the street was not a safe place for women. When focusing on the little statue in the foreground, one can notice how tight its dress is, the way the represented girl seems to suffocate, how unhappy she looks. Her umbrella suggests she is about to go out. This statue could be a reflect of the artist herself, it could also be a reflect of women of the time generally speaking. Women locked up in a motionless statue.

To conclude, what attracted me in this painting is, first of all, its impressive intense colours. In my opinion, the way the lines are curved and the little characters also make the picture alive, therefore very enjoyable. The painting is full of details, it is very rich and offers us a never-ending view in which the viewer’s look gets lost.

 

Noémie