Nationalism and the Nordic Imagination: Swedish Art of the 1890s

Book Description
This richly illustrated book is a lucid introduction to a largely neglected manifestation of Modernism that came out of fin-de-sicle Sweden. Michelle Facos presents the first study in English to seriously examine the movement known as Swedish National Romanticism. Her work is especially valuable in showing how the movement's primitivist tendencies were related to, but different from, similar cultural forces in Germany and other parts of Europe at that time. Facos shows how a small group of Swedish artists espoused a politically progressive, culturally conservative form of nationalism. These artistsamong them Carl Larsson, Bruno Liljefors, and Hanna Hirsch Pauliproduced a specifically national Swedish art by focusing on indigenous history, legends, and folk tales as well as uniquely Swedish-Nordic values, geography, and ethnography. Their breathtaking images of the Nordic landscape shaped a communal "Folk" identity that accented regionalism, solidarity, and attachment to the past and protested against the perceived dangers of capitalist industrialism and urban expansion. By 1900 Sweden was on its way to realizing a society of social, economic, and political equality, and the National Romantic painters were no longer renegades. Facos's portrayal of their movement will attract readers in the arts, historians, folklorists, cultural anthropologists, and sociologists.


About the Author
Michelle Facos is Assistant Professor of Art History at the Henry Radson Hope School of Fine Arts, Indiana University.


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Taking an interdisciplinary approach, Michelle Facos links the social and cultural dynamics in turn-of-the-century Sweden to the discourses of primitivism, nationalism, and symbolism. In the process, she sheds new light on a major area of study, the manifestation of modernism in Sweden. These painters - among them Carl Larsson, Anders Zorn, Bruno Liljefors, and Prince Eugen - sought to produce a specifically national Swedish art. They focused on indigenous history, legends, and folk tales as well as customs, values, geography, and ethnography - anything they perceived as uniquely or typically Swedish. Politically progressive and culturally conservative, the National Romantic artists protested against the dangers they perceived in capitalist industrialism and urban expansion and promoted an egalitarian ideology centered on the Swedish/Nordic native culture.


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