Stockholm, Baby and Bath Water

July 4, 2018

The drawing above is from my trip to Sweden, in June 2016. I spent a total of 9 days in Stockholm, enjoying the beautiful city, but missing looking at art. The State Museum was, and still is, closed for renovations, although I think it is opening in a month or two.

The museum in Stockholm being closed was why I had been able to spend some time with Rembrandt’s great Claudius Civilis in Amsterdam. The Swedish government lent it out to the Rijksmuseum, so people could see it during the renovation. It looked right at home at the Rijksmuseum, at the end of the great hall, to the left of the Night Watch.

By the way, there is a political bit at the end of this blog post, so if you want to avoid it, please don’t read the last paragraph.

In Stockholm there was a temporary exhibit of work from the National Gallery, held in the Academy of Design building in a few makeshift rooms. For the sake of trying to clarify an issue I am thinking of, I’ll be blunt, and say that it was a poor exhibit, poorly planned and feebly executed.

In terms of the physical space, there was a noisy in-room air conditioner whose vents or filters needed cleaning. The air was off-puttingly stale and dusty. After I saw the show, I was tempted to speculate if poor air quality was part of the plan.

The show consisted of recent and contemporary work, and art from past centuries. Spotlights lighting the otherwise dark, windowless space were trained on the recent work, and not on the older pieces. I kid you not, there was a Delacroix painting that had no light on it at all. Literally none. It was even hard to read the label, it was in shadow too.

In the next room there was a tiny, early Rembrandt Self Portrait, in a big, molded frame. It was lit in such a way that contours of the frame molding made a bold, dark shadow slicing diagonally across the picture. I did my best to sketch it anyway, and my drawing is above.

In the room with the Rembrandt was the Anders Zorn Self Portrait with a Model. The lighting on it provided inescapable glare, from every angle I was able to discover.

Was all this a hasty accident? I was in Stockholm during Midsummer, the longest day of the year, a favorite Swedish holiday. Understandably a favorite, given the long, cold, dark Swedish winters. Was the badly done show just a sign of neglect by sunlight-starved museum workers?

Perhaps. But it seems worth considering as a potentially more intentional curatorial statement. In the shady Delacroix room there was a video playing, and playing visibly, since the monitor emitted light, and there was room light on the monitor as well. The video showed the artist sprinkling sand out of his pant leg in the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen, the incredibly beautiful sculpture museum that I had just visited the previous week. It was special sand from a special place, that the artist was sprinkling, and the piece was about colonialism, I think.

Talking about injustice, inhumane treatment, abuse of power: it is a valuable thing that I appreciate having brought to my attention.

But are the products of corrupt civilizations, and individuals, themselves irredeemably corrupt? Are deeply beautiful statues made by warlike past civilizations, perhaps stolen and displayed in a rich man’s public museum, inescapably tainted by the various layers of injustice inherent in their making and presentation?

Tainted, perhaps, but not destroyed, I think. So do not destroy them. With creative intelligence, find the energy and flexibility to learn from and adapt previous models. Do not throw out the baby with the bath water.

After seeing the show in Stockholm I wanted to write to the Rijksmuseum and urge them not to give the Claudius Civilis back to Sweden.  How poorly would it be displayed when it was returned?

Having a curatorial mission to sabotage art of the past, from within the museum, seems short-sighted, cowardly, a bit like treason. Such a mission would be based, I think, on the assumption that a hurtful culture produces irredeemably hurtful art. Hidden in this assumption is a tragic undervaluing of the potential artworks have for bringing meaning to people’s lives.

If you don’t love art, get out of the art business.

I have had more than enough of people within an institution willfully tasking themselves with destroying that institution. If you have too, write to your Representative, and demand impeachment.