DryStoneGarden

On my trip I got to see the home museums of all three of Scandinavia’s prominent twentieth-century sculptors, Karl Milles from Sweden, Vigeland from Norway, and Rudolph Tegner from Denmark. Tegner was my least favorite, he’s a clear step down from Milles and Vigeland, but the museum is set in a beautiful moorland that makes it worth visiting.

The museum is a brutalist concrete building with a huge skylight and no windows. It mostly houses plaster models of his sculptures. They’re not great and I didn’t spend a lot of time inside. But the museum is in a beautiful moorland with grazing sheep and fourteen bronzes. The sculptures aren’t really sited all that well, but the heather is beautiful enough to make it work.

I feel like he just dragged his sculptures out into the moorland rather than designing sculpture and space to fit together the way Milles did. The one above was clearly designed to be in front of a wall, and the one below is diminished by the scale of the space.

This one has a charming sentimentality. The rest I found pretty stiff.

This is the other one I found interesting. It’s too bad he didn’t do more like it.

But I give him credit for appreciating the moorland. It’s lovely.

I should think of this as a Swedish garden. I went to see the sculpture, but it turns out to be about the garden experience. It’s the Millesgarden, the former home of Carl Milles, Sweden’s best modernist sculptor. It’s mostly bronzes, but which aren’t my favorite, but I loved it as a garden. The sculptures are sited wonderfully, and the fountains, trees, paving, walls, and sky all interact with the sculpture.

Milles has a couple of things he does. The most obvious is the way he puts sculptures up on ridiculously high pedestals to show them against the sky. They are a little prone to butt-shots and views up a tunic or dress, but it works. Sweden has beautiful skies, a lot of bright white clouds against deep royal blue, and it gives the sculptures a dynamic backdrop.

He also does nice fountains. I like how splitting this one into two sections leads people to stand between the sections and become like sculptures as well, their reflections on the water alongside the reflection of Poseidon.

And then the other thing he does nicely is work with scale and space. The garden’s sculptures come in virtually every size, but they are always sited in a space to feel as if they’re the proper scale. That’s harder than it sounds, and it makes for a garden that’s fun to wander.

My favorite garden in Sweden.