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.

Two great videos of an old-school American sculptor copying a Canova marble. The videos are part of a National Gallery of Art exhibition of Canova’s clay sketch models. Seems like a fantastic exhibition. Canova’s marbles are so highly finished, it’s great to see his expressive little sketch models. I like Canova, a little bit to my surprise; I’m not especially interested in figurative sculpture or neo-classicism, but I’ve seen a lot of sculpture as I tour around Europe and if I find myself thinking, ‘Hey that sculpture’s really good’, there’s a good chance it will turn out to be by Canova. I especially love the Canova sculpture that Scarpa sited at Castelvecchio, and Scarpa’s room at the Canova museum in Possagno is one of the best sculpture spaces in Europe, but I’ve seen a few others here and there and they have something about them that makes them better than all the other stiff European marbles. The sketch models look great too, and the exhibition seems worth a visit for anyone remotely close to the national gallery.

The exhibition page is here. There’s a great interview with the curator on Modern Art Notes Podcast.

In Spain I also rode my bike through the Isla de Esculturas, a little island with a sculpture collection that includes a Richard Long stone line. That’s of course not me in the drone video above, I found this video on the internet after my trip, but I did that exact thing, riding my bike past the line, and I’m a little obsessed with this video; it captures my memory of that day and even something of the feeling of riding a bike through Europe. Long says his work is about walking, but I’ve mostly seen it as 2D images, shapes he’s created in the landscape or in a museum. This was the first time I really experienced his work as movement. I took photos of the line, and I like them, I like how his line resembles the remains of an old stone wall you might see alongside a road or path, but there is a subtle but distinctly experiential effect of the line when you see it in person and I think you can see it in the video too. And also I love when the dog appears in the video.

Richard Long has been hit or miss for me, but over time I’ve realized that I’ve liked everything that he sited and built himself, while every time I’ve seen one of his works that was sited and built by other people — I’ve seen a couple of his stone circles that had been installed by teams of volunteers — I’ve thought it was lame. I kind of respect that after he’s finished a piece, he’s fine with a crew packing it up and shipping it somewhere else and then a bunch of strangers putting it back together in its new home, but I think that shows how much his work really is site specific and how it’s tied to his participation in a specific experience and place. Like the bad cover songs that make you realize how good the original is.

I thought the rest of the sculpture collection was pretty weak, but the island’s a nice spot, with several nice bridges and a swimming beach across the river. I ate peaches and watched ducks and enjoyed the sunshine, before continuing on my way.

The day before Chillida Leku, I went to the Jorge Oteiza Museum in Pamplona. Oteiza was a mid-century Basque sculptor. He was friends with Chillida and other modernists, and his work overlaps with them and was influential, though I don’t really know if he’s well-known these days or not. He was an ideas guy, a lot of his stuff is interesting, and some of it is almost good, but almost all of his ideas seem to have been developed into better sculptures by other artists. The museum paired well with a visit to Chillida Leku the next day, though I don’t think Oteiza does well by the comparison. Chillida’s sculptures are much much better.

Oteiza started with figurative work and did pretty well with it. The works are pretty good but noticeably derivative, almost every one can be identified as a Giacometti or a Henry Moore or a Brancusi, etc… He seems to have realized that, because he gave up on figurative work and only did abstract work for a while, and then eventually he gave up on that too. I’m not sure when he got the idea of turning his house into a museum, but after he died they built a modern concrete structure around the farmhouse where he had lived. The building is — like the sculptures — interesting and almost good, with some odd details such as windows that only go up to your waist. (more…)

In Spain I visited Chillida Leku, the museum Eduardo Chillida developed to display his work. It’s great, a wonderful sculpture garden around a 16th century farmhouse and one of the best single-artist museum’s I’ve been to. Chillida is most famous for his work in steel, but he also did a lot of work in stone. The steel sculptures are great, but I’m mostly going to post photos of the stone and the farmhouse. (more…)