Männen och målningarna: Nationalmuseum som konsekrerande institution 1885–1920

This dissertation examines the Swedish National Museum of Fine Arts (Nationalmuseum) as a consecrating institution of fine art, between 1885 and 1920. A time influenced by major events such as the First World War, Sweden’s industrial revolution and the advent of universal suffrage. During this period, the production and consumption of the Arts was characterised by rivalry between three fractions, namely, representatives of the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts (Kungliga Akademien för de fria konsterna), the Artists’ Association (Konstnärsförbundet), comprising the broad artistic opposition formed in the mid-1880s, and the Swedish Artists’ Association (Svenska Konstnärernas Förening), a new generation of artists who had attended the third iteration of the Artists’ Association’s school which won recognition in 1909. Some artists did not fall into any of these major groups. Landscapes were the prominent motifs chosen by the Procurement Board, followed by portraits and genre paintings.

The dissertation shows how these developments are reflected in the choice of officials as well as members of the Museum Board and Procurement Board. Both comprised prominent men in society who each year selected a small number of oil paintings by contemporary Swedish artists, to be incorporated in the Nationalmuseum’s collections and thus be indisputably defined as fine art. The current study is concerned with these men and the chosen works of art which came to represent Swedish society and its artistic life at the time. However, the prevailing conditions concerning the annual acquisition of art changed due to the influence of His Majesty the King as well as the revised statutes of 1900, determining which members were to be seated on the Procurement Board until its abolishment in 1913. A reorganisation of the Nationalmuseum’s undertakings also called for the appointment in 1915 of the reformist Richard Bergh as the museum’s Director General. The study highlights not only the prolonged course of the reformation process but also how changes concerning the appointment of representatives responsible for the institutions’ consecrating process influenced
which oil paintings were incorporated in the collections.