Gustav vigeland og hans svenske meséner

Abstract

Summary Gustav Vigeland and his Swedish patrons Vigeland once asserted that he would not have survived without his Swedish friends. Although this is perhaps an overstatement, he received nevertheless substantial support from Swedish art patrons and collectors, especially Ernest Thiel and Klas Fåhræus, at a time when that was urgently needed. Ernest Thiel (1856–1947) was a prosperous Jewish banker; influenced by Nietzsche, he came to see it as his special duty to support talented artists. For his rapidly growing collections around the turn of the century, he built a combined home and gallery at Djurgården in Stockholm. Helped by Thiel's financial and moral support, Vigeland was able to finish his monument to the mathematician N. H. Abel (erected in Oslo inl908), and by that year eight of Vigeland's sculptures were included in Thiel's collections. Thiel's most generous gesture towards Vigeland, however, was a donation in 1907 of 50000 crowns to secure the erection of a fountain, containing numerous sculptures, now part of the Vigeland sculpture park in Norway's capital, a year and a half after the severing of the country's union with Sweden. Klas Fåhræus (1863–1944) was an art connoisseur and collector, writer and business man, who for a period owned one of the most exquisite private art collections in Sweden. Between 1905–14 he acquired six sculptures from Vigeland and wrote several articles about his art in newspapers and magazines. In 1906 he contributed 5000 crowns to Vigeland's fountain project. Vigeland always acknowledged his gratitude to his Swedish patrons. In 1916 he wrote to Fåhræus that he would not have been able to work so freely if Fåhræus had not bought works from him. His most sincere homage, however, was paid to Ernest Thiel; in a notebook from 1930 he wrote: «In Stockholm, apart from the artists, I have only met one person Ernest Thiel, who had a truly noble attitude towards art; all the others were connected with the arttrade.«