Swedish Celebration Exhibition

Abstract

THE exhibition of some six thousand years of Swedish art, lent by the Swedish Government to America to commemorate the three hundredth anniversary of the founding of New Sweden on the banks of the Delaware, is a unique enterprise for the Swedish museums. Operating in New York at Rockefeller Center from September 24th—October 6th, and then going to museums in the Eastern and Middle Western states, the exhibition includes objects which not only have never been shown outside of Sweden but which in many cases, lent by institutions and collectors often hundreds of miles apart, have never been shown together even to the Swedish public. The four hundred objects were chosen from the three fields of prehistoric and medieval archeology, native or peasant art, and from the more sophisticated collections of later Swedish painting. But always the selection was governed by the underlying purpose of revealing to the American visitor the homogeneity and unity of Swedish culture throughout its many centuries of development.