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The male nude in Swedish art was my topic, studying how images of naked men became icons of masculinity in art and popular culture at the turn of the twentieth century, from a queer perspective. ĭuring my own research as a PhD student around 15 years ago, I had been denied access to the painting and museum archives. Jan Hietala and Eugene Jansson in dialogue” (June 13-September 20, 2015), I wanted to underscore that naked men would again have a permanent place at the museum. Since the 1970s, however, the Navy Bathhouse had been stored in the museum's vaults, displayed only during temporary exhibitions. Jansson’s paintings had a dedicated wall in the gallery layout. The museum is devoted to Scandinavian art from the decades around 1900, installed in a purpose-built villa with interiors from the period. Photo: Thielska Galleriet/Tord Lund.Įugène Jansson belonged to the close circle of artist friends around the art collector and banker Ernest Thiel, who founded the collection that would become the Thielska Galleriet art museum in the 1920s. 1).įig.1: Eugène Jansson, The Navy Bathhouse, 1907, oil on canvas, 301 x 197 cm. As the recently appointed director of the museum, I invited Hietala to show a selection of his works in order to evoke a contemporary perspective on one of the museum's most eye-catching paintings: The Navy Bathhouse (1907) by Swedish painter Eugène Jansson (1862-1915) (fig.
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The Swedish-Finnish artist Jan Hietala has since long devoted himself to exploring the artistic tradition of the male body through various media: painting, films, texts and installations.
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The theme was men by water, and the rooms were filled with male nudity. The challenge for museums lies in taking critical perspectives very seriously while at the same time striving to truly represent an object’s ability to reflect both its past and our present, while drawing connections between the two.Īgainst this statement of creed, I will focus on an exhibition that I curated in the summer of 2015, exploring the queer potential of a specific artwork at the art museum Thielska Galleriet in Stockholm, Sweden. In my opinion, the intersection of these trajectories is where truly creative museum work occurs, when we can move beyond the seeming opposition between objects and stories, aesthetics and context, historical artifacts and contemporary perspectives. In the fall 2016, writers in the culture pages debated Swedish museum priorities-is there too much ideology, what should actually be communicated, and how should collections be shown? Are museums favoring diversity and identity politics over conservation and traditional knowledge about objects? On one hand, the situation can certainly be interpreted as a backlash against progressive trends in the institutions, but on the other, it can also be seen as a resistance against state agencies setting agendas for cultural life. It seemed a consensus was being established around the importance of including these perspectives, but this was not actually the case. These documents sought to support museums that wanted to engage with the issues, offering an international outlook. Subsequently, these issues were taken seriously by state institutions, and the National Exhibition Agency published two reports-one on museums and diversity (2014), one on museums and LGBTQ issues (2015).
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The museum’s own role in producing and upholding normative interpretations had still not been dealt with, nor had the museums’ collection policies been evaluated with respect to sexualities. With a critical eye towards the museum world’s queer ventures in Stockholm 2008, my impression is that the exhibitions, tours, and interventions did not offer the necessary critical analysis of norms, tending to engage with queer perspectives only at a superficial level. Gender studies scholar Vanja Hermele pointed out that through temporary exhibitions and collaborations with feminist and queer artists and curators, Swedish art institutions tend to see themselves as much more radical than they actually are. National media reported on these initiatives, the audience came in large numbers, the press reported on their success, and it seemed like queer perspectives made a successful entrance into the Stockholm museum world. Several museums gave “queer tours” of their permanent collections, some museums presented queer “interventions” in their general exhibitions using temporary information panels, and a few institutions organized temporary exhibitions on queer themes. In the summer of 2008, when Stockholm hosted Euro Pride, the term “queer” and the acronym “HBT” (Swedish for LGBT) appeared all over the Stockholm museum world.