| Abstrakt: |
During the 1880's and '90's the Fürstenberg Gallery in Gothenburg contained the foremost private collection of contemporary art in Sweden. Pontus Fürstenberg (1827-1902) was a liberally minded Jew, eager to be accepted as an equal in upper-class circles to which his wealth and occupation gave him the entry, but in which his Jewish ancestry was to some extent a handicap. Up to 1881 he was a partner in the firm of wholesalers his father had founded in Gothertburg, but after that date he devoted himself mainly to the successful management of his fortune, to which he had greatly added by his marriage in 1880 to Göthilda Magnus, the richest heiress in the city. Fürstenberg was engaged in many aspects of politics and cultural work. As a collector and promoter cf the arts he did a great deal to support the artists' association—Konstnärsförbundet—that is to say those who opposed the Academy of Art and its antiquated methods of teaching, and who were later to become the leading figures in Swedish Symbolism in the '90's. In his first tentative efforts as a collector, he allowed himself to be guided by his artist friends, but gradually he developed a taste of his own for which he was prepared to fight. The fact that he opened his art gallery to the public in January 1885 can, to some extent at any rate, be taken as an expression of an awareness of his social responsibility. The public nature that this gave his collection should have meant that Fürstenberg took great pains to collect and display only such art as was acceptable from the point of view of propriety. It may therefore seem surprising that the Fürstenberg Gallery today, as reconstructed in the Gothenburg Museum of Art, is so rich in nakedness that Peter Gay likened it to "a forest of nudes". Wherever one looks one sees naked or half naked bodies: lying or crouching plaster figures above the cornice, statues in white marble standing on the floor, paintings of rosy-hued female bodies. It may seem paradoxical that the same Victorian outlook which banned nakedness and sexuality in literature, pedagogics and social intercourse could tolerate nude male and female bodies in art, often with shamelessly exposed genitals. In his major investigation into Victorian mentality, The Bourgeois Experience, I, Peter Gay introduced "the doctrine of distance" to explain this phenomenon. He maintains that nudity could be tolerated and appreciated only as long it was separated in time or space from the beholder's world, or foreign in some other way to his experience. Several of the works in the Fürstenberg collection can be seen as confirmation of this doctrine. The extent to which "the doctrine of distance" could "purify" a motif that would otherwise have been regarded as offensive is demonstrated particularly clearly by Arnold Böcklin's Forest Scent with a Faun and Nymph, 1856, in which the nymph attempts to defend herself, evidently without success, from the assault of a rutting faun; it was, in fact, the depiction of a rape.… [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
