Swedish grace: art and design in 1920s Sweden

Abstract

"The era has been called 'the Roaring Twenties'. World wars and pandemics were over. The Kreuger crash had not yet occurred. But the 1920s was the decade of contradictions. The heated party atmosphere was mixed with starvation, government crises and high unemployment. Citizens made new demands for emancipation and rights. Tradition and nationalist progressions were set against new technologies and international modernism. Everyday depictions and craft ambitions were violated by post-Cuban modernism and industrial mass production. The tensions were felt in visual arts and design as well as film, photography and dance. One hundred years after the 'the Roaring Twenties', Nationalmuseum summarizes the era in a magnificent exhibition. In connection with the exhibition, Nationalmuseum publishes a book in which the exhibition's curator Cilla Robach writes about fashion and modern women, Kalle Lind about the entertainment and fashion drug cocaine and Per Hedström about the Swedish art scene in Paris. Eva-Lena Karlsson writes about the transformation of Greta Gustafsson to the icon Greta Garbo. Other contributors are Alice Cousin, Eva Eriksson, Bo Florin, Anna Tellgren and Cecilia Widenheim. The term Swedish Grace was coined by Philip Morton Shand, a British architectural critic, after he visited the 1930 Stockholm Exhibition and observed that the Swedes had abandoned the national tradition of graceful elegance they had cherished in the 1920s. Artists of the 1920s drew inspiration from around the world and from many periods in history. Architects, designers and artists borrowed motifs from classical antiquity, ancient Egypt and China. The wider world beckoned, albeit on the white man’s terms, and in 1922 the Swedish government set up an institute of racial biology"--Provided by publisher.