Multiple visions from a Baltic shoreline : Richard Berghs quest for a school of Swedish painting in Vision, scene from Visby

• For a few years around 1890 the small town of Visby on the island of Gotland was a centre for the development of avant-garde painting in Sweden. A group of Swedish artists going on their 40s was about to depart from their, admittedly fairly recently acquired, realist ideals and embark on yet another adventure – the construction of what they perceived of as a true, and yet, avant-garde, Swedish school of art.1 As I have argued elsewhere the change of artistic agendas that this generation of artists performed during the late 1880:s and early 90:s in the end turned out quite successfully. At least in that sense that they managed to convince their contemporaries that they had succeeded in creating for the first time art that was truly Swedish. That success in its turn made it possible for them to dominate the art political agenda of Sweden round 1900.2Here I would like to turn to another complex of issues surrounding that same generation of artists: In what ways did stays in artist colonies shape their artistic agendas? In brief, it is my hypothesis that the social character of the stays in the artist’s colonies helped to create a new paradigm for images during the last decades of the 19th century. I would like to add to the description of this new paradigm through an analysis of an image that was produced during an attempt of the artist to transfer from realism into a new style, symbolism, albeit still (as I will argue) within that same socially founded paradigm. Richard Bergh’s Vision, Scene from Visby (1894).

Ämnesord

HUMANIORA  -- Konst -- Konstvetenskap (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Arts -- Art History (hsv//eng)

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Gotland

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