Word: frogner
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...most ambitious sculptural scheme of modern times was rising last week in Oslo's Frogner Park. It was the life work of Norway's leading sculptor (and eccentric), Gustav Vigeland, who died in 1943, aged 74. Not since Michelangelo, claimed one critic, had a sculptor chiseled such a forest of figures-over 100 separate versions of the human form, in granite and bronze, standing, reclining, cavorting, caressing, all over some 190 grassy acres. Vigeland simply ignored the Nazi invaders, and they let him go on with his sculpture. The work took 40 years to complete, cost Norwegian taxpayers...
...barrel-chested populator of Frogner Park was a mystic, a recluse, and a scoffer at all art-except his own. Largely self-taught. Sculptor Vigeland emerged, in 1905, from a cocoon of starvation and obscurity, to receive a prize beyond the wildest dreams of patron-seekers. The Norwegian Government had agreed to commission him with a carte blanche...
...theme of Frogner Park is nothing less than the birth, life and death of man. There are no monumental mementos of captains, kings and conquerors in the Vigeland cast of characters-just plain men, women & children. Massive males stagger under the weight of a heavy fountain-bowl; chubby children sport in & out of stone tree branches. A bridge over a pool bears 58 bronze figures of rugged toilers. At one corner of the bridge is a 20-ft. dragon clutching a reluctant woman whose bowed face, closely examined, reveals smiling pleasure. Topping the park is a 56-ft. white granite...
This exacting art Sonja Henie began to study when she was eight. For Christmas that year Father Wilhelm, a Scandinavian copy of W. C. Fields, gave her her first, cheap pair of skates. Trying them out at the Frogner Stadium, little Sonja promptly sat down. Getting up, she practiced her outer and inner edges so diligently that next year she won Oslo's junior competition; five years after that, aged 14, the Norwegian championship. That was the Olympic Year of 1924 and Sonja went to Chamonix to try out in the great games. The trial was a disappointment...