Word: vigeland
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Norway's Gustav Vigeland spent a lifetime on one of the vastest projects a sculptor ever attempted. It fills Oslo's Frogner Park (TIME, July 16, 1945), and promises to remain among the most controversial works of modern times. With perhaps five years to go before all of Vigeland's sculptured legacy can be cast, TIME Correspondent William Gray found Oslo citizens of two minds about it. His report...
When you mention Vigeland to somebody in Oslo, his face brightens quickly and he asks: "What do you think of him?" Nobody in Norway, as far as I can tell, knows exactly what to think. But when outlanders like British Novelist Evelyn Waugh attack their favorite son, Norwegians are shocked and depressed. "The most heathen thing I have seen in Europe," Waugh recently told an interviewer. "A subhuman zoo in bronze and granite . . . more terrible than the ruins of Hiroshima...
Thus fixed, Vigeland married himself to his job, forever forsook all ordinary social life. Even wives (he divorced two) were out. Oslo's citizens caught only brief glimpses of him-when he took walks armed with a heavy stick, to protect himself from dogs, which he hated. One result of his personal seclusion: Vigeland is far less known internationally than his fellow Scandinavian sculptor, Sweden's Carl Milles...
...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...
...Vigeland's most enigmatic achievement for Frogner Park is a powerfully built man juggling three bronze babies on his arms, booting a fourth into the air with his right foot (see cut). The old sculptor was once asked to explain this caprice. His answer: "In dreams anything can happen...