Word: vigeland
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Flying Tackles. Norwegian critics never go that far, and laymen seem to like the statues-at least, the park draws visitors of all ages in droves. As for blunt-spoken old Gustav Vigeland (who died in 1943), he refused to consider criticism for a moment. Oslo's city fathers gave him what he demanded: carte blanche and an expense account for 24 years to do for Oslo, if he could, what Michelangelo did for Rome (total bill: some $5,000,000). As his part of the bargain, Vigeland gave Oslo more than 120 groups of park statues...
...Vigeland preferred nudes, and even his statue of Ludwig van Beethoven leading an orchestra (done in 1906) was naked as a winter oak. The nudes of those early years were realistically proportioned, often graceful. But Vigeland's conception of the human figure changed over the decades, and his work came more & more to reflect his new (and increasingly stereotyped) ideal-thick-bodied women of action and bull-necked men. Among the samples in Frogner Park: a male tossing a female over his shoulders; a male carrying off a female while she, with one leg over his shoulder and another...
Fruit First. In later years he was preoccupied with the cycle of human life, from embryo to the grave. One of the showpieces at Frogner is the Vigeland fountain, surrounded by four groups of "trees of life." One group depicts childhood, with babies dangling from the first tree like ripe fruit...
...Vigeland planned his park so that everything leads up to a monolith-a vast pillar with 121 entwined figures, carved out of a single 200-ton piece of granite. My four-year-old boy described it as "a pretend chimney with monkeys." Vigeland put it differently: "The monolith is my religion." Most observers think that he was trying to show humanity struggling upward, but since he never explained, it is also possible that he intended to show humanity losing its grip...
...last figures that Vigeland finished before he died was modestly clad in a smock: a self-portrait of that remarkable sculptor, Gustav Vigeland...