Harmonies and Counterpoints

This afternoon we saw a traveling exhibit at the Frick Art Museum, The Scandinavian Home. It's only there for a few more days; we kept meaning to go on a day with docent tours and logistics kept happening, but finally, success. (The remaining tours are this Friday and Saturday.)

The pieces are mostly drawn from one private collection of works from Scandinavia from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. From the museum's description:

Exhibitions of Scandinavian art typically focus on either painting — often on the work of a single artist or theme such as landscape — or on artisanal design. The Scandinavian Home integrates folk, decorative, and fine art with “home” as a central metaphor, mirroring the tastes and convictions of the period’s collectors and creators.

There were a lot of paintings, many of them landscapes, many of them striking -- capturing the feel of hoarfrost or high-latitude twilights. The collection also included some furniture items, including this really nifty cabinet:

It's pretty shallow. I don't know its intended use:

From the description:

Lars Kinsarvik, Norwegian 1846-1925:
The complex design of this cabinet rewards close looking: trolls, animals, enigmatic faces, and fantastical details peer out from the interlaced patterns -- folkloric imagery that helped forge a national design identity in Norway at the turn of the 20th century. [...] A chronicler of Viking ornament and rural material culture, he incorporated historical motifs into his invented repertiore of trolls and other imaginary creatures.

The exhibit includes an ornate chair (obviously well-used) by the same artist. The docent told this story: the collectors found the chair, very beat up and covered in crud, at some sale or other, bought it, and stuck it in their basement. Later they started to clean it up and realized they had something special, but they didn't know anything more about its origins. The chair was, it turned out, one of a pair: somewhere in Europe (I forget the details) they happened to be at a museum, saw the other one, and said "we have one just like that at home!". So that's how they found out who the artist was. I didn't ask, but I assume they acquired the cabinet sometime after that.

You can see the exhibit any time the museum is open (through Sunday), and we wandered around on our own for a while before the scheduled tour. The guided tour is about an hour; it was informative and the docent was friendly and approachable. I appreciate having a guided overview of an exhibit before diving into the details and reading all the little cards one by one (which at most museums is physically taxing for me). After the tour we went back through the exhibit to take a closer look at things.

I said that reading the display cards is usually a challenge. The Frick Museum gets major kudos for always having printed booklets (at decently large font) for people to use. Each page includes the information from the card and a small photo of the item it's for. Sometimes I have to do some flipping through the book when starting a new "section", especially when there are many rooms that you can take different paths through or when there are displays in the middle of the room as well as along the walls. But it works pretty well and it's a huge accessibility win. I don't know how long it'll be there, but I later found the PDF for this exhbibit on their website (and I see that somebody has already saved it in the Wayback Machine).

The exhibit included a few tapestries and carpets. Most were displayed so you could see only one side, as usual, but they had one hanging in a room so that you could view both sides. This is a tapestry from 1906 of wool and linen; they did not include information about dyes. After only 120 years of, presumably, being hung in range of sunlight, compare:

Front:

Back: