Moderna Museet – Joel’s Journeys & Jaunts

This morning in Stockholm, I went to the Moderna Museet, and that was pretty much it. My recalcitrant left foot was not to blame. That’s starting to get back to normal. Thanks for asking.

No, this is going to be a three-post, rather than two-post day. So each will probably be shorter than usual.

I know, I know. Three posts! Exciting, right? But, please try to contain yourself. Too much excitement is probably not good for your heart.

The middle entry today, the one after this one, will be about something that’s scheduled to last from noon until 3:00.

“Joel,” you’re saying, “You just went on a Stockholm food tour a couple of days ago. I know you enjoy them, but enough already!”

Well, that just goes to show you that you don’t know everything. It’s not a food tour. Food isn’t even included. However, considering the hours, I hope I’ll be able to buy some lunch during that time.

No hints. You’ll have to wait for it.

The Moderna Museet is almost a 25-minute walk from my hotel. The museum is, in turn, is nearly a 25-minute walk from my midday activity’s starting point. So I didn’t have a lot of time at the Moderna Museet.

Oh, Canada, eh?

Oh, by the way, guess what I passed on the walk over to the Moderna Museet? It’s in the first picture in this post. I know it’s hard to see what it is, but if the wind hadn’t died as I took the picture, you’d clearly see a Canadian flag. That building houses, among other things, the Embassy of Canada in Sweden.

Don’t look so forlorn, Canadian flag. I’ll be home soon. I’ve got two more full days left in this trip to Sweden, and then I head back home the next day.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve loved Sweden. And I expect I’ll enjoy the next two days here as well. But home is home. And a stone is a stone. And a paper clip is a paper clip. And a jumping jack is a jumping jack. And a couch is a sofa is a chesterfield. And…

Where was I going with this?

Oh yeah, I’ve only got a few days left here before heading home. So let’s enjoy them.

To and At the Moderna Museet

Moderna Museet is on an island with a couple of other cultural institutions as well. The bridge to that island has one lane of traffic. On either side of that, there are pedestrian boardwalks. Calling them boardwalks leaves the wrong impression. There are no wider than a typical sidewalk you might expect to see in a downtown area. I call them boardwalks because their surface is wooden boards, placed as you would expect to see them on a boardwalk.

I said that the bridge has only one lane of traffic. But traffic can travel across it in both directions. Traffic lights at either end determine which direction is allowed to travel across it when.

The view off one side of the bridge is of Gamla Stan across a channel. The view on the other side looks deeper into the Stockholm archipelago.

“Moderna Museet” is Swedish for “The Modern Museum.’ It will never cease to amaze me how creative the Swedes are in their naming of places. Moderna Museet is a museum of modern art. There are other cities in Sweden with galleries called Moderna Museet. For example, I was in one in Malmö. Although now that I said that, I seem to recall writing in the post about it that the Malmö Moderna Museet is a branch this one.

It’s a rather small museum, which is good because I didn’t have much time before I had to leave to get to my midday activity. And because I don’t usually have much patience for art galleries.

One of the rooms is dedicated to surrealism. The first thing that catches your attention is a large, open-topped square container. Its transparent sides are, maybe, six to ten centimetres high.

It contains what looks like thick, light-brown, homogenized mud. Every once in a while, bubbles erupt out of the mud at various points in the container. When the bubbles erupt, they make a weird, loud popping sound that I can’t explain.

I couldn’t find a placard for this piece, so I don’t know its name or the artist.

There are, of course, paintings in the surrealism section, such as one by David Alfaro Siqueiros titled “The Peace Guardian.” Its subject is a snarly, surly, grotesque beast of some sort. My thought on seeing it was that it looks like it’s doing the opposite of guarding peace.

There was also a painting by Margareta Renberg titled “Baroque Angel II.” I won’t try to describe it. I posted a picture somewhere here. I’ll just say that, apparently, the second Baroque angel is a leg with the area below its knee turned into a human corkscrew. I don’t know, I think there were way more than one Baroque angel before that one, and none of them had that body shape. Not that I want to body-shame an angel, you understand.

And there are some black & white films playing in the surrealists gallery.

Dali is represented on a wall outside the Surrealist gallery. His contribution is titled “The Enigma of Wilhelm Tell.” I’ll say it’s an enigma! The first puzzling thing is, apart from the fact that it’s written on the top of the pages of the book Dali painted in the scene, how does that represent Wilhelm Tell?”

But there are so many more enigmatic elements as well. For example, why does Wilhelm Tell have three legs, one of which looks like a baguette? Why is he wearing a shirt and a vest, but no pants? Admittedly, finding pants made for two normal legs and a baguette would be difficult, but still, he could get arrested in many places for going out bottomless. Couldn’t he find matching shoes for his two normal feet? But most importantly, if the gallery is going to go to the trouble of translating the title of the painting into English, why is it Wilhelm Tell and not William Tell?

In another room, I saw a painting by Sven X-et Erixson titled “The Sculptor (Portrait of Bror Hjorth).” It’s a painting of a sculptor beside a sculpture. The sculpture has its head sitting on top of its torso. I know that’s how heads normally work, but in the pictured sculpture, the neck is detached, and the head is sitting horizontally on the torso.

I thought. That’s weird. Get real!

After looking at that, I moved on a little to the right and saw a sculpture. That sculpture.

On a wall in a hallway, there was a series of rudimentary paintings by Bo Hylander. They were untitled. The text associated with it said, “Bo Hylander painted emotional portraits of himself. …”

After looking at the paintings in the series and reading that, I thought, “Portraits of himself? That poor man. He has even lower self-esteem than I have.”

There were, obviously, more works, but that’s almost all I’ve got to say about the Moderna Museet because of a shortage of time at the gallery and a shrinking patience for writing about it now.

I will say, though, there was a temporary exhibition by an American, Mike Kelly (1954-2012). I don’t like to speak ill of the dead, so I’ll say no more about that temporary exhibition.

Are you excited about my upcoming midday activity? I know I am.