Art to see in Gothenburg: the art museum, Poseidon and the Colourists

The best-known art in Gothenburg is in the Gothenburg Museum of Art at Götaplatsen, which has one of the finest collections of fin-de-siècle painting in the Nordic countries, with Richard Bergh’s Nordic Summer Evening and Prince Eugen’s The Cloud, and the largest collection of the Gothenburg Colourists. In front of the museum stands Carl Milles’s Poseidon. The Röhsska Museum shows design and decorative arts, and Gunnar Asplund’s extension of the Law Courts building is one of the principal works of Swedish Modernism.

Facts

The Gothenburg Museum of Art

The Gothenburg Museum of Art was built for the city’s jubilee exhibition in 1923 and rises at the top of Götaplatsen, with a broad façade of yellow brick and a high arched portico. The collection of Nordic fin-de-siècle painting is based on the collection that the wholesale merchant Pontus Fürstenberg and his wife Göthilda bequeathed to the city. They bought art from the young Opponents when few others did.

Here hang Richard Bergh’s Nordic Summer Evening, with a silent couple on a veranda before a glassy lake, and Prince Eugen’s The Cloud, in which an enormous white cloud towers over a dark landscape. Karl Nordström’s Varberg Fortress of 1893 is one of the principal works of the Varberg School. The museum also has the first version of Gustaf Cederström’s The Funeral Procession of Charles XII of 1878; the second, larger version is in the Nationalmuseum. The collection also includes older European painting, and photography is shown in the Hasselblad Center in the same building.

Valand and the Colourists

Gothenburg has had an art school of its own, Valand, since the 19th century. Carl Larsson taught there in 1886–1891, and among the students was Olof Sager-Nelson, who painted pale, dreamy portraits and died at only 27 in 1896. Later Carl Wilhelmson led the school, and his students Ivar Arosenius and Gösta Sandels are among Gothenburg’s most original artists. The art museum has the largest collection of Arosenius, who made the picture book The Cat’s Journey for his daughter.

In the 1920s Tor Bjurström, who had studied under Matisse, taught there, and from his classes came the Gothenburg Colourists: Ivan Ivarson, Ragnar Sandberg, Åke Göransson and Inge Schiöler. Their glowing colour painting from the west coast fills several rooms of the museum, and nowhere else are so many of their works gathered.

Götaplatsen and Poseidon

In the middle of Götaplatsen stands Carl Milles’s Poseidon, unveiled in 1931. The sea god is about seven metres high in bronze and looks out over Kungsportsavenyn towards the city and the harbour. He is built to be seen from a distance, and the elongated, stylised body belongs to the 1930s rather than to antiquity. According to a frequently repeated story, the people of Gothenburg took offence at the god’s nakedness, but how much of it is true is uncertain.

The square is a unified whole. The art museum closes it to the south, and around it in the 1930s came the City Theatre and the Concert Hall, and later the city library. The Gothenburg Kunsthall in the same block shows temporary exhibitions of contemporary art. Anyone walking up the Avenue sees the whole composition emerge, with Poseidon in the middle.

The Röhsska Museum and the Law Courts

A few blocks away, on Vasagatan, is the Röhsska Museum, Sweden’s museum of design and decorative arts, in a building of dark red brick designed by Carl Westman in the National Romantic style. The building shows the period’s faith in craftsmanship, with steep roofs and care over every detail. The collections range from Chinese porcelain to Swedish design of the 20th century.

At Gustaf Adolfs torg stands the Gothenburg Law Courts building, where Gunnar Asplund worked for almost thirty years on an extension to the 17th-century building. It was completed in 1937. The façade towards the square continues the division of the old building, and inside is a bright hall of wood and glass. The extension became a model for how the new can meet the old.

Excursions from Gothenburg

The west coast has attracted painters for more than a hundred years. Wilhelmson painted the fishing community at Fiskebäckskil, the Colourists sought out Hisingen, Tjörn and Koster, and a little over an hour to the south is Varberg, where Bergh, Kreuger and Nordström lived in the 1890s. Further south is the Mjellby Art Museum outside Halmstad, devoted to the Halmstad Group.

How to plan your visit

The art museum, the Röhsska Museum and Götaplatsen are within a few minutes’ walk of one another, and the Law Courts are reached along the Avenue and through Kungsportsplatsen. One day is enough for all three, but the art museum deserves at least a couple of hours. Do read the guide to the Gothenburg Colourists before you go, and add the museums to the app’s map. The guide Art to see in Stockholm covers the Nationalmuseum, where the second version of The Funeral Procession of Charles XII hangs.

Don’t miss

Exercise

Where is the first version of Cederström’s The Funeral Procession of Charles XII?