Parklife: the joy of Gustav Vigeland, Oslo

Oslo is not a city high on most people’s lists of places to visit. But anyone interested in twentieth-century art, and particularly in sculpture, should make it a priority destination.  The Frogner Park there is not only one of the earliest large-scale contemporary sculpture parks in the world; it is also the creation of a single artist, Gustav Vigeland (1869-1943), who proves himself on that site to rank among the greatest modern sculptors.  Nearby is a museum in which plaster casts of the works in the park, together with bronzes and maquettes from all periods of his life can be studied. Some of his work is to be found in other Norwegian towns, and the Nobel Peace Prize medal is cast to his design; but elsewhere in the world he is absent, and as a result unknown. This is a loss for all of us.

You enter Vigeland’s park through the grand gates that he designed for it, and pass his self-portrait – a rather dour standing figure – as you begin a walk of nearly 1,000 yards that takes you through the whole of life in an astonishing kaleidoscope of vivid experience.  It begins with towering, minatory columns topped by men and women struggling with strange insect-like reptiles. There’s plenty of surreal fantasy in the park, but the overall impression one gains is that Vigeland was impelled by a consuming love of humanity and all aspects of our life and experience. His primary idiom is a naturalism that oscillates between the expressionist and the realist. Flanked by the tall columns, a bridge carries us over the Frogner Lake, its parapets lined with naked figures of men, women and children in a multitude of relationships, with themselves and each other.  They are in bronze, a little larger than life.

There are skeletons too in the square panels that form a frieze round the square basin: skeletons drifting slowly down through deep water, or lying disintegrated on the sea-bed. A skeleton inserts itself between two closely embracing lovers and forces them apart; in the curled horns of a prehistoric monster’s skull a child sits comfortably ensconced. Animals and people have curious encounters – a woman and a unicorn; a baby and a bear. Lovers meet, adults console one another or quarrel; a “hermit” crawls along, surely a memory of Blake’s Nebuchadnezzar: Vigeland knew British art and had studied the English cathedrals as a young man, before he executed sculpture for the great gothic cathedral at Trondheim.

Separated from the basin and frieze by an outer “moat” the visitor walks round this grand composition on a pavement designed by Vigeland as a labyrinth that symbolises the maze of life, and reaches wrought-iron gates depicting upright nude men, women and children, all engaged in conversation or play.

Next to the park is the Vigeland Museum, a handsome building that contains most of his work, either in the bronze or marble original or in the form of casts. The components of the park layout can be studied in tranquillity here, as can maquettes for the fine, characterful portrayals of Ibsen, Grieg and other great Norwegians that were erected in Olso, Bergen and elsewhere in the country. In particular, the Museum offers a chance to examine Vigeland’s remarkable early work. He was much under the sway of Rodin in the 1890s, and his panels of Hell and The Last Judgement show the debt, yet are themselves highly original conceptions. His groups of lovers in every stage of bliss and misery are a poignant refection of his own early emotional troubles, and perhaps of the bizarre family life he led.  His father, Eliseus Thorsen (Vigeland very soon changed his name) was a master-carpenter, a devout and gloomy pietist who imposed an intolerably strict regime on his family and later, traumatically, renounced religion altogether. There is, then, a good deal of the familiar Scandinavian despair about the early work, and it is a miraculous shift of tone that we witness in the much broader, more all-encompassing, we might say Shakespearean, acceptance and celebration of human existence that greets us in the Frogner Park.