Noble grandeur and bourgeois comfort: Two period rooms at the Nordic Museum

In 1907, the newly opened Nordic Museum (Nordiska museet) in Stockholm presented a selection of the museum’s comprehensive collections. Visitors were already well acquainted with its folk-art exhibitions, but the size of the space devoted to the upper-class collections was something new. The chronologically arranged Avdelningen för de högre stånden ('Gallery of the upper classes') included period rooms, which were intended to bring to life the development of the Swedish home from the 16^th century onwards. Today few traces remain of this exhibition, which was dismantled and stored away in the early 1970s. The exception is two interiors – a state bedroom from Ulvsunda Castle in Bromma, and a room from a bourgeois home at Högbergsgatan in Stockholm. Today the context of these rooms has been changed, yet after more than a century, museum visitors can still experience them. This article traces the history of how these period rooms has been altered over time, which allows them to guide us through a relatively unresearched chapter in the history of the Nordic Museum.

At the turn of the century 1900, numerous period rooms were created in European and North American museums, where they formed part of the canon of art and architectural history. In recent decades, long having been regarded as a dated form of exhibition, these installations have received increasing attention by academic research. This study focuses on the Nordic Museum interiors, which from 1907 until the early 1970s were part of the museum’s comprehensive exhibition of the cultural history of the elite. The analysis is based on various questions that relate to the origin of the interiors and how the exhibition format was applied. Focusing on the two extant interiors, the article discusses what specific practices the museum developed in this area. The main goal is to shed light on the museum’s role in communicating Swedish domestic culture.

The study of the Nordic Museum’s period rooms show just how closely related they were to the museum’s dissemination of knowledge as a whole. The reconstructed interiors were chosen primarily to illustrate specific phases of Swedish cultural history. The upper-class gallery was created and retained at a time when stylistic typology was a core feature of academic research into artistic artefacts. The layout of the exhibition, where visitors would walk from room to room, era to era, reinforced this chronological perspective. The concept of stylistic typology was associated with the cultural history of the elite and the shifting international currents in architecture, art and interior design. The museum’s research into domestic history and the history of the built environment interacted with its exhibition work. From this perspective, the Nordic Museum’s upper-class gallery embodies the theories and practices predominant in cultural science at the time.

In 2011 a new museum opened in Stockholm – Sven-Harry’s art museum – named after its initiator and funder, the building contractor Sven-Harry Karlsson. Besides a gallery for temporary exhibitions, the museum includes a permanent collection of art and applied art installed in a penthouse on top of the building. The installation is conceived as a full-scale replica of the lower floor of Karlsson’s former home in an eighteenth-century manor house. The article focuses on the reconstructed home and aims at situating it within a tradition of full-scale displays of architectural interiors – period rooms – in Swedish cultural history museums. Since the turn of the twentieth century, eighteenth-century architecture has had a central position in the Swedish cultural heritage. Sven-Harry’s replicated home, a small manor of the rococo era, fits perfectly well into the national canon, which for a long time focused on the homes of the elites to illustrate development within the arts. Even though the recreated milieu in Sven-Harry’s museum depends on traditional museum practice, it is also typical of contemporary innovations. In the last decades, even prestigious cultural history museums have utilized the period-room format in unconventional ways, and the bold reconstruction of Sven-Harry’s home is clearly a representative of this trend.

In the winter of 1930, the old timbered manor house at the Skogaholm estate was dismantled, log by log, loaded on a train and transported from its rural setting to Stockholm, the capital of Sweden. Reinstalled among the old farmhouses at the open-air museum Skansen, the main building was soon supplemented with two freestanding wings (with a different origin) and a suitable formal garden. Skilled craftsmen and academically trained curators carefully staged the whole ensemble, in order to present the architectural heritage and the living conditions of the landed gentry to an urban public.

Skogaholm manor in its new context was clearly a success. To generations of museum visitors it became an emblem of the increasingly popular Swedish eighteenth-century manor. Although well preserved and still an attraction, the eighty-year-old staging of Skogaholm is a challenge today. The curators of the 1930s sought to combine the careful preservation of historic remnants with an urge to construct an ideal manor, which inevitably led to compromises. And some of these make it difficult for today’s visitors to interpret the environment.

By looking closely at the installation of Skogaholm in the 1930s, this paper aims at a better understanding of the manor complex on display at the open-air museum. Despite its authentic components, Skogaholm manor can be seen as a full-scale historical experiment, driven by a variety of motives and professional practices within museology, historiography, architecture and conservation. To uncover some of these motives will shed light over Skogaholm as a museological artefact, and it will help today’s visitors to understand its inherent complexities and contradictions.

Kartläggningen av det inhemska byggnadsarvet i alla dess former var ett prioriterat projekt för Sveriges kulturhistoriker vid sekelskiftet 1900. Nordiska museet var en ledande aktör på området, inte minst när det gällde att undersöka slott och herrgårdar. När museet invigde sin nya byggnad 1907 visade man upp en storslagen svit av svenska interiörer, de flesta hämtade från rivna eller hotade miljöer. Denna presentation sätter fokus på ett av dessa rum – paradsängkammaren från Ulvsunda slott. Syftet är att genom exemplet belysa Nordiska museets stilhistoriska rum, vad de representerade som historiegestaltning och hur de förhöll sig till museets kunskapsproduktion.

Att paradsängkammaren hamnade på museum hänger ihop med hur den moderna samhällsutvecklingen påverkade de gamla adelsgodsen i Sverige. Egendomen Ulvsunda utanför Stockholm slukades av den urbana expansionen redan vid sekelskiftet 1900, då marken styckades för villabebyggelse medan 1600-talsslottet förvandlades till vårdanstalt. I det skedet förvärvade Nordiska museet delar av slottets praktfulla barockinredning. Även det är typiskt för tiden, då den gamla högreståndskulturen började uppfattas som lika hotad som allmogekulturen. Nordiska museet utvecklade en mångsidig praktik inom det bostadshistoriska fältet, som innefattade inventering, insamling, forskning, publicering och utställning.

Sängkammaren från Ulvsunda ingick från början i den serie av stilhistoriska interiörer som utgjorde museets högreståndsavdelning, en installation som illustrerade de bemedlade samhällsklassernas bostadskultur i Sverige från 1500-talet till samtiden. Utställningen kan betraktas som en fysisk gestaltning av museets expertis och forskning på området. Med tiden kom de stilhistoriska rummen att ses som obsoleta, och omkring 1970 monterades de ned och magasinerades. Helt andra vetenskapliga och museologiska ideal präglade utställningen Svensk bostad, museets uppföljare på hemkulturens område. Sängkammaren från Ulvsunda fick emellertid plats även i den nya installationen. Efter 111 år som utställd miljö är rummet därmed en av Nordiska museets mest långlivade publika attraktioner.

The State Bedroom from Ulvsunda as a Museological Project

A major undertaking for Swedish cultural historians at the turn of the century 1900 was to map the indigenous built heritage. Here the Nordiska museet was a leading actor, not least when it came to investigating castles and manor houses. At the inauguration of its new building in 1907, the museum displayed a magnificent series of Swedish period rooms. This paper focuses on one of these – the State Bedroom from Ulvsunda castle. Through this example, the presentation aims at highlighting the period rooms at the Nordiska museet, their role in a museological context and how they relate to the museum’s knowledge production.

The modernization of society strongly affected the estates of the Swedish nobility. Ulvsunda outside of Stockholm was swallowed by the urban expansion already around 1900, when its land was exploited and its seventeenth-century castle turned into a nursing home. At this instance, the museum acquired some of the castle’s elaborate baroque fittings. This is also typical for the time, as the old elite culture was considered equally threatened by modernity as the peasant culture. The Nordiska museet developed an expertise within the history of Swedish domestic culture, including collections, research projects, publications and exhibitions.

The Ulvsunda bedchamber became part of the period rooms that formed the backbone of the museum’s upper-class department, illustrating the homes of the privileged classes from the sixteenth century to present days. The galleries can be regarded as physical representations of the museum’s expertise within the field. Eventually the period rooms became obsolete, and they were dismantled and put into storage in the 1970s. Completely different museological ideals characterised the sequel within this area; Swedish House and Home. However, the Ulvsunda interior was included in the new installation. After 111 years the room is now one of Nordiska museet’s most long-lived attractions.

The project Historical Homestaging examines how the image of the Swedish home has been constructed and communicated though various forms of full-scale models at history museums. A major issue is how these installations relate to historiography and to the formation of a national canon. Here I will briefly present a part of the project that deals with the Period Room, once a main attraction but later rejected as historical evidence. By looking at three recent installations, the case study ‘The Return of the Period Room’ raises the question whether we are actually witnessing a revival of this specific form of display, which was practically abandoned some fifty years ago.

Nordiska museet (The Nordic Museum)

In Sweden, as in most European countries, and the United States, cultural history museums were keen to present full-scale installations of domestic environments. Artur Hazelius, the founder of Nordiska museet, introduced the concept at his ethnographical displays already in the 1870s, and a whole series of period rooms were installed in the new museum building in 1907. For many years, the period rooms were regarded as trustworthy illustrations of the traditional Swedish home. Although they represented historical styles, the rooms were also meant to have an impact on contemporary architecture and interior design. And they were closely linked to contemporary academic research and historiography. Eventually, their authenticity was disputed, and the period rooms at Nordiska museet were finally dismantled in the 1970s.

Sven-Harry’s Museum

At the turn of the 21^stcentury the situation had changed, and in the post-modern era, reconstructions and replicas were no longer looked upon with the same suspicion. The new cultural climate seemed to allow the period rooms to reappear. My first example is Sven-Harry’s Museum in central Stockholm, which opened in 2011. The founder, the building contractor Sven-Harry Karlsson, chose to display his private art collection at the top of the building, and to design the premises as a full-scale replica of his former home. The setting contrasts radically with the strict White-Cube concept that prevails in the other part of the museum, the art gallery on the lower levels.

Folkhemslägenheten

The second example is an installation at Nordiska museet in Stockholm. In 2013 the museum opened ‘Folkhemslägenheten’, a small apartment representing the housing and planning ideals of the welfare program, which were implemented in Sweden between the 1930s and 1970s. In the last decades, the Swedish welfare state has emerged as a major issue for historical research and public debate. At the same time, modern architecture has been acknowledged as cultural heritage, thus added to the long line of historical periods, and inscribed in the national canon. The social aspects of the installation highlight the strong links between social history and architectural history in contemporary heritage discourse.

The IKEA museum in Älmhult

In 2016 the originally Swedish furnishing company IKEA opened its own museum, located in its first store, built in 1958 in Älmhult in southern Sweden. Although the company today operates on a global market, the idea of a Swedish identity, in terms of design as well as mentality, is still a fundamental element of the brand. Consequently, one part of the exhibition is devoted to the Swedish vernacular culture. Another part contains around a dozen period rooms. They are free reconstructions of interiors from old catalogues, and originally nothing more than stage sets for the photo session. The objects play a more important role, but not, of course, as unique artefacts.

Conclusion

Even though these new installations are housed within museums, and clearly rely on the classic period room, they transcend the traditional concept. Instead of representing style or artistic development, they seem to focus on other aspects of historical representation. The issue of authenticity, for instance, which once was a precondition for the period rooms, seems to have changed in character. By being openly non-authentic constructions, not least regarding their architectural framework, the new installations cleverly avoid the critique that affected the period rooms by the middle of the twentieth century. The recent displays support other kinds of narratives than the old period rooms. They open for a varietyof uses, and users that can afford such an expensive medium to support their brand. Still, the urge to situate the display within a solid frame of national history seems unchanged.

Built heritage in Sweden usually presents itself in a convincingly genuine manner, whether in a book or in real life. This impression is however the result of conscious efforts made in the last hundred years or so. The early twentieth century was a period preoccupied with issues of heritage and national identity, not least within the field of architecture. Academic scholars, museum curators, architects and antiquarians contributed in a dedicated manner to the formation of a Swedish architectural canon. This process involved a variety of professional practices; historical research and publication, extensive investigations and inventories, exhibitions at the cultural history museums, restoration projects and other interventions in the built fabric.

The main concern in this formative period was the architecture of the pre-industrial era. General concepts of Western architectural history, its epochs and styles, were gradually adapted to Swedish conditions, and the emerging national heritage included domestic highlights such as the medieval churches, the Vasa castles, the aristocratic palaces of the seventeenth century and the eighteenth-century manors. This particular image of Swedish heritage has been surprisingly persistent, and to a large degree it still dominates. However, it was not only the most prestigious examples that counted; cultural historians put focus on the vernacular traditions, and the museums presented full-scale representations of a wide range of built environments.

Further on in the twentieth century, attention was moved to more recent epochs – the architecture of the late nineteenth century, the early modernism of the 20s and 30s, and eventually the structuralism of the post-war era – but the ancient monuments still seem to play a key role in the national heritage. Although today’s historical research and heritage discourse generally focus on the twentieth century, modern architecture is rarely included in the national heritage. And as it turns out, not even some of the most outstanding examples of built environments of the twentieth century are protected from alteration or demolition.

By discussing three recent displays of domestic interiors, this paper raises the question whether we are actually witnessing a revival of the period room, although with a different agenda than the traditional one. These examples do not primarily aim at illustrating period style, even if the furnishings as well as the architectural backdrops are still essential parts of the staging. Instead of the art historical discourse that was fundamental to earlier displays of period milieus, recent installations seem to focus on other aspects of full-scale historical representation.

The first example is an installation at Nordiska museet in Stockholm, an institution whose tradition of displaying historic environments goes back to Artur Hazelius’s early exhibitions in the 1870s. In 2013 the museum opened ‘Folkhemslägenheten’, a small apartment representing the housing program of the Swedish welfare state, thus connecting to a current discussion on modern heritage. The second example is Sven-Harry’s collection in central Stockholm, built in 2011. To house a collection of art and furniture, Sven-Harry Karlsson choose to include a full-scale replica of his former home in the new museum. The setting represents one of the most canonical epochs in Swedish art and architecture – the late 18^th century. Despite this, the whole installation rests heavily on the narrative about Karlsson himself. The third example is an installation at The Victoria and Albert museum in London in 2013, designed by the artist duo Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset. The fact that a full-scale domestic interior plays a key role makes it relevant to discuss the exhibit in this context. A synopsis for a film, set in the milieu, is a central part of the interaction with the audience.

Even if these new installations are housed within museums and rely on traditional displays of period rooms, they transcend the ordinary concept. Rather than isolated rooms they present coherent environments, which makes them related to house museums. Instead of illustrating an art historical canon, they highlight real or fictive human residents, and thus they depend on life stories and other narratives to communicate with the public. By being openly non-authentic replicas, at least regarding their physical frame, these installations avoid the critique that affected the period rooms in the course of the 20^th century.