Linnéuniversitetet, Institutionen för kulturvetenskaper (KV)
Abstract
The present paper presents results from research of the Swedish Olle Hjortzberg’s career as visual artist. The objectives have been to explore the circumstances around why Hjortzberg got established and received prestige assignments already in his early years in fierce competition with other established artists. Hjortzberg managed to move himself into a central position in the Swedish arts life after the turn of the century 1900. While being successful in his artistry, Hjortzberg was however to a large extent ignored by critics and his name is just very briefly mentioned. if at all, in summaries of the later Swedish visual arts history. This study makes use of some theories used withing the art history field to try to explain why such a successful career leave just weak traces in works describing the Swedish arts live in the late 19th and early 20th century.The study makes use of an extensive collection of written sources and collection of visual expressions received at field studies. The theory frameworks applied on Hjortzberg’s life and career are discourse analysis, qualitative social networks, social rooms and habitus, cultural capital and art regimes. Theories used for the visual studies are based on reception esthetics, performativity and iconology.Initially, the study describes Hjortzberg’s upbringing, training and education, then grand tour travels followed by studies of his earliest commissions and arts production with the intention to use this as basis for mapping out the artist’s contact network and how Hjortzberg explores this in his personal interest and strive for a power position at the Swedish arts arena. This part of the study contributes also to the analysis of why the artistry came to be diminished or ignored in its time and in retrospect.The second part to follow describes commissions and the actual art of those created by Hjortzberg. The selection is chosen for testing the initial questions mentioned above. With highlighting among those commissions are the decorations in the memorial chapel raised for the Swedish king and war-lord Gustav II Adolf in Lützen, Germany. These art expressions by Hjortzberg have never before been studied from an arts history perspective. The study proposes in its conclusions that Hjortzberg close to unprecedented made use of his contact network and his social skills to move himself into a central position in the Swedish arts life and stay there for decades. In contrast has his oeuvre left very few traces of influences among followers and hardly at all among critics and those describing the Swedish art history. The study presents the thesis that Hjortzberg’s artistic preferences came out of sync with the contemporary streams of modernism. As epilog, the study provide an interpretation proposal of Hjortzberg’s artistic preferences. While not being discussed in previous research, this study wants to say that Hjortzberg came to find his role as mastering the perfection within the constraints given by the physical boundaries of architecture and in book illuminations. On a foundation of old traditions, the artist made this the arena of his very own artistic expressions
