Post by Grubb. To get to the Moderna Museet this morning, we crossed a bridge to the island of Skeppsholmen in central Stockholm. The museum was at the top of a hill next to a sculpture park resembling a modernistic playground. The main exhibit featured Laurie Anderson. In the early 1980s I covered a Laurie Anderson gig…
Author: Grubb
Filmstaden, Råsunda
Post by Grubb Laurie Anderson’s musings about pilgrimages notwithstanding, I knew where today’s pilgrimage would end up. The film studio facilities in Råsunda, Solna on the outskirts of Stockholm were built in 1920 and subsequently more than 400 Swedish films were shot there. Bergman’s “The Seventh Seal” was shot in the studio and the surrounding…
Sometimes not even one
Post by Grubb. Contemporary art museums are always a risky proposition. No matter what’s on exhibit, they’re usually located in a part of town that’s far from the tourist trade, places with a lot of warehouses and abandoned factories. The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation is on a part of an island that on this Saturday…
In the garden of the heroic
Post by Grubb. Furthering our adventures around the Stockholm archipelago, we went to Lindingö island late this morning and were the first ones through the gate of Millesgården, art museum and terraced sculpture park. Carl Milles studied under Rodin in Paris at the turn of the century. Sculpting with neo-classical brio, Carl become Sweden’s answer to Gustav…
Fotografiska
Post by Grubb. We took a ferry from the Thiel Gallery. And ended up at Stockholm’s Photography Museum. Before we checked out the exhibits, we had lunch at a restaurant on the top floor. Great view. Some people were enjoying it less than others. After lunch, the exhibits. Diana Markosian documented her journey to America comparing the soap…
Bergman
Post by Grubb. And I don’t mean Ingrid, or Ingmar, but Oskar, the painter. His was the biggest collection at the Thiel Gallery that we traveled to today. On the outskirts of Stockholm past the American Embassy and expansive green equestrian grounds, the Thiel Gallery is nestled among expensive villas overlooking an undeveloped stretch of coastline. The…
Vasa
Post by Grubb. Still on the Djurgården island, we couldn’t resist the Vasa Museum. This an immense maritime museum built around an almost fully intact 17th century 64- gun warship that sank in 1628 and was salvaged in 1961. The Vasa gives you an idea why Sweden was so great a power during the Thirty-Years…
Tunnel of Viking adventure
Post by Grubb. Around noon we took the ferry from Gamla Stan to visit the Viking Museum on Djurgården Island. I was captivated by the museum’s mapped historical timeline. Given the extent of the three-hundred year extended Viking tour, it’s a wonder that we all don’t have a drop of that marauding Nordic blood in our veins. And…
Nobel Flashback
Post by Grubb. After our first stop in Gamla Stan where we had been awestruck by the Stockholm Cathedral (four hosannas), we cut through a plaza to go to the Nobel Museum. When I was growing up in Chicago where my father was at the university doing his thing, my parents would throw a tree-trimming party…
Moose flees photo opportunity
Post by Grubb. I always get a kick out of the absurdities of travel, especially the misunderstandings. While we were boating up the coast of Norway (a few days ago), we took a quick bus jaunt over the Lofoten archipelago. Our guide, speaking first in Norwegian, then in English, was a middle-aged man who directed our…
Stop, there’s an aurora!
Post by Grubb. And it’s inside the Nordnorsk Museum painted by Gunvor Bull-Teilman in 1974. It’s the only aurora borealis we saw today.
Lutheran cathedral, old style
Post by Grubb. In the middle of Tromsø, made entirely out of wood, is a 19th century Lutheran cathedral painted yellow. The uncushioned pews are more like I remember enduring. Per Vigeland’s stained glass told a more compelling story than the vague figures looming in the Arctic Cathedral. That’s Moses lifting up a snake in the…
Lights out
Post by Grubb. The Northern Light Planetarium on the campus of UiT Arctic University of Norway sits on a ridge above Tromsø. Since it wasn’t raining, we decided to walk up to the planetarium and take in a show they have about those otherworldly lights. It was a beautiful trek, like taking a walk in the hills…
Hands-on aurora
Post by Grubb. The #33 bus got us to the rainy forest leading up to the Arctic University Museum. Outside the museum was an example of a hut the indigenous Sami peoples of northern Norway lived in. If we had the construction students at CNM build something like this we would call it a Hobbitat for Humanity. …
Arctic Cathedral in Five Takes
Post by Grubb. The accordion ripple of white concrete give this church the look of a collapsing iceberg that can be seen from miles around. My father’s church in Los Alamos was an A-frame like the Arctic Cathedral in Tromsø. Similar to the Arctic Cathedral, it also had stained glass windows above the altar that let…