Bruno Liljefors. Wild Sweden

The latest instalment in a series of exhibitions, widely discussed on our pages, that the Petit Palais has been devoting over the last decade to the Scandinavian art scene at the end of the 19th century, Bruno Liljefors. Wild Sweden concludes the tribute paid to the three most renowned Swedish artists of their generation, nicknamed ABC after the first letters of their first names, Anders Zorn (see article), Bruno Lijefors and Carl Larsson (see article). The hundred or so works brought together here - paintings, drawings and photographs - once again owe a great deal to the Swedish partner institutions, foremost among them the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm, the main lender, whose curator in charge of nineteenth-century paintings, Carl-Johan Olsson, is once again brilliantly co-curating the exhibition alongside Sandra Buratti-Hasan, curator of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century paintings at the Petit Palais, who has since moved to the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Bordeaux.

1. Bruno Liljefors (1860-1939)
La Parade du Grand Tétras, 1888
Huile sur toile - 145 × 200 cm
Göteborg, Musée d’art
Photo : Göteborg, Konstmuseum

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2. Bruno Liljefors (1860-1939)
The Curlews, 1913
Oil on canvas - 119.5 × 220 cm
Paris, Musée d’Orsay
Photo: RMN-GP/Hervé Lewandowski

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Everything would seem to link Liljefors to his compatriots and friends Zorn and Larsson: his education at the Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm, quickly rejected as part of the Opposition group, his training in Europe and especially in Paris, where he was honoured at the Salons and the Universal Exhibitions, his decisive stay in the artistic colony of Grez-sur-Loing and then his return to his native land at the time of national Romanticism - all these milestones are evoked by the six thematic and chronological sections of the exhibition. However, the same cannot be said of his work, which is entirely distinct. There are no…