Europe 25: Street Art in Stockholm

One of the things that I enjoy doing when we travel is looking for the public art – the statues and various artworks that are out there in the streets making the cities more interesting. Stockholm has its share of this, but it’s different from the cities of southern Europe.

There’s very little graffiti in the areas of Stockholm where we were, for example, despite there being a lot of it in the touristy areas of Porto and Florence. I’d say that graffiti was a southern European thing except that Paris is full of it too so I’m not sure what the dividing line is other than that Stockholm falls on the other side of it.

Mostly what Stockholm has for public art is sculpture, and it comes in a wide variety of forms.

My favorites were the animals. You had the standard lions, for example.

But the the one that stood out was the Homeless Fox. I’m sure that it is meant as social commentary and it’s hard not to feel a certain sympathy when looking at it, but there is also just something ridiculous about a fox in a blanket when you get down to it and that is strangely appealing.

There are also many, many statues of people, some of whom I think we were expected to know.

St. George, for example, is pretty well known and he is helpfully a) depicted fighting a dragon, which is generally what he is famous for these days, and b) labeled.

King Gustaf III makes an appearance.

As does King Karl X Gustav, who seems to have spotted something of interest off to his right and wants to share that with us. It probably has something to do with the Danes, with whom he did not get along.

On a smaller note, this plaque depicting the Swedish painter Carl Larsson sits right about where the street scene that I use for my computer desktop is, and it was interesting to see the connection there.

Apparently August Blanche was a journalist. I suspect he was a good one, to have gotten a monument on a leafy boulevard in downtown Stockholm.

Evert Taube was mainly known as a musician during his lifetime, according to the brief internet search that I just did. He seems like someone whose music would be interesting.

Sometimes the statues are just there and you either know who is being depicted or you don’t. The first one struck me as vaguely Indian through it’s possible this is just someone sort of medieval as fashions change and I have no better explanation for it anyway. The second one probably does have a name and if we were on the other side of him we’d have seen it, but from our vantage point he just looked like a guy waggling his privates at the tourists and really who hasn’t been tempted to do that? Even as a tourist I understand that urge. The helmet was a nice touch, though.

There are a lot of more abstract ones that aren’t meant to be anyone in particular at all. They’re just people. This one was done by the same artist who put the big gold statue in the Piazza della Signoria outside of the Uffizi in Florence, for example.

Whenever I see a sculpture like this one I like to assume that the subject started out with a full complement of limbs and cart pieces and has just had a day full of spiraling misfortunes but they keep on keeping on because what else are you going to do?

I suspect that Sven Lundqvist was the sculptor who created both of these works, though only the top one was labeled that I saw. It’s called Tungviktare (Heavyweights) and it’s right outside of the Jerusalem Kebab and Café. It’s easy to miss – it’s only about a meter tall including the pedestal and it’s kind of tucked away behind a building – but it’s adorable. I’m not sure where the other one was other than somewhere in Gamla Stan.

If you’re looking for Carmen San Diego, she’s in Stockholm. She does seem to be looking for a way out, so if you want to find her you’d better hurry.

I think architecture went downhill when they stopped putting goofy little things like this on the public buildings. Minimalism is quick and easy, but it gets sterile after a while. Sometimes it’s fun just to look up and realize that something weird is looking back down at you.

Heroic Comrade Mermaid and Husband Will Protect You, Good Citizen. It is a service they provide.

We stumbled into this one on our way from somewhere to somewhere else and it was worth stopping for a bit to try to figure out just what was going on here. I don’t think we succeeded, but the effort was well spent.

Sometimes the art can just be rather abstract, such as this tower-sort-of-thing in the middle of a large fountain. It felt like my cell service should have been better when I was next to it, but it did have a certain charm to it nonetheless.

It’s nice when the metro stations get decorated as well. This is what you see when you come off the train platform at Huddinge and head down toward the exits.

And if you are headed into the big metro station in Stockholm, in the corner of the plaza is this sculpture. It’s designed to be a place where people can sit for a bit and it’s always a lovely thing when art and everyday life merge like that. We passed it many times on our travels in and out of the city and there was usually someone there.

But not all public art in Stockholm is sculpture. Some of it is painted. If you go into the metro station in Stockholm City the various levels are sort of color-coded (our level was blue) and they’re nicely decorated as well so it’s interesting to walk along to get your train.

The Ocean Bus seemed interesting. Not interesting enough for us to buy tickets to get on, mind you, but certainly interesting enough to pause as it rumbled by.

And there are little things here and there, things that you might miss if you weren’t looking right at them. There’s this streetlight, for example.

And this street sign, which someone has decorated appropriately though I hope nobody alerts the House of Mouse because their lawyers are a notably humorless bunch.

Art is everywhere if you think to look for it, and that is one of the things that keeps us all human in these parlous times.