Vigeland's Visions

The most ambitious sculptural scheme of modern times was rising last week in Oslo's Frogner Park. It was the life work of Norway's leading sculptor (and eccentric), Gustav Vigeland, who died in 1943, aged 74. Not since Michelangelo, claimed one critic, had a sculptor chiseled such a forest of figures--over 100 separate versions of the human form, in granite and bronze, standing, reclining, cavorting, caressing, all over some 190 grassy acres. Vigeland simply ignored the Nazi invaders, and they let him go on with his sculpture. The work took 40 years to complete, cost Norwegian taxpayers $5 million.

The barrel-chested populator of Frogner Park was a mystic, a recluse, and a scoffer at all art--except his own. Largely self-taught. Sculptor Vigeland emerged, in 1905, from a cocoon of starvation and obscurity, to receive a prize beyond the wildest dreams of patron-seekers. The Norwegian Government had agreed to commission him with a carte blanche job.

Thus fixed, Vigeland married himself to his job, forever forsook all ordinary social life. Even wives (he divorced two) were out. Oslo's citizens caught only brief glimpses of him--when he took walks armed with a heavy stick, to protect himself from dogs, which he hated. One result of his personal seclusion: Vigeland is far less known internationally than his fellow Scandinavian sculptor, Sweden's Carl Milles.

The theme of Frogner Park is nothing less than the birth, life and death of man. There are no monumental mementos of captains, kings and conquerors in the Vigeland cast of characters--just plain men, women & children. Massive males stagger under the weight of a heavy fountain-bowl; chubby children sport in & out of stone tree branches. A bridge over a pool bears 58 bronze figures of rugged toilers. At one corner of the bridge is a 20-ft. dragon clutching a reluctant woman whose bowed face, closely examined, reveals smiling pleasure. Topping the park is a 56-ft. white granite monolith, stone for which was inched through Oslo, halting all traffic, at the rate of a yard a day for one year. Carved upon it now is a writhing mass of intertwined human bodies (see cut, left).

Vigeland's most enigmatic achievement for Frogner Park is a powerfully built man juggling three bronze babies on his arms, booting a fourth into the air with his right foot (see cut). The old sculptor was once asked to explain this caprice. His answer: "In dreams anything can happen."

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