Timeline

The spring salon is a jury-judged exhibition that is open for anyone over the age of 18 to apply to. The spring salon usually runs from mid-January to March and thus begins every new art year at Liljevalchs. The first salon opened in 1921 and Vårsalongen is thus – in principle – the country's oldest unbroken exhibition format. Each work is for sale and the price set by the participants themselves is in the exhibition catalogue. The spring salon has been cancelled a few times, including during the emergency time during The Second World War. In the earliest years of the salon, it also bore other names and the exhibition period shifted. Otherwise, the concept has been the same over the years.

The exhibition was organized by Professor Gustav Pauli, director of the Kunsthalle in Hamburg, who worked to spread modern German art beyond the country's borders. The exhibiting artists stretched from the 1850s until the avant-garde German expressionism represented by, among others, Paul Klee, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Oskar Kokoschka and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff.

In 1939 and a few years ahead, Liljevalchs was closed to exhibitions and the premises were taken over by the Navy's naval base. The navyman Birger Lindberg from Fjällbacka remembers his time in Stockholm during the war years: "After the outbreak of war, preparedness was tightened in Sweden, especially in the Navy, which had been upgraded compared to other weapons battles that had been dismantled during the interwar period. So many people were called to Stockholm that regiments and other camps were not enough. "Liljevalchs konsthall and Cirkus became temporary dressing rooms," Birger recalls. With many young men in the same place, it wasn't always so quiet and in some places the navy's men weren't so well seen. At the entrance to a restaurant in Stockholm there was a sign that said 'Dogs and marines do not own access'." Fredh, W. Terje Eleventh Hour Maritime Memories, Lysekil, 2002

The war years are usually referred to as the "five lean years" in cultural contexts in Sweden. There was a lively protest in some cultural circles that the navy had occupied Liljevalch's premises so that no exhibitions were possible. When the German artists Käthe Kollwitz and Ernst Barlach were honoured with a memorial exhibition in 1949, it was a long-awaited event. Both artists' works were counted in Nazi Germany as entartete Kunst and both died during the war. This was one of many exhibitions around Europe after the end of the war that were arranged to pay tribute to the artists placed with professional bans by the Nazis.

This exhibition stands out in Liljevalch's history both in terms of scope and number of visitors. It was shown only in two European countries, first at the Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris and then at Liljevalchs in Stockholm. There were reportedly 23 other countries that had their applications rejected. The choice of Sweden motivated the Mexican Minister of Education Gual Vidal, who along with the Swedish king serves as the exhibition's high patron, with the Swedes' own efforts in Mexico and so the fact that Paris and Stockholm must probably be considered the most important centres, when it comes to reaching the largest possible European audience. It took 12 train carriages to transport all the more than 2,000 items that stretched from precolumbian times to the present with an insurance value of over SEK 600 million (then). During the transport, the cargo was guarded by eight well-armed state police officers. The exhibition is the most visited in Liljevalch's history with 212,431 visitors. Group trips by bus and boat were arranged and people came travelling from all over Sweden and also from our neighbouring countries to visit the tour. On some busy days, there were over 7,000 visitors. Curiosity: There was unusual rainfall during the exhibition period, perhaps because visitors sacrificed to the rain god Chac Mool. This was heard by a farmer in Barcelona on the radio. He then sent a pesetas note to Radiotjänst in Stockholm and asked them to help him sacrifice this banknote to the rain god so that it would rain on his dry almond trees instead. Lasse Åberg shares his experience of the exhibition at Liljevalchs in 1952: "It is a mystery why my father, who was not particularly interested in art, took me to Liljevalchs one September day in 1952 to see the exhibition Mexican Art from antiquity to the present. It was an overwhelming experience for little Lars with skulls, dramatic paintings by Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, ancient sculptures and suggestive graphics. The exhibition was one of the most visited that Liljevalchs had /... / and I found out that one of my favorite artists, Öyvind Fahlström, moonlighted as a guard during the exhibition period. Maybe he told me I couldn't touch the canded skull."

Two years after the artist's death, a large memorial exhibition was arranged by Carl Kylberg, the artist who was a great role model for, among others, the Gothenburg school students. In connection with an earlier exhibition at Liljevalchs, the artist himself wrote a call to visitors: "To the visitor! First, a warm welcome! There's only one thing I want to ask of You. There is a wardrobe for outerwear in the entrance hall and I ask you – along with your clothes, also hang in any pendant, which consists of habitual, preconceived notions or perhaps prejudice. Only then, when you have freed yourself from these long-suffering thoughts, can you perhaps enjoy my paintings with a little pleasure." Two years earlier, in 1952, shortly after the artist's death, a major exhibition with Carl Kylberg was arranged in Paris. He was then the first foreign (not in France resident) artist to be invited by the French state to exhibit at the Palais des Beaux-Arts.

During this decade, no less than 15 international exhibitions were arranged. After the Second World War, many countries wanted to work together in international organisations to avoid major new wars and facilitate economic development. In 1946, for example, the United Nations was formed to work for peace and security. The purpose of these international exhibitions was usually to strengthen relations and cultural exchanges between the countries, which is why each country's embassy was involved in the exhibition process, usually with the king or head of state as the supreme patron. The texts in Liljevalch's exhibition catalogues from this time were often explicitly political with the hope of good relations and trade relations.

When Liljevalch's art gallery exhibited Arman in the early 1970s, he was one of the brightest stars among the artists of the time. In the 1960s, Arman co-founded the group "Nouveaux Réalistes" with César, Jean Tinguely and Yves Klein, among others. This direction of art is seen as the European equivalent of pop art in the United States. In a press clip about the exhibition, Arman told how he and Yves Klein had divided the world among themselves – Yves Klein would address in his art what was organic while Arman would devote himself to what was industrially produced. In the exhibition Accumulations Renault, which was a collaboration with the car company Renault, Arman exhibited sculptures and objects created from different parts from the car factory.

As part of giving women an opportunity for their own livelihood, Sophie Adlersparre started the Friends of Handicraft Association in 1874. From the very beginning, in parallel with the artistic work, there was an educational ambition. At the turn of the century, Carin Wästberg and Maja Sjöström stood for the artistic expression together with the art industry designers Gunnar Wennerberg and Alf Wallander and the artists Anna Boberg, Carl Larsson and Anders Zorn. In the mid-1950s, production consisted mainly of utility products such as furniture fabrics, curtains and carpets; only the artist Alf Munthe was attached to HV for the artistic work. Then Edna Martin took over as direct rice and under her leadership the textile monumental art developed. She was later attached to Konstfack where she could further develop the textile art. Until the exhibition at Liljevalchs, HV had collaborated with some 50 artists, including Lennart Rodhe, Max Walter Svanberg, Endre Nemes, Karl Axel Pehrson, Lenke Rothman, Siri Derkert and Olle Bærtling. Edna Martin once asked a critic in the daily press about the reason why textiles were not judged as art was a lack of interest, ignorance or sheer reluctance and received the answer "as much of each".

After World War II, the United States and, above all, New York became an important center of avant-garde art: abstract expressionism in the 1950s, pop art in the 1960s and 1970s, and postmodernism in the 1980s. The exhibition American 1980s consisted of a collection from neue galerie in German Aachen belonging to the chocolate manufacturer Peter Ludwig and his wife Irene. Alongside Charles Saatchi in Britain, Ludwig was one of the largest collectors of American postwar art in Europe. Much of the exhibition at Liljevalchs consisted of graffiti art with artists such as A-one, NOC 167, Lady Pink, John CRASH Matos, DAZE, Futura 2000, TOXIC with several clays. Lars Nittve, who was then an art critic in Svenska Dagbladet, was not impressed by this graffiti: "Daze! Crash!! Lee!!! Noc 167!!!! I'm in the exhibition American 80's at Liljevalchs. The thunderous inferno of the Far Underground, on neat paintings in the halls of the art gallery, transforms the proud fanfare into a sad memento about what the Arts Council calls 'the negative side effects of commercialism'." Today, several of these artists are seen as important pioneers in graffiti art. Also at the exhibition were several of the greatest artists of American postmodernism, such as Eric Fischl, Julian Schnabel, Robert Longo, David Salle and Jean-Michel Basquiat.

In the autumn of 1985 until the beginning of 1986, the major Nordic initiative in Nordic painting was shown at Nationalmuseum. It was the first time Nordic art from this important period was highlighted in a uniform presentation. Although there were female artists in this exhibition (Anna Ancher, Helene Schjerfbeck, Maria Wiik, Harriet Backer, Kitty Kielland, Eva Bonnier and Hanna Pauli) the male artists were in clear dominance in number. When Liljevalchs showed the exhibition De drogo to Paris, the female artists who had been shown at the Nationalmuseum were also present, but also many women who had been noticed during their time but then forgotten and disappeared from art history. A total of 250 works were shown. Common to these artists was 1880s Paris, where women could educate themselves and live in freer circumstances than in their home country. The exhibition was the great success of the 1980s with queues ringing in front of Liljevalch's gate. The press was also overwhelmingly in favour of this exhibition and there were columns written in the newspapers about the importance of highlighting these forgotten female artists in order to be able to re-enter art history.

With over 250 works, Lena Cronqvist filled the halls at Liljevalchs with an extensive retrospective exhibition. The works, which were mostly selected by the artist himself, were thematically hung in different rooms with "Girls" in a couple of halls, "Family Life", "Madonnor", and "The Painter and Her Model" in others and so on. Since the 1960s, Lena Cronqvist has played a significant role in the Swedish present with her self-revealing, existential works of art. The large retrospective exhibition at Liljevalchs, which ran from the early 1960s until 1994, attracted a large audience during the barely two autumn months that the works were shown in Stockholm before the exhibition continued to Konsthallen in Gothenburg.

The artist Anna Sjödahl often took as her artistry a starting point in everyday life – its problems or its dreams. Through art, Sjödahl questioned norms and society's conventions, often with a certain undertone of humor. The exhibition was, of course, shown the painting Vår i Hallonbergen, 1972, with Munch's figure from Skriet teasingly placed in a concrete suburb – an image of the isolated toddler mother and suburban prince who has almost become an icon for the 1970s. It was also the work selected for the exhibition poster. The retrospective exhibition ranged from the clearly political works of the 1960s and 1970s across the landscapes to the more abstract paintings of recent years.

Barbro Bäckström has mainly come to be associated with her mesh sculptures of bodies in rebar or iron cloth that she started making in the early 1960s. In her work, she often had a mental dialogue with other artists, both from art history and now alive. The then head of Liljevalchs, Bo Nilsson, therefore chose to exhibit another artist, John Coplans, in parallel with Barbro Bäckström's work. Like Barbro Bäckström, Coplans used the human body in his artistry, but not as sculpture but in photographic form. In addition to sculptures, the exhibition also featured paintings and drawings from the 1960s until the artist's death in 1990.

The exhibition featured Warhol's late production, from 1972 until his death in 1987, about 300 photos, paintings, prints, portraits and more. Pop art was then a closed chapter and Warhol stepped forward as a more experimental artist than ever before. Some of the walls of the exhibition were covered with Warhol wallpaper: Mao, Self-portrait, Fish and just as Warhol himself wanted, his own works hung on these wallpapered walls. Andy Warhol was one of the first to use images from the media – mainly photographs from newspapers – in his work, but he was also an almost tireless photographer. In thousands of images, he has depicted his own life, his friends and colleagues from the art world and jetset circles in New York. A selection of these were shown at the exhibition. The then head of Liljevalchs, Bo Nilsson, about the exhibition: "Many people have not seen what Warhol did in the last years of his career. After the assassination attempt (Valerie Solana's attempted murder in 1968, reds note), the motives and thoughts behind the images changed; it became more black and more serious. Andy Warhol became more political and when his friends started dying in the 1980s of AIDS, addiction and other things, it manifested itself in art." This was a walking exhibition on display in Düsseldorf, Liechtenstein, Stockholm and Lyon. During the four months of the exhibition in Stockholm, it drew a record audience.

When Sophie Tottie put on her mid-career exhibition at Liljevalchs, it was her biggest to date. Tottie's art revolves around existential issues such as philosophy and politics, science history and atomic physics, reason and speculation. In her works, she moves freely between different media such as painting, drawing, video, photography and objects. The exhibition began already outside Liljevalchs with long, white weasers in synthetics with red letters or images forming a line that continued into the first exhibition hall. Some of the works were painted directly on the walls of liljevalch's halls.

The exhibition showed Märta Måås-Fjetterström's artistic development from the tapestries of youth in winding Art Nouveau style to later years' advanced designs. Walls and floors were covered with a selection of 150 unique works, from 1919 to 2009, created by the most well-known names of textile art and in recent years also by the younger generation of Swedish contemporary art as well as designers and architects. One of the walls of the sculpture hall became a "yarn wall", covered with the colour of thousands of wool yarn tangles from mmf's own colours. And in the middle of the exhibition, of course, a flying carpet floated in the finest rot.

One hundred years after August Strindberg passed away, the exhibition opened August. A great exhibition. In 12 Strindbergsrum they showed August Strindberg as an artist, playwright, debater, alchemist and human being. Liljevalchs also introduced a living Strindberg to the exhibition. "Liljevalch's communication work with a highly living August Strindberg – a person in our own time, here and now – attracted the attention of many. Before and during Liljevalch's large Strindberg exhibition in autumn 2012, we let August himself speak: He tweeted and Facebooked from his mythical Occult Diary (1896–1908), where each post was published on the right date but with a little over a hundred years of delay. He also appeared on Liljevalch's web and in the exhibition – in both spectacular and everyday environments that our visitors themselves placed him in. Last but not least, he looked down from large billboards around the country. Questions about the image of August – which was used in all the aforementioned contexts – collapsed into Liljevalchs. Is that the real August? And if it's not August, who's his doppelganger? How have you done it? We kept it all a secret, but right towards the end of the exhibition – which was also awarded one of the museum industry's finest prizes, "Exhibition of the Year 2012" – we told: We found an August look-alike. The first step was to find and photograph a person whose facial features would remind as much as possible of Strindberg's appearance, so that the processing – the retouch – would then be as small as possible. But where and how would we find an August look-alike? Our photographer Mattias Lindbäck thought. And happened to look in the mirror... Voila! A clearly useful resemblance to Strindberg! With the help of the Royal Library, we had access to a variety of original photographs by August Strindberg and this is where we made the selection of the publishers for our own pictures – a couple of photos of August in our 30s."

Lars Lerin is one of our most beloved artists, which was evident in the number of visitors to the exhibition in the summer of 2018, no less than 189,347 people saw the exhibition. Even so, the figures from the Mexican exhibition in 1952, which still holds the audience record with its 212,431 visitors, were not surpassed. With over 100 works on display from 2002 onwards, it was Lerins' largest exhibition to date in Stockholm. Based on Lerin's imagery, poet and Tranströmer laureate Eva Runefelt wrote 22 poems in the exhibition catalogue.