Frogner Park, Vigeland Sculpture Park, Vigeland Museum

First, a bit of geography regarding the title of this post. Vigeland Sculpture Park is a section within Frogner Park. I primarily went to see the sculpture park and got the surrounding park as a bonus. Vigeland Museum is just across the street from one side of Frogner Park. Of course, all of that is in Oslo, Norway, which, if you’ve been following along, you’ll know is where I am.

Frogner Park

Frogner Park is quite large. I’ll leave the Vigeland Sculpture Park portion of it for the next section of this post. The rest of the park is beautiful and peaceful.

The peaceful part is much to be appreciated. I mean, who wants to spend all this time and money only to find yourself in the middle of a war or other violence? Certainly not me. But if that’s you, please seek help for your condition. Seriously. Peaceful is good.

The park contains lots of grass and trees and a few flower beds, that contain mostly but not exclusively roses. And there are lots of benches to rest tired old legs. I speak from experience about the resting of tired old legs.

There are also two, I assume artificial, lakes in the park. One of the lakes is higher than the other. A channel between the two flows under a bridge. (More on this special bridge later.) On the lower-lake side of the bridge, the water in the channel tumbles over a small waterfall.

At the other end of the lower lake, a small river falls over some rapids. It makes for a very calm and beautiful experience.

By rights, this paragraph and the next three belong chronologically at the end of this post, but they describe the non-Vigeland-Sculpture-Park portion of Frogner Park, so I put it here.

Atop a hill in Frogner Park sits a restaurant with outdoor tables on terraces. I had lunch there. I got a table on the outer side of the terrace closest to the greenery of the park, overlooking the lower lake and the grass and trees surrounding it. I also got a view of a statue a bit beyond.

I had a creamy fish and shellfish soup and a glass of wine. The food was mediocre, but what a terrifically pleasing place to pleasantly partake of some sustenance.

As a bonus, despite the morning being mostly overcast and gloomy, the clouds broke up and showed some blue sky and sun during my lunch.

Vigeland Sculpture Park

Gustav Vigeland was a noted Norwegian sculptor. (Noted by others. I can’t recall hearing of him before this trip. “Can’t recall” might be doing a lot of work in the preceding sentence.

The Vigeland Sculpture Park runs along an axis through Frogner Park. If you enter the park where I did, that axis begins with the above-mentioned bridge.

Four stone statues of dragons sitting in tall pillars frame the ends of the bridge.

A few dozen bronze statues sit on short stone pedestals built into the stone railings along the two sides of the bridge.

All of the statues are of nude men, women, and children. Some of the statues are of individuals and the others are of couples or small families. The poses and activities depicted vary.

The most photographed and famous of the statues is “Angry Boy.” It is a statue of, well, a very angry boy. The story is (I don’t know if it’s true) that to get the model for the angry boy Vigeland gave a boy a chocolate and then took it away to make him angry.)

For the record, no, I was not the model. Vigeland created the statue well before I was born. Besides, I don’t know if Vigeland had ever been to Toronto where I’ve lived my whole life. But his ploy definitely would have worked to make me angry when I was a little boy. Big time. It still would, but I’ve gotten better at controlling my emotions so my anger won’t show. At least, not as much.

The patina has been rubbed off one of the hands of the boy, turning it shiny. I read that this was the case before visiting the park, but I didn’t read why people feel compelled to rub that hand. Is it a superstitious good luck thing? And I still don’t know.

I’ve seen the rubbing of a statue-portion phenomenon elsewhere and read about the good-luck theories in those other places, such as Greyfriars Bobby in Edinburgh, the plaque on the statue of St. John of Nepomuk on Charles Bridge in Prague, and I think one or two others, but I don’t remember. However, I don’t know if that’s the case here. Maybe rather than good luck, people think that rubbing the boy’s hand will soothe him. Some people are nice like that.

I’ll have more to say about the Angry Boy in the section on the Vigeland Museum below.

Past the bridge is a lovely rose garden.

Beyond the rose garden is a large fountain in which water gushes over the rim of a large bowl held up by the statues of six nude men. The pool at the bottom of the fountain is square and surrounded by a low bronze wall. Relief sculptures decorate the wall. At regular points along that wall, pedestals support statues of people doing things in tree statues. Some of the statues have only one person in the tree. Some have a couple. And some have small families.

In some trees, the people are just standing or sitting there. In others, they seem to playing. In at least one that I saw, a couple appears to be necking.

Walking past the fountain takes you to a small hill. I believe it’s manmade. It’s composed of stone steps. At the top of the hill, there’s a stone pedestal that supports a stone, cylindrical monolith with a multitude of thoroughly intertwined figures climbing up its full height. The huge monolith was carved from a single block of stone.

On the steps leading up to the monolith, there are more large statues of the human form. Sometimes the statues are comprised of just one person. Sometimes there are two or more. And all of the poses vary.

Almost all of the statues I saw throughout Vigeland Sculpture Park are of humans. However, there are a few dragons and I saw a couple of dogs with some children in one of the relief sculptures on the wall around the fountain’s pool. None of the human sculptures are of people with so much as a thread of clothing on. And all are anatomically correct.

I’m not suggesting there’s anything wrong with that. I’m just pointing it out. While in the Vigeland Sculpture Park, I came to think that Vigeland sculpted only nudes. (Warning: Spoiler alert for the next section.) I soon came to learn that that was not true.

Vigeland Museum

As I mentioned, the Vigeland Museum is just across the street from one side of Frogner Park. It’s housed in a large building that Oslo provided to Vigeland to use as his home and studio during the last two decades of his life.

The museum houses several plaster casts of Vigeland’s statues, including many that are in Vigeland Sculpture Park. But there are also some casts of statues that are not in the park, including some that proved that Vigeland was capable of sculpting clothed people. Among the garbed statues is a self-portrait of him holding a hammer and chisel while fully clothed.

I promised to tell you more about the Angry Boy. Here it is. The museum contains a small plaster version, along with some larger plaster studies for the final statue. There’s also some text discussing that statue.

The process for creating the Angry Boy started in London in 1901 when Vigeland drew a quick sketch of the boy. He used the sketch to create a small sculpture, but not until ten years later, in 1911. And it wasn’t until 1928 that he made the larger version that’s in Vigeland Sculpture Park.

One of the rooms of the museum contains a plaster cast of Vigeland’s monolith but it’s split into three sections, all of which sit on the floor. So I could get up much closer to see the figures carved in it.

The text accompanying The Monolith sections says that Vigeland modelled the monolith in clay between 1924 and 1925. Three stone carvers then used this as the model and took 13 years to carve the 121 figures on the 17-metre-tall column.

The text also says that Vigeland generally didn’t discuss the symbolism of his sculptures, but about The Monolith he said, “The column is my religion.”