Friends & Enemies 

Maybe you’re sitting at home, ruing the fact that National museum is closed until 2017. But have no fear – the national gallery is still displaying works and until November you can catch the show “Carl Larsson – vänner och ovänner” at the Academy of Royal Art, on Fredsgatan 12.

The exhibition presents the work of national hero Carl Larsson, with his romantic portraits and paintings, and as the title suggests there are additional contributions from his friends and enemies, many of whom are well known-figures of early 1900s cultural life in Stockholm.

You can find works by Eva Bonnier, August Strindberg and Anders Zorn, among others, and the exhibition is refreshing in that it gives a rounded picture of this complex character. It includes Larsson’s famous cutesy scenes of family and idyllic Swedish summer house fun, but also gives us the story of Larsson’s misogynistic tendencies, where he never approved of women being artists, effectively stopping his own wife, Karin, from creating the art she wanted.

Find out more about Carl Larsson as well as the people he loved and hated at Fredsgatan 12, until November 3. For those who can’t make it there, you can see the whole show in 3D at nationalmuseum.se and plenty of Instagram photos at vannerovanner.se.

Also, don’t miss the Tuesday nights at the exhibition, which are filled with talks on subjects related to Larsson’s work!