Nationalmuseum: To the Sea!
Nationalmuseum’s exhibition To the Sea! is the result of an initiative by the Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (RJ) to promote collaboration between research and culture.
Nationalmuseum was one of seven organizations awarded funding through RJ’s initiative Art and Culture, which aims to create new productions grounded in academic research. The goal is to make the humanities and social sciences accessible to a broader audience. The exhibition is rooted in historical research projects.
To the Sea! sheds light on how bathing and beach culture from the 1870s to 1945 in France, Germany, and the Nordic countries left a mark on contemporary art. It explores how the beach—as a geographical, social, and cultural borderland—inspired artists to develop new modes of expression through paintings by Edvard Munch, Claude Monet, Anders Zorn, and others.
The research project behind the exhibition is To the Sea! German Seaside Resorts and Coastal Tourism, 1871–1945 by Wiebke Kolbe, Professor of History at Lund University.