This summer, 122 years after Berthea Aske Bergh brought the tapestry to New York, Southward traveled back to Norway as part of From the Roots: Kitty Kielland and Frida Hansen, an exhibit at the Stavanger Art Museum, part of the celebration of the 900th anniversary of the founding of Stavanger. After the exhibit, Southward remained for an extended period, as museums in Norway work to find financial backing to purchase it. (Lykke til! [Good luck] I’m sure the Stavanger Art Museum would appreciate any donations.)
Another notable time that Southward was exhibited was at the 1925 Norse-American Centennial held at the State Fairgrounds in Minneapolis. We know from a photo in the collection of Vesterheim Norwegian-American Museum that the tapestry was hung dramatically high above the heads of people, and if it was not seen by all of the 500,000 visitors, certainly many thousands viewed the swans and maidens.
This summer I stumbled on a film made at the Centennial. I hoped it might include a glimpse of Southward. See the silent film here. The other photos in this post are screenshots from the film.
The Norse-American Centennial Planning Committee kept a scrapbook of publicity. An article in the Fargo Forum on June 9, 1925, “Final Reunions Mark Closing Day of Great Gathering,” included a curious comment about Southward. “Tapestries stand out in the exhibit. Hanging high above the crowd hangs a blue tapestry with calm, placid ducks floating leisurely across it.” Ducks! The reporter did not look closely.
I didn’t find a glimpse of Southward in the film, but there was a short bit that showed the extensive collection of textiles that were on display.
The film is fun to watch; there are lots of shots of organizers of the event. Here is the Women’s Auxiliary.
And of course a Norse celebration needs a Valkyrie!
There are photos of displays and sporting events, and a reproduction of the ship that carried the first Norwegian immigrants.
I didn’t take a screen shot, but found it interesting that a number of close-ups of organizers revealed that dentistry has come a long way since 1925.
The Norse-American Centennial was quite well-documented. There are papers at the Minnesota Historical Society and records digitized by NAHA, the Norwegian-American Historical Association. There is a letter from Berthea Aske Bergh, the owner of Frida Hansen’s Southward tapestry, in which she offers to display it at the Centennial.
Here are some interesting excerpts.
“I bought these of Fru Hansen in 1903 and took and brought them to America to show the Museums an Art Centers of America the pictorial weavings of Norway, as I had been repeatedly told that Norway had never been a tapestry producing country.”…One of the tapestries is called Sørover, Southward, 16 x 15 feet, woven with hand carded spun and vegetable-dyed yarns and sterling silver thread. The Museum in Washington writes about it, “There is no other tapestry in the world like it.”
She added a comment that is a bit baffling. I wonder whose weavings were causing her “a great deal of sorrow”:
“It is with great pleasure I send these weavings to the Centennial, it will show how magnificent and beautiful the Norse weavings are, especially since in the last two years some very inferior work has been, I am ashamed to say, sent over from Norway called “Representative samples of Norway’s picture weaving,” and being patriotic and anxious this art shall stand always on par with the other tapestries of Europe, it has given me a great deal of sorrow that such has been the case.”
In this 200th anniversary of Norwegian immigration to America, it’s fun to look back at the 1925 celebration. One thing I am sure that won’t happen this year is a church service of the size that was held in the Fairground Hippodrome during the 1925 Centennial.
