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This article examines ideas surrounding abstract, modernist art for children during the post-war era by analyzing play sculptures and picturebooks created by Egon Møller-Nielsen, a Danish-Swedish sculptor and artist. His monumental sculptures for children received international attention during the 1950s, and became influential and representative for progressive ideas about art and children in both the United States and in Europe. How, then, is the notion of art articulated and expressed in this context? And how are these ideas connected to the ideological position that children have in the rebuilding of the post-war society in Europe? Egon Møller-Nielsen described his play sculpture as a “lekmaskin” (play machine), paraphrasing Le Corbusier’s famous modernist term for a house, “machine à habiter” (a machine for living in). This kind of use of terminology demonstrates how play sculpture is situated at the core of notions concerning public art, architecture and sculpture in post-war Europe. It also encapsulates ideas of children as the future citizens of the welfare state, and thus, ideas about how these new citizens could be created and formed. Modernist play sculptures and experimental books for children can be seen as a means of equipping children with knowledge of art, thereby creating better adult consumers of art, which identifies children as both an integral part of the utopian vision of modern existence and as future consumers. The play sculpture is thus based on the idea of a new citizen who is also a new kind of art consumer, and can thus be seen as a sculptural embodiment of an idea of the modern child.
In the 1953 September issue of
Egon Møller-Nielsen emerged during this era as an artist who presented children with sculptures that were playable and at the same time artistically progressive. He was described as “the first serious sculptor to intermingle the flowing space of modernism with the fantasy world of children” (Solomon 58). While Møller-Nielsen’s play sculptures are well-known to the Swedish audience, and are still in use in many Scandinavian cities, his collaboration with
How, then, is the notion of art – and more specifically, modernist art – articulated and expressed in this context? And what is the connection between educational toys, playgrounds and art? Applying a method by Robin Bernstein, who has theorized the complex interdependence between material culture and child agency in children’s literature and culture, I will discuss ideas expressed through the play sculpture as well as the practices and behaviour it invited.
In the post-war years, the educational potential of children’s early surroundings were often connected to ideas of “good” toys, books and educational environments as a way to improve child development but also as a means to cultivate taste in children.
As the advertisement for their play sculptures in
In
In their study
Radical ideas about children’s play spaces and creativity had already emerged during the 1930s in Europe. In 1931, the Danish landscape architect Carl Theodor Sørensen introduced innovative concepts for new kind of playgrounds in his seminal
The notion of children playing and building with junk was, however, controversial. The spokesperson for these new ideas in the United Kingdom, landscape architect Lady Allen of Hurtwood, changed its name to “adventure playground,” most likely to avoid negative connotations (Kozlovsky 178). Allen represented United Kingdom at several international conferences that considered the effects of the war on children and visited Emdrup in 1946. Impressed by her visit, she started to promote adventure playgrounds in different ways and wrote several essays and articles on the role playgrounds could have in a community, and how the Danish model could be used for post-war reconstruction in the United Kingdom (Kozlovsky 181). The first adventure playgrounds were opened in Camberwell (1948) and Clydesdale (initiated in 1949, opened in 1952). The idea of adventure playgrounds was spread to other cities. They were usually placed in destroyed neighbourhoods, bomb sites or other empty plots and were sponsored and operated by different local and national organizations (Kozlovsky 183).
Roy Kozlovsky points out that while a conventional playground – with ready-made play equipment such as swings, see-saws and sandboxes – operates by inciting kinetic modes of pleasure, the adventure playground engages its user through a different kind of gratification, “the pleasure of experimenting, making, and destroying,” he writes and continues: “children introduce content and meaning to the playground through their own action” (172). While the British adventure playgrounds were often temporary, and in many cases closed down when the reconstruction of the cities’ infrastructure and housing progressed, they can be seen as part of a broader debate about how to rebuild the post-war society. Ideas of playgrounds as an important part of a democratic community as well as demands for more creative play were in many communities integrated in progressive, child-centered educational ideas during the post-war years (Kozlovsky 185).
Both the Danish and the British junk playgrounds can be seen as explicit critiques of conventional playgrounds for children, but considering the context they were created in, they also bear a strong symbolic meaning, where the notion of the playing, creative and independent child is central. Many of these ideas were later included in new forms of adventure playgrounds during the 1960s and 1970s in both the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and the Scandinavian countries.
Several Swedish educationalists and landscape architects, like Arvid Bengtsson, also visited the Danish junk playgrounds and were inspired by what they saw. Soon two different lines of developments could be traced in Sweden, expressed in public discussions, landscape design competitions and implemented playgrounds from the 1940s onwards: junk playgrounds (called “bygglekplatser,” building playgrounds) and play sculptures (Nolin 50). In both cases, the goal was to develop and reinforce a child’s fantasy (
Junk playground in Gärdet, Stockholm ca 1940–1949. Photographer: Lennart af Petersens, Stockholm City Museum. Public domain. CC: License: BY-NC-SA.
How, then, should we consider Møller-Nielsen’s modernist play sculpture in relation to developments in playground planning and educational toys in general? And how does it relate to the radical and progressive ideas connected to junk playgrounds? Although created during the same time period, and with several connecting ideas concerning children’s play and creativity, the aesthetics used in Møller-Nielsen’s work contrasts distinctly with both traditional playgrounds and the rough and uncontrolled junk playgrounds. While the play sculpture certainly includes the idea of the playing and creative child, it also clearly embeds playgrounds and children’s creative experience in a modernist context and the aesthetics of abstraction.
Although Møller-Nielsen originally studied architecture, and as a student trained with renowned architects such as Alvar Aalto and Gunnar Asplund, he eventually became a sculptor and painter. He never practiced as an architect but was involved in several public art projects during the 1950s. After leaving Denmark in 1939, he settled in Stockholm. Here, he became part of a generation of young artists who participated in the breakthrough of modernist art in Sweden around 1945. When his first play sculpture for children “Tufsen” was placed in a park in Stockholm in 1948, it was unique in Scandinavia. An increased interest in the social and human context in which the artwork is included was, however, characteristic for the time. Artists wanted to reach out and beyond galleries and, instead, aimed to inter-act with the public sphere. These ideas were also expressed in one of the most seminal, radical culture journals in Sweden,
Egon Møller-Nielsen in his studio with his daughter Mona, ca 1949. Photographer: Sune Sundahl, DigitaltMuseum. Public domain.
During a time when many artists saw themselves as part of a collective project, aiming to build a better world and a better society through public art, attention to children’s culture and literature can be seen as part of this involvement engagement. Møller-Nielsen’s interest in the spatial form and space, as well as the ideas of children’s creative activity in interaction with the sculpture, are fundamental in his work and are expressed in a similar manner in his two books for children. Even in his picturebooks, the artist builds up his stories as if constructing an object or a building, with rooms, doorways, holes and openings between the page spreads. Most importantly, the books are based on active participation by the reader.
While Møller-Nielsen’s first picturebook,
Åke Löfgren’s and Egon Møller-Nielsen’s
Sculpting and shaping materials and volumes are fundamental in both Møller-Nielsen’s artwork and picturebooks. It should, of course, be noted that while the spatiality of a sculpture is literal and real, the two-dimensional spatial images in a picturebook are based on a visual convention. The crucial difference between a sculpture and a two-dimensional image is also the viewer’s or reader’s physical participation. The user of a play sculpture can touch it, move around the object, crawl into the sculpture or climb on top of it. The reception of a picturebook also requires certain physical participation, but it is regulated by the book’s medium-bound properties and its more or less linear and sequential structure. At the same time, unlike a traditional painting, the picturebook is also an object that can be opened and flipped through. This means the narrative space extends in space in three dimensions as opposed to a single image or a painting. As Wendy Steiner suggests, while the architecture of reality is limited by the physical laws of the material world, the book can play with its spatial and architectural design and structure (Steiner 144).
Applying Bernstein’s concept of determined and implied scripts on a picturebook emphasizes how the literary-visual content combines in a meaningful way with the book’s physical properties and the sequential and spatial arrangements the book scripts for the reader. The book’s determined actions include opening the covers, turning the pages, and (depending on culture) reading its contents from left to right or right to left, but it also invites active participation. In a similar way, the play sculpture has certain determined material elements that invite, or
But why did Møller-Nielsen, artist and sculptor, active at the heart of the Swedish modernist movement, create sculptures and picturebooks for children? And what are the parallels between art for children and children’s literature? As already mentioned, the heightened interest in children’s literature during this era is partly connected to the interest in public art. Many of the Swedish artists and authors who emerged in the 1940s and 1950s considered children’s literature a potential site for stylistic experiments, free from the demands of adult literature, poetry or art (Druker 175–176). Picturebooks were often used to describe modern childhood through affirmation of technique and urban environments, but children’s literature was also used as an instrument for forming children. High demands were placed on children’s books, book design and illustrations.
How Møller-Nielsens’s works for children was described and defined in media, and how he described them himself, is interesting in this respect. In 1954, his play sculpture “The Egg” appeared on the August cover of the influential journal
In this context, Møller-Nielsen’s architectural background is note-worthy. It becomes evident in his terminology and description of his play sculptures, which he, in fact, never called ”play sculptures” – an expression broadly used in reviews and articles from the time – but rather “lekmaskiner” (play machines). The expression paraphrases Le Corbusier’s famous term for a house as a “machine à habiter,” a machine to live in (Marcus 1). The functionalist terminology used by Møller-Nielsen, demonstrates how central the concept of the play sculpture is to ideas concerning modernist art, architecture and sculpture in post-war Europe. But the term “play machine” can also be applied to his picturebooks, where the stories are constructed with the child reader’s interaction in mind, and where the construction of the book as object, the turning of the pages and the reading aloud situation are fundamental to both the aesthetics and the narration.
Furthermore, J.M. Richards’ depiction of children as
Egon Møller-Nielsen and Ralph Erskine, competition proposal, 1952. Photographer: Sune Sundahl, Arkitektur- och designcentrum. Public domain.
Similar ideas are expressed by contemporary architects such as Isamu Noguchi or Aldo van Eyck. In fact, Erskine and Møller-Nielsen’s plan has similarities with Noguchi’s renowned design ”Play Mountain” from 1934, an abstract, surreal playground landscape, which children would be able to interpret and use however they wanted – an idea that would become influential in innovative playground planning (O’Connor 244). Like Noguchi’s model, Erskine and Møller-Nielsen’s proposal was never realized, but the ideological and artistic concept is noteworthy in this context.
In their competition proposal, the artists describe their intention with the work:
A time gone by and another faith have created their own kind of monuments, high and inaccessible, seen from below. It is the time and the faith, that also created the prisoner. Our belief is that all such monuments are complicit in a new dogma, a new prisoner – a prisoner of faith in authority and oppression of opinion. Our desire is to create a monument, which is a true expression of faith in man, to commemorate the past by showing the future, just like the prisoner believed in and hoped for a better future, to build with future generations’ own material in mind – children of men, their constantly renewed hope – which forms an integral part of a sculpture in which they experience the power of freedom – not hatred’s lust for annihilation. (
In their proposal, Erskine and Møller-Nielsen present an idea of discarding classical monuments in a way reminiscent of early Futurist manifestos, aiming to dismantle all monuments and memorials. What is significant is, however, that children are described not only as symbols of the future but as
Was the play sculpture primarily aimed at children or was it a way to engage with the public sphere in the same way as Erskine and Møller-Nielsen’s playground landscape? Could the play sculpture also function as a means to introduce abstract art to a larger audience during a time when modern art was still often met with resistance? A colleague of Møller-Nielsen’s, the painter Endre Nemes, suggested that the play sculpture functioned as a “Trojan horse,” a way to smuggle abstract, controversial modern art into the public space under the pretext that it was aimed at children (Druker 65). Nemes’s suggestion implies that it was also addressing the current generation of adults who were already capable of consuming. A noteworthy detail in a photography taken of Erskine and Møller-Nielsen’s competition entry is that human figures in different sizes are incorporated in the three-dimensional design. These figures, both adults and children, are depicted using the playscape or walking towards it together, holding hands, indicating an idea of adult participation – or at least an adult presence.
Or was the idea of turning to children, instead, a way to engage future consumers of art, as the influential art critic Aline Bernstein Saarinen suggested in
Modernist play sculptures can thus be seen as a way to equip children with knowledge of art and to create improved adult consumers of art, which points to children as an integral part of the utopian vision of modern existence, but also as future consumers. Both the play sculpture and the modern picturebook demand new citizen players and readers and a new kind of art consumer. To use Fredric Jameson’s words, the new architectural object always demands a new subject (Jameson 456). The play sculpture can thus be seen as a sculptural embodiment of an
Children in all these contexts are described and seen as subjects, as active citizens, autonomous and free. At the same time, it could be argued that the ideas of children’s activities and imaginative play are highly conceptualized, requiring the participation of active subjects but at the same time instrumentalizing play and creativity. To apply Bernstein’s term, a play sculpture is
As already suggested, the notion of children as “an integral part of a sculpture,” as expressed by Erskine and Møller-Nielsen in their competition entry, is significant. At the same time, the concept of the playing child is a complex idea. It includes freedom and creativity but it also uses the child as a fundamental and symbolic part of the artworks’ novelty. Just a few years later, in the middle of 1960s, the concept of the play sculpture – with its modernist, abstract form – was criticized for its fixed, modernist aesthetics. Critical voices were raised concerning their function – seemingly more suitable for adult sensibilities than children’s since they were “immobile and thus useless to the energetic young” as Lady Allen of Hurtwood writes in
In this context it should also be noted that the sculptures were very expensive – especially if compared to traditional playground equipment. Møller-Nielsen’s fibreglass helical slide “Snäckan“ (also called “Spiral,” “Seashell” or “Spiral slide”) was, for instance, priced at $3600 in the 1956
Another, more pragmatic argument for the play sculptures’ function as
Furthermore, even the larger sculptures have, despite their monumental form and shape, surprisingly small openings and slides. It seems that adults are literally and intentionally excluded from
Egon Møller-Nielsen’s “Tuffsen” in Humlegården, Stockholm 1949. Photographer: Sune Sundahl, DigitaltMuseum. Public domain.
In the post-war years, progressive ideas of play and playgrounds and the educational potential of children’s early surroundings were connected to ideas of “good” toys, high quality books and educational play spaces as a way to support children’s development and also to cultivate their taste. Egon Møller-Nielsen’s artworks for public spaces, as well as his picturebooks, are characteristic of how the role of artists can be connected to everyday life, the local environment and the society at large.
When comparing junk playgrounds and modernist play sculptures, the idea of the creative, independent, competent child is recurring. But while the junk playground is based on ideas of reforming the urban environment through exploration and creativity – or in some cases, recreating places of destruction – the play sculpture emph-asizes play and creativity in connection to, and performed through, an already existing work of art. And while the junk playground is constructed and used by children only – placed “well closed off from its surroundings” – the play sculpture is not only created by an adult but can also be seen as a camouflaged abstract work of art, aiming to reach both children and adults. It is worth noting that Møller-Nielsen’s play sculptures and picturebooks are produced by adults and consumed by children, a notion that according to Bernstein indicates “power emanating from the top down” (“Toys” 460). If we, instead, understand children’s culture and literature as constantly integrating with material culture and play, as she suggests, our depiction changes slightly. “We see adults producing children’s literature
Both the junk playground and the play sculpture replace traditional memorials and convey a strong symbolic, and in some sense utopian, dimension. The Danish junk playground is a clearly anti-authoritarian concept based on new pedagogical ideas and relies heavily on the idea of something new replacing old ideas and norms. The notion of building on sites of destruction, which was the case for the adventure playground in the United Kingdom, can instead be seen as an effort to replace traces of war with playgrounds “to commemorate the past by showing the future,” as Erskine and Møller-Nielsen stated in their competition entry in 1952. In both cases children’s play, creativity and agency become metaphors for renewal and regeneration.
What is demonstrated here is a meeting of radical ideas of children’s play from different countries; a meeting of progressive pedagogical theories, design, architecture and modernist art. The adventure playgrounds, play sculptures and experimental picturebooks discussed in this article are all based on the concept of creative, playing and agential children. With children as the main target group – or possibly as mediators – Egon Møller-Nielsen’s abstract works of art are simultaneously loaded with artistic, social and ideological functions. Their heavy, concrete bodies and refined, fluid forms express a reaction against a broken and fragmented world and, instead, offer a utopian vision of modern existence.
Beneath the larger image, other sculptures by the artist are demonstrated, together with the American sculptor Robert Winston’s statue “Mid-Century Monster.”
I am applying Robin Bernsteins concept “scriptive things” presented in her study Racial Innocence:
See, for example, the acclaimed critic Georg Svensson’s request that the best painters and artists should create children’s picturebooks in “Kommentar” in
The title refers to the finishing lines of Richard Lovelace’s poem “To Althea, from Prison” from 1642.
Original quote: ”En gången tid och en annan tro har skapat sin egen typ av monument, höga och oåtkomliga, sedda nerifrån. Det är den tid och den tro, som också skapade fången. Vår övertygelse är att varje dylikt monument är medskyldigt till en ny dogm, en ny fånge – en auktoritetstrons och åsiktsförtryckets fånge. Vår önskan är att skapa ett monument, vilket är ett sant uttryck för tron på människan, att hugfästa det förflutna genom att visa på framtiden, liksom fången trodde och hoppades på en bättre framtid, att bygga med tanke på det kommandes eget material – människornas barn, deras ständigt förnyade hopp – vilket bildar en integrerande del av en skulptur, i vilken de upplever frihetens kraft – inte hatets förintelselust.”
Lady Allen, quoted in Tania Long, “Briton Criticizes U.S. Playgrounds” in