The neoclassical sculptor and draughtsman Johan Tobias Sergel is a household name in his native Sweden, but little known elsewhere. This month Swedes will get a grand overview of Sergel’s work for the first time in a generation, when Stockholm’s Nationalmuseum mounts Fantasy and Reality, with a checklist of close to 400 works. Then in the autumn, Americans will get an introduction to the artist when New York’s Morgan Library & Museum hosts Sergel’s first monographic show in the US.
Sergel (1740-1814) lived a productive and eventful life that took him from artistic circles in 1770s Rome to the late 18th-century court of his patron, the Swedish King Gustav III. Nominally an early and influential neoclassical figure, he was also marked by Sweden’s love affair with the Rococo and, some scholars argue, by a proto-Romantic sensibility shared with his Rome buddy, the Swiss artist Henry Fuseli.
The bulk of Sergel’s work is part of the Nationalmuseum’s permanent collection. But staging the Stockholm show, even if so much is already in-house, is no easy feat, says the curator Daniel Prytz. Sergel’s massive marble sculptures need to be moved from their usual spots to a temporary exhibition space. Meanwhile, the Nationalmuseum’s paper conservators have to prepare for display more than 200 of Sergel’s fragile drawings.
Sergel’s Cupid and Psyche (1787) captures the god’s early rejection of the beautiful woman who would become his wife. The artist’s earliest sketches for the work, set for display, “show how he wanted to catch this specific moment”, says Prytz, who thinks the final statue is more compelling than a different and more famous depiction of the two figures by Antonio Canova.
Johan Tobias Sergel’s A boisterous dinner (1780)
Networking
Both versions of the show will consider Sergel’s important network of artist friends in Rome, with Stockholm hosting a number of British and Danish loans, including Fuseli’s Thor Battering the Midgard Serpent (1790) from the Royal Academy of Arts in London.
The static elegance of Sergel’s neoclassical art was belied by his private propensity for the grotesque, the erotic, and even the pornographic, in drawings intended for consumption by his friends. This darker, stranger side shows up in works like A Boisterous Dinner (1780), in which the revellers, long beyond self-control, are welded to their drinks. Less realistic than the works in marble, the often-scabrous works on paper convey a deeper reality.
Many of the Stockholm sculptures are too heavy and fragile to travel to New York, but The Faun (1774), which seems to blur torment with desire, is an exception. And some works in US collections will only appear at the Morgan, such as the ink-and-wash drawing Nicolai Abraham Abildgaard, Sick, showing Sergel’s friend, an artist from his Roman years, with a hangover.
The Morgan’s curator John Marciari sees Sergel as a key player in the early phases of neoclassical sculpture as well as an artist who created a daringly diverse record of goings-on in his drawings. Indeed, he regards Sergel as “one of the most engaging personalities of the 18th century—even if you have never heard of him.”
• Fantasy and Reality: The Art of Johan Tobias Sergel, Nationalmuseum, Stockholm, 19 February-9 August; Morgan Library & Museum, New York, 30 October-31 January 2027
