Marta Edling, Södertörns högskola

2010-2015

The main findings of the project show that the recruitment to senior teaching positions in Swedish fine arts education has displayed 1) a notable social homogeneity, 2) a "brotherhood logic", and 3) that the professional networks have had a decisive impact.

These findings were a direct result of the aim to study both applicants and appointees, as well as to consider the absence of successful individuals who could have applied. The relational perspective showed, in an interesting way, that gender was only one of several dominance structures reflected in the appointments. Other social axes of power were also identified: between the national center and "periphery", between older and younger generations, and artistic hierarchies between fine and applied arts. The applicants' relative position to all these dominance structures turned out to be a determining factor in how they were assessed.

The article "A radical academy? Power and social dimensions in the recruitment to the professorships at the Royal College of Art 1938-2000", which presents results from the vast collection of data about the applicants and the Swedish art scene during the period, shows that not only the appointed candidates, but the group of applicants to the professorships at the Royal College of Art in Stockholm was notably socially homogeneous.

Out of 50 appointed professors at the Royal College of Art 1938-2000, 39 were alumni, 45 were men, and the majority had strong roots in the capital city's art scene. They were all successful; 49 of them were represented by a major work at the Museum of Modern Art at the time of appointment. The other applicants had a similar profile; these were alumni to a lesser extent - 36% of 329 individuals - but the relative proportion of alumni rises to 76% among the applicants that were deemed to be qualified. The non-appointed applicants were also relatively successful. 60% of the 329 individuals had a major work included in the Museum of Modern Art's collections at the time of the application. Almost exclusively, the applicants had careers in Stockholm, the average age was relatively high, and most were active in the fine arts; very few applicants had careers in fields such as decorative arts, textile arts or crafts.

Some kind of background and career in Stockholm thus appears to have been a prerequisite for individuals to feel compelled to apply for a position. Here we can see a closeness to networks and generational peers, where the school served as a hub. The importance of having a connection to the school is also reflected in the fact that one or more of the external experts always had close ties to the school as an active or former professor. Being a "familiar face" was a clear advantage in the selection process.

The importance of the networks is also reflected in the obvious lacunae that can be observed. The men were in overwhelming majority: out of the total 379 applicants during the period, 80% were men. Over time, far fewer successful women than men thus applied for the positions. For example, it is the rule rather than the exception that the women elected as members of the academy of art did not apply for a professorship, neither before nor after their appointment. Furthermore, the women are unevenly distributed over the time period. We cannot find any female applicants at all before 1952. They slowly entered the stage in the following years, but we cannot see a significant increase in the proportion of women until the 1990s. Here we find women applicants corresponding to 60% of the men. This is also the decade when four out of the total of five women professors were appointed.

The absence of women can be assumed, as previous research has shown, to be related to indications that it has been more difficult for young female students to integrate with the important networks of the supervising professors, and that the lack of reflection and closeness these networks created made it much more difficult to build a career. Drawing a comparison to the world of business, an artistic professorship was a management position which, traditionally, was extremely male dominated and heavily reliant on informal networks. As in the world of business, recruitment was also characterized by cooptation. In the article "Ett naturligt broderskap. Professorstillsättningar vid Kungl. Konsthögskola under 1980-talet" (A natural brotherhood. On the recruitment of professors to the Royal University College of Fine Arts during the 1980s), I thus point to the importance of taking into account the homosociality, the "brotherhood logic", that is a part of such processes. The recruitment of peers into businesses and organizations also appears to have been an active "logic" at the Royal College of Art during the studied time period.

Another sign of the networks' importance is that successful artists without a connection to Stockholm appear to have refrained from applying. None of the Halmstad Group's surrealist artists can be found in the group of applicants during the time period, despite their many exhibitions in Stockholm during the 1930s and 1940s, and there were remarkably few applications from the Gothenburg colorists - a mere handful. The only artist with a background in Gothenburg's art scene to obtain a position at the Royal College of Art, Ragnar Sandberg, was called to the position.

Historically, there has also been a clear divide between the recruitment at the Valand School and the Royal College in Stockholm. Very few people have held or applied to senior teaching positions at both institutions; two very rare exceptions are Peter Dahl and Alvar Jansson. Moreover, the Valand School of Fine Arts has had little success attracting the qualified artists from Stockholm. Professorships/head teacher positions in Gothenburg have apparently had little appeal.

For a long period of time, the appointed head teachers in painting at Valand also mirror conceptions about a regional colorist and expressionist artistic character, with one clear exception: Endre Nemes. In this case, it is interesting to note that it was the influence of professors Eric Grate, Sven Erixson and Ragnar Sandberg from the Royal College, who submitted petitions, that decided in Nemes's favor. Studies of this atypical recruitment directed the attention to the art and design school "Slöjdskolan" in Gothenburg, from which many of Nemes's students were accepted. There were signs that the divergence from the Gothenburg colorist tradition that Nemes's period signified was, in important respects, prepared by the post-cubist and surrealist-influenced artist Nils Wedel, who was appointed as a teacher at Slöjdskolan in 1938. Slöjdskolan's recruitment of Wedel seemed interesting because it was more peculiar and difficult to explain than the recruitment of Nemes, where the pressure from the Stockholm circle was the deciding factor. The article "Teaching Abstraction? Art historical and Sociological Perspectives on Nils Wedel and and the Basic Form Course at Slöjdskolan in Gothenburg, Sweden 1946-1953" thus focused on exploring what made Slöjdskolan recruit such a peculiar artist by Gothenburg standards.

The most important new questions generated by the project are based on these results, which indicate that the recruitment to the art field's elite has not followed a distinct logic. On the contrary, the recruitment of professors shows striking similarities to the recruitment to other power elites, such as the Swedish corporate elite, bishops in the Church of Sweden, the appointment of history professors in Uppsala, etc. Larger comparative studies could therefore be expected to be very rewarding, especially across national borders. Here, the new empirical data on the applicants and the Swedish art scene that the project has generated could provide a starting point for further study.

The publications mentioned summarize the most important findings. Thanks to funding awarded in 2011, the pilot study and the planned article based on quantitative data in 2010, "Ett naturligt broderskap" (A natural brotherhood), could be expanded, as the funding allowed for archive studies of individual appointments that were not part of the original plans. The article is available in Swepub via the DIVA database, with incorporated new findings and empirical data, and is one of the project's most important publications. It was part of the collaboration with the researchers in the 2006-2009 project "Konsten att lyckas som konstnär" (The art of succeeding in Art) in the anthology "Konstens omvända ekonomi" (The reverse economy of art).

The collection of data for sub-studies one and two, which formed the basis of the most central article in the project, "A Radical Academy", was delayed as the preparation of sub-study two could not take place as planned in collaboration with these researchers. The work thus took longer than expected, and this article will be published in Swepub and DIVA, while the printed version will be published in issue 36 of the journal Passepartout in 2015. These subordinate studies also resulted in the article "Teaching Abstraction? Art historical and sociological perspectives on Nils Wedel and and the Basic Form Course at Slöjdskolan in Gothenburg, Sweden 1946-1953" which was submitted to Konsthistorisk tidskrift in the fall of 2014 and will be parallel-published with Open Access via DIVA.

This time-consuming work of collecting data for sub-study one and two meant that the third sub-study planned for the final year of the project had to be postponed. This work is ongoing, and the review of important collections of letters from female applicants has begun, as has the review of the unique interviews with former students conducted by Carlo Derkert and Rolf Söderbergh for the school's 250-year anniversary in the early 1980s, but the results of this study will not be able to be published before the end of the project period.

The project has had an international connection, primarily via British researchers at Tate Research in London. Together with them I have conducted seven conference sessions, seminars and symposiums, and I have been invited twice to present my research at Tate. We are currently planning to publish a joint anthology. Through Professor Anita Göransson and her activities at GEXcel in Linköping, I have gained many interesting connections; for example, I have been associated with the "Network for Intersectional Research into Higher Education" (NIRHE).

The project has been presented to the collaborative group that worked with recruitment and equality issues at the art colleges in 2011 and gave lectures to students at the Royal College of Art and the University College of Arts, Crafts and Design in 2013 and 2014.

Publications

Edling, Marta, “A Radical Academy of Fine Art? Power and social dimensions in recruitment to the fine art professorships at the Royal College of Art in Stockholm, Sweden 1938-2000” Passepartout nr. 36, 2015.

Edling, Marta, “Teaching Abstraction? Art historical and Sociological Perspectives on Nils Wedel and the Basic Form Course at Slöjdskolan in Gothenburg, Sweden 1946-1953”, under peer-review Journal of Art History March 2015.

Edling, Marta, ”Det naturliga broderskapet: professorstillsättningar vid Kungl. Konsthögskolan under 1980-talet”, i Martin Gustavsson, Mikael Börjesson och Marta Edling (red.)  Konstens omvända ekonomi: tillgångar inom utbildningar och fält 1938-2008., Göteborg 2012

Edling, Marta, ”Att förbereda för rummet av möjligheter: om skolornas antagning, fria utbildning och starka fältberoende”, i Martin Gustavsson, Mikael Börjesson och Marta Edling (red.)  Konstens omvända ekonomi : tillgångar inom utbildningar och fält 1938-2008, Göteborg 2012

Gustavsson, Martin; Börjesson, Mikael; Edling, Marta, ”Inledning”, i Martin Gustavsson, Mikael Börjesson och Marta Edling (red.)  Konstens omvända ekonomi : tillgångar inom utbildningar och fält 1938-2008., 2012

Edling, Marta, “The conspicous presence of visual conventions: Some reflections on the visual imagery in the archives of 20th century Swedish art schools”, IJHE Bildungsgeschichte, 2, s. 247, 2012