Carl Gustaf Bernhardsons folklivsmålningar som källa för kulturhistorisk forskning

Abstract

Carl Gustaf Bernhardson’s folklife paintings considered as source material for research in cultural history My point of departure in this essay is the life and work of the folklife-artist Carl Gustaf Bernhardson (1915– 1998) who worked in a coastal community in western Sweden during the 1900s. His extensive production dealing with both folklife and a popular conceptual world is now publicly owned and found, for the most part, at the Bohuslän Museum in Uddevalla. In 2005, all 526 paintings now at the museum were published on the Internet under the address www.bohusmus. se/samlingar. How can this material be utilized by ethnologists and cultural historians in their research? In this essay, I present a subjective view of such use based on my own research experience. The big number of themes shown in these paintings are such that they give the scholar insight into numerous and different aspects of coastal culture. The paintings reproduce events that the artist himself experienced during the 1920s and 1930s. His memory for detail and his observational ability are of extreme value. His depictions of women's lives are comprehensive. In addition to scenes of the people's severe and demanding life and work, the artist also portrays popular expressions of belief, among these the various beings who prevented accident and death on the high seas. He considered himself to be clairvoyant, declaring that he could see the supernatural beings that he depicted in his paintings. The artist has made an important contribution to posterity due to his painstaking pictoral documentation and the textual comments he has written on the backs of his paintings. These have to do with ways of life in everyday situations and on festive occasions, and also deal with the popular conceptual world as this was manifested in a pre-industrial farming and fishing society. The major portion of this material has never been utilized in research, but may be made better use of in the future after having been published on the Internet.