The exhibition is produced by Millesgården museum in collaboration with the private collector Lee Price. It is an unofficial exhibition about Dame Vivienne Westwood, not an institutional partnership with Vivienne Westwood Limited™

Dame Vivienne Isabel Westwood (b. 8 April 1941) is responsible for bringing modern punk and new romantic fashions into the mainstream. Along with individual tailoring, knitting techniques and as a supporter of political causes –Vivienne Westwood is the original punk rocker! This show illustrates her five decades in fashion – from her origins in the Do-It-Yourself of punk and her evolution into the glamour of  couture.

Westwood’s illustrious fashion career first began with Malcolm McLaren, future manager of punk band Sex Pistols, in the 1970s. Together they created clothing, which they sold from premises at 430 Kings Road, London. Their aesthetic shocked a conservative 1970s England featuring bondage suits made from military tartan, tops adorned with pins and bearing slogans like “Destroy” superimposed over a nazi swastika, and t-shirts featuring provocative images such as a pair of cowboys naked from the waist down. The shop on King’s Road went through a number of name changes – “SEX”, “Seditionaries”, “World’s End” – each reinvention opening up yet another imagined world. 

When her partnership with McLaren ended, Vivienne turned to tradition and craft. From the mid-1980s she rooted her work in tailoring and the self-taught Westwood apprenticed herself to the skills necessary to cut, sew and fold cloth. 

Westwood’s “mini-crini” design from 1985, a combined mini-skirt and Victorian crinoline was a turning point. For the next two decades, she created collections that took inspiration from classical sources, notably the paintings of 18th century painters Jean-Honoré Fragonard, François Boucher, and Antoine Watteau. Facsimiles of favourite paintings were printed directly onto her designs, for example Boucher’s Daphnis and Chloe, a painting held in London’s Wallace Collection. 

The Westwood logo, the orb and ring, used since 1985 is part of the royal regalia held by the Queen at the ceremonial State Opening of Parliament, used together with the ‘Saturn’ ring this logo represents the taking of tradition into the future.

In1988, the Austrian designer Andreas Kronthaler met Westwood at the Vienna School of Applied Arts where she was a professor. He moved to London to work with her, in 1991 they designed their first joint collection, and two year slater, they got married. 

Westwood has come a long way from maverick designer, to gradually becoming part of the establishment and in 1992 she received an Order of the British Empire and in 2006 the title of Dame Commander for her outstanding contribution to Britishfashion. Her clothes and products are today sold in more than 50countries. 

Westwood remains a figurehead and creative force in fashion whilst she remains a passionate and committed activist. Over the years both her and her clothing have become increasingly more politicised. Westwood campaigns for freedom of speech, against climate change, protests to end fracking and advocates for the preserving the Arctic from mineral speculation.

On display, curated by English collector Lee Price, are circa 350 items designed by Westwood, spanning from the 1970s to the 2010s. In addition, we show pictures taken by photographer Ki Price, where Westwood appear on both glamorous catwalks and on the streets of London, during political campaigns. 

See all Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec's posters at Millesgården this summer. The exhibition also shows works by his contemporaries, e.g. Alfons Mucha and Theophile - Alexandre Steinlen. Through these artists, the poster's status was raised from the media to an accepted artistic genre. The exhibition presents over 100 works that give the visitor a chance to sense life in Montmartre during la Belle Époque, among theaters, opera houses and bars, and understand the origins of today's advertising.

Featured artists: 
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Alphonse Mucha, Théophile - Alexandre Steinlen, Félix Vallotton, Pierre Bonnard, Jules Cheret, Eugène Grasset, Henri-Gabriel Ibels, Adolphe Willette, Firmin Bouisset, Caran d'Ache alias Emmanuel Poiré, Alfred Choubrac, Georges de Feure, André des Gachons, Clémentine Hélène Dufau, Fernand Fernel, Henri Gerbault, Jules-Alexandre Grun, Gustave-Henri Jossot, Lucien Lefevre, Georges Meunier, Gaston Noury, Manuel Orazi, Pal alias Jean Paléologue.

The exhibition will contain of about 150 art works by illustrator Gustaf Tenggren (1896-1970, from private collections and museums. There will be drawings and prints made as illustration assignments for Walt Disney and other employers but even paintings and drawings made as free art works. The scope for this exhibition is to show the width of Tenggren’s art over the years, from his start as an art student in 1914 to the Golden Books of the 1960ies.The most significant for the understanding of the importance of Gustaf Tenggren is the Disney period from 1936. Original Tenggren artworks from this time will include early Disney classics as Snow White, Pinocchio, Fantasia and Bambi. The initial thought is to have the Disney years as a center and build out from it, backwards into the roaring twenties and forward into the forties to sixties, thus illuminating the evolution of American illustration that he was such an important part of. A fairy tale environment and scenography is planned for the exhibition. 

Gustaf Tenggren(1896-1970) was one of a few prominent artists during the 20th century that have reached a certain fame in the USA. Starting as an artist in Sweden, his American career
spanned more than 50 years and was tightly intertwined with the development of American Illustration Art. Arriving in the USA in 1920, he was established as a sought-after illustrator of the New York commercial art scene. As he had started as a fairy tale illustrator within the German/Nordic tradition, he was hired for illustrating children’s books, a field to which he kept contributing throughout his entire career. Tenggren never went back, nor even visited Sweden, USA was his home for the remainder of his life. Gustaf Tenggren was vaguely remembered and finally almost forgotten, despite a number of his illustrated books being published in Sweden. 

The exhibition Gingerbread Houses from Poland includes some 30 ingeniously decorated houses, castles and courtyards, replete with balconies, garlands and curtains and surrounded by
Christmas trees, Santa Claus and his elves, reindeers with sleighs and picket fences.

The gingerbread houses have been generously loaned by the Living Museum of Gingerbread in Toruń, Poland, which is on the National Geographic’s list of the Seven Wonders of Poland. Since the museum was inaugurated in 2006, visitors from throughout the world have become acquainted with the Spice Witch and the Master Gingerbread Baker and tried their hand at making gingerbread. Before you travel to Poland and experience the Living Museum of Gingerbread in Toruń, why not let yourself be inspired by a visit to the Artist’s Home during Christmastide where you can enjoy the enticing aroma of gingerbread and view the showbread!

The exhibition is a collaboration with The Polish Institute in Stockholm.

In the exhibition Lena Anderson’s World, we have the opportunity to see everything from the first idea sketches to the detailed watercolours printed in the books. Of course, there is Linnea, as well as other favourites including Nicky/Anna, Stina, Hedgehog and Bunny. Come and listen to stories in Storm-Stina’s house, learn to tell the time with Uncle Knut, join Linnea on Monet’s bridge or call in on Anna in her tomato-filled greenhouse. We will also get to know the woman behind the books and see some of Lena Anderson’s watercolours and charcoal drawings previously unseen by the public.

Ever since the book that made her name, Linnea in Monet’s Garden, Anderson’s paintings and stories have captured the curiosity and instilled the love of reading of several generations. Themes running through her art are nature, flowers and the desire to share knowledge.
Lena Anderson has published 46 books and received Swedish and international awards and accolades.

The exhibition is suitable for all ages.

A comprehensive exhibition comprising 134 works, including paintings and prints by, among
others, Emil Nolde, Otto Mueller and Max Pechstein.

The exhibition Back to Paradise assembles major expressionist masterpieces from two
collections, the Häuptli Collection at the Aargauer Kunsthaus in Switzerland and the collection of the Osthaus Museum Hagen in Germany. Both include outstanding works from the various stages of expressionist artistic production in Germany in the period from 1905 until 1938. During the course of 19th-century industrialization, the size of European cities multiplied. Social mobility grew and technical development accelerated the pace of life. Tensions among disparate social classes, but also within them, resulted in various transnational reform movements. A young generation began to rebel against their fathers and pave their way towards freedom. Liberated from academic traditions, art at the dawn of World War I became the radical expression of this particular zeitgeist. The impact of these social upheavels led the artists to a search for new lifestyles. The faster the changes have been, the stronger was the yearning for a new paradise, which the artists often found in harmony with nature and in the study of foreign cultures. 

Impressionism predominantly addressed visual perception and thus was unable to permanently satisfy the seekers and restless minds. Painters like James Ensor, Paul Gauguin and Edvard Munch had already captured their subjective world experience on canvas. Although Art Nouveau had created forms without shadows and spaces without perspective, over time, the beautiful line seemed to have decayed as a trivial end in itself, but a new spark and emotionality was imminent. »Colors became charges of dynamite, they were expected to discharge light«, wrote André Derain about the Fauvists’ scandalous appearance at the Paris Salon d’Automne in 1905. With the foundation of the Dresden artist group Brücke (The Bridge) in early summer of 1905, Germany also  set the course for change. Subsequently this new and emotive painting style was aimed at not only provoking the bourgeois taste, but as a means to shake up the established concepts of beauty.

The circle around the Neuen Künstlervereinigung München (New Artist’s Association of Munich) and the editorial department of the Munich almanac Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) set
forth on a quest for a new introspection. Painting far outgrew the representational and new theoretical principles for the reconsideration of »primitive« art were established. 

Joint to the exhibition and on display is a correspondance by Carl Milles concerning the events in Germany and the art exhibited at the exhibition Entartete Kunst, in Munich 1937.

Artists: Cuno Amiet,  Max Beckmann, Walther Bötticher, Conrad Felixmüller, Lyonel Feininger, Erich Heckel, Alexej von Jawlensky, Wassily Kandinsky, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Max Liebermann, August Macke, Franz Marc, Ludwig Meidner, Gabriele Münter,  Otto Mueller, Emil Nolde, Max Pechstein, Christian Rohlfs, Karl Schmidt Rottluff.