Contemporary art

Carl Larsson's Contemporary Art (1888) is an unusual meta-artistic work — the Swedish painter depicting contemporary art itself as subject, possibly in a gallery or studio setting where current work is displayed or examined. Larsson, who would become famous for his illustrations of family life at Sundborn, was in 1888 still working through his mature style. A painting about contemporary art participates in the self-reflective tendency of late nineteenth-century avant-garde culture, where the nature of art itself became increasingly a subject for art.

The specific subject of contemporary art as depicted by Larsson would determine much of the technical approach. If depicting a gallery scene, the challenge is rendering paintings within a painting — the specific colors and styles of works on display within the broader compositional space. Larsson's elegant watercolor technique, which was becoming his signature medium in this period, would allow the refined handling that gallery or studio subjects demanded.