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Paper short abstract:

Neo-Romantic images of the magical Forest were coincident with exploitation of actual forests. Such images are commoditized in the contemporary imagination. How has this distantiation of the Forest reified the rupture between Culture and Nature and normalized the exploitation of one over the other?

Paper long abstract:

At the end of the 19th century in Sweden, a neo-Romantic resurgence significantly linked illustrated fairy tales and nation formation, while at the same time the economics of the nation was based on rapid industrial expansion at the expense of vast forestlands. The artist John Bauer was uniquely situated at the intersection of these two phenomena. Bauer's dark imaginings, his Trolls and his knights and princesses are part of the national heritage, but his work also hardened the distantiation of the Forest, facilitating (and inviting) its exploitation. Bauer's work continues to circulate in unexamined adulation, for example in the current exhibit of his works at the Waldemarsudde in Stockholm which depicts Bauer's subject as "Magical, animated nature with deep, mysterious forests."

This paper re-examines Bauer's work and his subsequent rise to 'beloved Swedish artist' status to suggest his images might be read as metaphors for the conquest of the forest by industrialization, resource exploitation and settlement, while they served to distance and distract from the actual violence. Knowing, in hindsight, that the aggressive plunder of the forests has led us to the brink of environmental annihilation, how might the human/Forest encounter be revisited to explore potential alternatives that do not depend on the unforgiving Nature/Culture divide? Or are humans doomed to experience the "revenge of the Trolls"?