”Men kläder det vill ingen hava på: ’Ack, mamma, låt oss alltid nakna gå!’” Mollie Faustmans gestaltning av nakna barn

Abstract

Title: “But no one wants to wear clothes: Oh mother, let us always go naked!” Mollie Faustman’s Portrayal of Naked Children

The Swedish modernist artist Mollie Faustman (1883–1966) depicted the child throughout her artistic practice as a painter, as a writer for adults as well as for children, and in her narratives she made picture and text interact. The focus of this article is the nude and the naked child in Faustman’s writing for adults (causerie) and children (cartoons) for the daily newspaper Dagens Nyheter in the 1920s. The preschool girl Tuttan and her younger brother Putte appear in both types of narrative. The article discusses the naked child body in terms of vitalism and naturism, and within the context of both literary and art criticism. The iconotext reading shows the complexity of how Faustman uses the naked body to embrace a vast spectrum of feelings. In the cartoons, she portrays and visualizes the siblings’ rivaly and play in the portrayal of their naked bodies. In her texts for adults, on the other hand, the naked and naïve body functions as an image of mother love.