In the exquisitely stocked museum shop of The Garden Museum in London I came across the tasty edition Garden Gnomes: A History† Finally a historically accurate publication about garden gnomes, reviled and loved by many.
In it I read that representations of dwarfs already appear in sixteenth-century Italian garden architecture. In Renaissance and Baroque gardens there was room for the grotesque, the strange and abnormal.
Most famous are the gardens of Bomarzo, Il Parco dei Mostri, just north of Rome. I was there years ago and the impression it made on me was no different from all those others, young and old, who have been coming here since the sixteenth century. Entertain in the forest through terrifying, bizarre images of sphinxes, dragons and other monstrous creatures.
Were the Italian gobbi, a collective name for dwarfs in all kinds of capacities, originally a toy for the rich, Walt Disney’s Snowwhite and the Seven Dwarfs ensured the great popularity of the garden gnome in our time. Based on the nineteenth century fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm, Disney produced the most expensive film production to date in 1937. And in our country, the books by Rien Poortvliet, of which more than four million copies were sold, went even further.
It’s too easy to dismiss the garden gnome as kitsch and the epitome of bad taste for the masses
Like the Brothers Grimm and the word kitsch, the garden gnome as we know it today comes from nineteenth-century Germany. Here were the Zwergen, Gnomes and garden figures For a long time popular with the nobility as well as the bourgeoisie. It is therefore too easy to dismiss the garden gnome as kitsch and an example of bad taste for the masses. The first garden gnomes were initially made of terracotta, but afterwards a growing demand arose and this exclusive garden ornament devalued into a mass-produced, sentimental and banal object in plastic and plastic and thus the exact opposite of good taste.
It is artist Jeff Koons who confronts us with the facts when it comes to aesthetics, about beautiful and ugly and the distinction between the two, which if you ask me, is often arbitrary. Are famous Ushering in Banality, in the collection of the Stedelijk Museum, is always an exercise in formulation, in deliberation, exactly on the interface, or on the contrary, interface between art and kitsch.
Walter Autumn
Nowadays you don’t come across the garden gnome in the gardens of the better-off. I imagine that the Amsterdam canal belt is a garden gnome-free zone. For a long time they were literally strictly banned at the prestigious London Chelsea Flower Show. But they are by no means extinct.
The red pointed hats mainly appear in suburbia and in the front and back yards of social housing in the big cities. And Drenthe is a heavily populated province. Here we find Kabouterland in Exloo, the Kabouterpad in Wold and since 1956 the Fairytale Court Zuidlaren.
Those who are alert to them will see them everywhere. I came across an impressive collection in the Oude Westen, a nineteenth-century working-class neighborhood in Rotterdam. A fishing rod or wheelbarrow are beloved attributes of the garden gnome. The latest versions even wear sunglasses and play musical instruments, with or without a battery. Female specimens have now also been spotted and there also seem to be specimens with a bicycle and barbecue. I haven’t come across it myself yet.
This makes the garden gnome far removed from its mythical origin in which, just like in the fairy tale of Snow White, our bearded friends do useful work underground, equipped with pickaxes and other tools. At the same time, the garden gnome has found its way into museums, Philippe Starck designed a gnome stool and the hip Fondazione Prada shows the red mushrooms by Carsten Höller, indeed, a German artist who is finally making this forgotten heritage more salable and thus accessible to the elite.
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of June 18, 2022