Litografiskt Allehanda 1859-1865 : Konsten att skapa ett album för svensk konst

The aim of my thesis is to study the release and the project of Litografiskt Allehanda, an art magazine covering contemporary Swedish art and artists, published from 1859 to 1865. My purpose is to look at the choice of the published material for Litografiskt Allehanda, the influence the contributing artists, how the work with advertisement and subscriptions was made and if it fulfilled its own purpose. Through a social and communicative perspective I am studying the relations between the different actors like the publicists, the artists, the subscribers and also the interaction between the lithographs and the texts. Litografiskt Allehanda was the first successful lithographic work produced in Sweden, and the release lasted for six years. The printer and lithographer Axel Jacob Salmson, who was the founder of the magazine, led the printing work for two years before Sigfrid Flodin, a bookseller, took over and continued the work for another four years. The idea with Litografiskt Allehanda was to reach out to people all over Sweden and give everyone an opportunity to enjoy art, something that usually was exclusively for the upper class in the big cities. The analysis shows that there were people in smaller cities that subscribed to the magazine and also that the amount increased every year. Every volume contained 48 lithographic posters with a diversity of genres, from portraits and landscapes to some with more ethnographic character and ancient Nordic motives. The content became more Swedish with every year and letters show that the participating artists had quite a big influence over the published material. Every poster was accompanied by a text, which didn’t necessary had anything to do with the image, but was meant to create some entertainment for the reader. Some of these essays were written by special authors, while some were written by the artists themselves. Even if Litografiskt Allehanda is mentioned in almost every reference as being of great importance for the development of lithography and its proliferation in Sweden, there is nothing written that is just about the magazine