All the light on Anna-Eva Bergman
About the exhibition "Anna-Eva Bergman - Journey to the Interior" to be seen until 16 July 2023 at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris.
In her article in the April issue of Beaux Arts Magazine, Daphné Bétard calls Anna-Eva Bergman "the alchemist with golden hands". This painter, born in Stockholm in 1909 and who died in Grasse in 1987, "who developed a profound and poetic body of work exploring the paths of abstraction, guided by the supernatural light of the midnight sun in her country, Norway", has long been overshadowed by her illustrious husband Hans Hartung (1904-1989), one of the greatest representatives of abstract art, who moreover outlived her. The Musée d'Art Moderne in Paris is finally putting the spotlight on the lunar and poetic work of Anna-Eva Bergman, through a rich retrospective that brings together some two hundred paintings, engravings and drawings recounting the career of this artist in search of the absolute, who painted bewitching abstract landscapes in gold, silver or copper leaf.
Despite, or because of, a childhood marked by the fear of bullying after her single mother entrusted her to the care of her aunt and uncle in the military at an early age so that she could work, Anna-Eva Bergman was noticed from an early age for her gift for drawing. The authoritarian lieutenant actually relaxed by painting, and the granddaughter found her only solace in this practice. When she was allowed to join her mother in Oslo, she attended the Academy of Applied Arts before continuing her education at the Oslo School of Fine Arts at the age of 18. "The academic art of Norwegian painters bores her," notes the Beaux Arts Magazine journalist. "She prefers Klimt, Munch, whose symbolist style she imitates, and Turner for his fiery style.
She continued her apprenticeship in Vienna, where she had followed her mother, at the Kunstgewerbeschule with Professor Eugen Steinhof, who enchanted her with his atypical methods. Close to the Bauhaus, Steinhof pushed his students towards non-figurative painting and encouraged them to find their own way with total freedom of inspiration. "Anna-Eva worked hard at it, but was caught up in acute attacks of colitis that would make her suffer all her life and force her to be hospitalised regularly, as during her stay in Vienna," recalls Daphné Bétard. She then left to regain her strength on the Côte d'Azur before moving to Paris and becoming a student of the painter and engraver André Lhote. It was there, at a ball given by a friend, that her path crossed that of Hans Hartung. Love at first sight and marriage followed. The couple settled in Dresden and travelled extensively.
Although she exhibited her work at the Heinrich Kühl Gallery in Dresden and in Oslo in 1931, her marriage to Hans Hartung marked a break in her career, for after travelling around Europe, on her return to Norway in 1939, Anna-Eva abandoned painting, due to her health, for journalism and illustration. "To make a living, she sold illustration drawings to the Viennese daily newspapers, in which she sketched the failings of her contemporaries with an acidic pencil stroke, in a style close to that of George Grosz and New Objectivity," the journalist reports. "On her easel appear the first landscapes inspired by her travels in the South of France but also in the fjords of Norway. The power of the rock, the vertigo of the steep coastline, the dazzling light on the icy water, all stirred a new feeling in her. It will take about fifteen years for it to fully reveal itself on canvas.
If Anna-Eva Bergman's first works of art for sale are strongly influenced by the magic realism of the expressionist artists of the German school of New Objectivity, her paintings and watercolours show her interest in the golden ratio or architecture and announce the simple, constructed forms of her future work. Her return to Oslo and to painting in 1940, two years after her divorce from Hans Hartung, who wanted her by his side but did not understand her desire for autonomy, further underlined this simplification; she set out to transcribe the landscapes of her native country through a stripped-down expression. Thus, by combining the use of dark tones and silver and gold leaf, which she uses as pictorial layers, her art tends towards abstraction. This use of metal leaves, the artist's signature, is in fact a desire to evoke light while producing an illusion of depth and relief. His art evolves towards more abstraction and what were originally fjords and trees become mountains, boats and horizons. The horizons, which are represented by geometrical patterns that stand out against the background of the canvas, signify for the artist eternity, the infinite, the beyond the known, and will fascinate her to the end.
In 1944 she married an engineer and amateur painter, Frithjof Lange, the son of her friend the architect Christian Lange. He played a decisive role in her career. As a cathedral restorer, it was he who introduced Anna-Eva Bergman to the technique of gold, silver, pewter, bronze, aluminium and copper leaf, and awakened her interest in the golden ratio. After the war, she was ready. "We must leave our old world and enter the new. It is a perilous leap. Abstract art," she wrote in her notebooks. In 1950, the artist held another exhibition at the Blomqvist Art Gallery in Oslo. But it was with her lifelong partner that she wanted to share this exaltation, this "state of untouched bliss". Anna-Eva Bergman and Hans Hartung therefore resumed a correspondence to discuss all this. And he wants to see her again. But this time she takes her time, as she is busy with her art.
She returned to Paris in 1952 and fell back into the arms of Hans Hartung. He too had remarried, to the artist Roberta Gonzalez, daughter of the sculptor Julio Gonzalez. Too bad. They both divorced their respective spouses and remarried. Hans' success became international, Anna-Eva's remained more modest. "But when she revealed her paintings at Louis Carré's in March 1955, changing material according to the light, it was a dazzling moment," writes Daphné Bétard. "She then joined the prestigious Galerie de France where painters Pierre Soulages and Michel Seuphor came to admire her work. The couple set their sights on Antibes to build their home-studio. They settled there in 1972 after twelve years of work. And they each had their own studio. Since 1994, this heavenly place has been a foundation that guarantees their respective works. Anna-Eva Bergman had a hard time, but she nevertheless managed to gain her artistic autonomy and her own reputation.
Illustration: © Anna-Eva Bergman / Adagp, Paris, 2023. Photograph © Laurent Chapellon - Key Graphic