Oslo (Norway). More modest than the retrospective at the Musée d’art moderne de Paris in 2023, the exhibition of Anna-Eva Bergman – born in 1909 in Stockholm and who died in 1987 in Grasse – focuses on the years 1950-1975. The tour opens, however, with a beautiful self-portrait from 1946, where the artist, isolated against a blue background, stares at the viewer. Based in France – in Paris where she moved with Hans Hartung, then in Antibes – her works with surfaces crossed by diagonals or undulating lines exude a strong dynamism. Bergman, who is part of the second School of Paris, is still searching for her artistic language. Among these paintings, an immense triptych, Composition (1951), long unlocated, acquired by the museum in 2013, is exhibited for the first time. All these works share a rich chromatic range, numerous transparency effects and, from time to time, the use of gold leaf that would become almost Bergman’s signature. Then, a purified form makes its appearance in his pictorial register – a vertical black figure placed in the center of a clear background. The titles, Stele with moon (1953) or The Tomb of Theodoric (1960), accentuate the dark aspect of this funerary architecture but sometimes also suggest natural elements – The Great Mountain (1957). From then on, Bergman’s great affair becomes nature, a nature from which all organic components are absent; human beings or any trace of vegetation are excluded. Composed of unified forms, of imposing blocks of color, built as much as painted, this silent work seems carved out of matter. The artist’s goal is to simplify, to transpose. She is concerned with structure and form to the detriment of the principle of imitation. In her work, the reflection of a mountain or stylized wavelets suggest more than they designate.
A painting inspired by his memories of the Great North
Living subsequently in Antibes – in a place where the Hartung-Bergman Foundation is today – paradoxically, his painting draws on his memories of the Far North, sometimes inspired by photographs taken in the Lofoten Islands and Finnmark. With a merciless luminosity, the plains, extended to infinity, have only nostalgic dreams as a horizon line. The mineral aspect of these strange and icy visions, as if filtered through a window, is accentuated by their geometrization, as with Transparent mountain (1967), this threatening wall which occupies the entire surface.
Gradually, these massive forms will transform: the vertical becomes horizontal with the seaside or lakeside landscapes, the compact is scattered in sparkling mosaics. When nature starts moving, it is thanks to an element that often recurs in Bergman: water. Sometimes they are rains, a swarm of golden drops, made with cut metal sheets, scattered on the surface (Rain1974), sometimes waves, in the form of whirlpools describing spirals (Baroque waves1973).
While Bergman’s painting, with its rather dark colours, is generally severe, here and there the artist introduces decorative components as in the magnificent Fire (1962), where metal leaves animate the canvas, like an abstract version of a work by Gustav Klimt (1862-1918).
However, the annotations that often accompany his works indicate that Bergman is above all in search of a cosmic vision of the universe – the artist speaks of cosmic piety – through a luminous atmosphere or certain symbols inherited from Romanticism, such as the circle (Big round1968, Another land, another moon1969). Thus, the rapprochement of a canvas like the Big Blue Horizon Bergman’s work, with the last period of Mark Rothko (1903-1970), a painter she admires, should not be limited to the exceptional size of the American artist’s works or to a form of pictorial minimalism that he practices. Above all, the paintings of these two creators give off the same impalpable feeling that we call the sublime.
