sehepunkte 25 (2025), Nr. 9

Marit Paasche: Søvn og lykke

In Søvn og lykke. Norsk kunst og det modern gjennombruddet (Sleep and happiness. Norwegian art and the modern breakthrough), Marit Paasche probes the historiography of Norwegian art history to trace its implicit biases. What makes Paasche's publication such a worthwhile endeavor is that she manages to move beyond critiquing the canon and analyzes the role of the language used by art historians in processes of canonization.

The author holds the opinion (with which I wholeheartedly agree) that Norwegian art history is often a reproduction of previously published thoughts, arguments, and assumptions. The same polemical debates, biases, and anecdotes recur throughout time, perpetuating myths.

According to Paasche, power lies in our choice of words used to write art history and their role in in shaping 'truths'. Working from feminist standpoint theory, Paasche notes that art history writing, whether purposefully or not, embodies the author's understanding of society and the ideologies they hold dear. To make her point, Paasche analyzes the cult of the personality as a prime tool in shaping the artist's place (or lack thereof) in the canon. Gender, for all artists, informs the narrative created.

To demonstrate the role of language in Norwegian art history, Paasche distributes her argument into three chapters dedicated to four different artists: Johan Christian Dahl (1788-1857), Catharine Hermine Kølle (1788-1859), Aasta Hansteen (1824-1908), and Christian Krohg (1852-1925). While Dahl and Krohg are likely familiar names, perhaps the reader has not encountered Kølle and Hansteen.

Chapter 1 compares the lives and careers of Dahl and Kølle. The artists were born the same year. Both traversed the Norwegian land and traveled across Europe. They sketched landscapes and were fascinated with meteorology, clouds, and mapping.

Despite parallels in their deeds and interests, Dahl and Kølle hold dissimilar positions in Norwegian art history. Dahl is often described as a 'father' of Norwegian art. Paasche expertly traces this heroizing of Dahl through art historians such as Aundreas Aubert (1851-1913), who equated the supposed freedom of the Norwegian peasant with the freedom of the artist. Interlinking Dahls paintings, personality, and his own nationalist-leaning politics, through Aubert's eyes, Dahl's paintings became a carrier of national identity, a narrative reiterated both in contemporary writing and in museum presentations.

Kølle, on the other hand, is hardly mentioned in Norwegian art history. When she is mentioned, she is described as a dilettante or eccentric rather than an artist. Paasche points out the bias in such language. The male artist is heroic, whereas the woman is the oddity.

Paasche's comparison between Kølle's Urnebildet (undated, University Museum, Bergen) and Dahl's Birch in the Storm (1849, KODE Art Museums and Composer Homes, Bergen) elucidates the limitations imposed on both artists by the ways in which they have been framed in literature. Dahl becomes limited to national narratives, even though his painting of the birch might also be interpreted in relation to his personal tragedies. Kølle's birch representations, on the other hand, are framed through biography. Her representations of the birch are not described as developing a national consciousness, a feat ascribed to Dahl, despite the fact that she too participated in 'discovering' Norway in the mid-1800s. For Dahl and Kølle, the motif would have held a multiplicity of meanings ranging from the national to the personal. Neither artist wins through one-sided interpretations.

Chapter 2 focuses on the artist and feminist writer Aasta Hansteen, bringing the reader forward to the 'modern breakthrough' of the 1880s. This breakthrough coincided with the phase known as the second wave of the women's movement in Norway between 1879 and 1890, but, Paasche contends, these two movements are hardly handled as occurring simultaneously in Norwegian art history.

Like Kølle, Hansteen is often left out of art historical surveys. She is more often included in history books and literary history. The chapter on Hansteen is divided into two parts. In the first section Paasche deals with her early career. Like male artists of the 'modern breakthrough', her art demonstrated her political positions, especially her history paintings of scenes from the Old Testament. However, scholars rarely analyze her paintings through the lens of her politics, and Paasche begins correcting this omission through close readings of her works.

The second portion of the chapter brings the reader's attention to Hansteen's feminist writings. Hansteen was the first Norwegian artist to formulate thoughts on women's role in society in public writing. Not only did she publish her thoughts on women's rights, but she also went on an international public tour to spread her beliefs.

Hansteen was often described by her peers as eccentric, angry, and humorless. Drawing on Sarah Ahmed's notion of the feminist killjoy [1], Paasche argues that Hansteen's grand personality seems to overshadow everything else about her, thus allowing art historians to place her, like Kølle, as an eccentric outsider.

In looking at Hansteen, we can see the often-invisible side of the 'modern breakthrough' narrative: the absence of independent female roles defined by women themselves. Hansteen sought to be a part of Norwegian intellectual debates on a par with men as an artist and activist. But through focusing on her personality rather than her contributions, it has become the norm to place Hansteen on the outside of Norwegian art history rather than do justice to the radical potential in her ideas and work.

The final chapter focuses on Christian Krohg, another 'father figure', this time one from the 'modern breakthrough'. Paasche scrutinizes Krohg's famed Albertine series, both a novel (1886) and painting series alongside his intimate images of sleeping figures.

The public campaign related to the banning of Krohg's Albertine resulted in the novel and artwork becoming meaningful and widely appreciated public property. However, the language of art history, Paasche successfully argues, embodies a misogynistic and classed perspective. Jens Thiis (1870-1942) and Knut Berg (1925-2007), both leading art historians and directors of the National Museum, fill their descriptions of the Albertine paintings with derogatory terms for the women depicted. Such language, Paasche notes, belies the bourgeois position of these writers, and erases the social-leveling potential of Krohg's work and its public reception.

According to Paasche, we can see the gendering of the 'modern breakthrough' become public through writing on Krohg's life and relationship with his wife, Oda Krohg (1860-1935). Oda Krohg is often portrayed as a femme-fatale, yet Krohg's paintings depict her as strong and capable. Paasche makes the case for understanding Krohg as an artist who saw women as equals. His images of figures at rest, like his paintings of Oda and the Albertine series, demonstrate a man searching with sensitivity towards a new relationship between the genders in the wake of the 'modern breakthrough'.

Overall, Paasche's book is a refreshing and vital contribution to (Norwegian) art history. While feminist art historians have long noted historical biases in the reception of women artists, Paasche's reading of sources over time demonstrates that the language of twentieth-century art history is not solely a problem of the past. The past informs our current writing and shapes the canon today.

While Paasche speaks primarily to Norwegian art historians, this publication is of critical relevance to art history generally, which suffers from the tropes outlined by Paasche. She makes a meaningful contribution to conversations on canonization and feminist art history by offering an example of how to use archives to create space for often-overlooked artists. For figures already incorporated into the canon, she models ways to analyze processes of canonization and create alternatives. While it is, perhaps, easy to critique the canon, it is harder to offer alternative ways of writing. Paasche has done just that. As art historians outside of Scandinavia would benefit from the research that went into Søvn og lykke as well I wholeheartedly hope that the publication is translated into languages other than Norwegian soon.

While an excellent publication, the book does have a few limitations. Paasche's archival work helps create space for Kølle and Hansteen. However, many artists - whether women, indigenous, or queer, for example - lack any sort of archive, public or private. Therefore, the methods advocated in this book will not work to resituate all artists. Additionally, the chapters are extensive and might have benefited from being divided or shortened. This book would make an excellent contribution to any art history theory or methods course. Shorter chapters would make its important lessons more digestible.

Overall, what is heartening in Paasche's Søvn og lykke is her call to action. Through her analysis of the long nineteenth century, Paasche identifies times when art history has not done justice to the underlying story of art and its artists. Paasche views her book as a first step, offering the chance for the reader to join her in changing the collective memory of art history. I hope we do!

Note:

[1] Sara Ahmed: The Feminist Killjoy Handbook. The Radical Potential of Getting in the Way, London 2023.