Frantz Gustav Widerberg is born in Oslo, Norway, on the 8 April, the son of stone mason Nicolai Magnus Widerberg (1905 – 1960), and Ingrid Christine Blom (1909 - 1983) an architectural assistant.

1940 

9 April, aged 6, Nazi occupation of Oslo. 

Escapes to Sweden overnight with his father, mother and sister Else Margrethe Widerberg (1935 – 2006). They return to Oslo at the end of the war.

1951-52 

Decides to become an artist. Begins his art training with the critic Birger Moss Johnsen (1988 - 1963), a relative of his mother.

Works as a studio assistant to the Norwegian sculptor, Wilhelm Rasmussen (1871 – 1965), on the monument to Hjalmar Johansen (1874 – 1957), at Skien.

His application to study at the National Academy of Fine Arts in Oslo is unsuccessful, but he is accepted at the National College of Art, Craft and Design in Oslo where he studies book design under Ivar Bell. He is also taught graphic techniques including woodcut, linocut, engraving, etching, lithography and silkscreen printing. 

A confirmed pacifist and conscientious objector, he refuses to be conscripted into military service and is sentenced to two years fatigue duty near Bergen.

Spends four months in London at Goldsmiths College, University of London where he sees Samuel Beckett’s play 'Waiting for Godot', which premiered in London that year. He also enjoys seeing the work of Turner, William Blake, John Martin and Francis Bacon. “Blake, that transcendent traveller, and of course Turner – although the full force of his vision didn’t hit me until later. I remember all those strange apocalyptic landscapes of John Martin; Stanley Spencer – and Lucian Freud, and the portraits of Augustus John, some of Jacob Epstein’s pieces and Bacon …”.

1956 

Works as a student teacher in Bergen.

 

Spends six months studying under Povl Christensen (1907 – 1977), the Danish master of traditional fine grain woodcut technique, who taught at the College of Art, Craft and Design in Bergen. Here, he receives excellent schooling in one of the most specialised fields in illustrative printmaking.

Widerberg and his contemporaries study Søren Kierkegaard’s early existentialist ideas as well as the literature of Goethe, Sartre and Camus, and for a time Colin Wilson’s (1931 – 2013) The Outsider, had a cult following. Strindberg’s diaries and the psychologically charged works of Dostoevsky (1821 – 1881), Hamson (1859 – 1952), Swedenborg (1688 – 1772), Nietzche (1844 – 1900) and Pår Lagerkvist (1891 – 1974) were also read.

He is accepted at the National Academy of Fine Art in Oslo, where he studies under the Russian painter Professor Alexander Schultz (1901 – 1981), who encourages Widerberg to travel to Italy “to find himself”. He receives a grant of 2,000 Norwegian Crowns from the Hans Ødegaards legacy, which enables him to travel to Florence where he spends what were undoubtedly the most important months of his student years. Masaccio’s Expulsion from Paradise at the Brancacci Chapel in Florence would continue to be of inspiration decades later.