WOODCUTS

It was almost inevitable that printmaking would play a central role in Frans Widerberg’s artistic career. From 1953 to 1955, he studied book design at the National College of Art, Craft and Design in Oslo, the birthplace of traditional training in the graphic arts. His tutor, Ivar Bell provided him with a thorough grounding in printmaking techniques including woodcut, engraving, etching, lithography and linocuts. 

In 1956, Widerberg spent six months at the Bergen College of Art, Craft and Design studying under the well-known Danish woodcut maker Povl Christensen, who specialised in producing small black and white illustrations of well-known books in xylography or woodcut engraving. 

Widerberg was certainly stimulated by his artistic environment, but the scope of his pictorial narrative would be very different from that of his tutors and his contemporaries. Apart from the usual range of landscape, figure, portrait and animal studies, he also produced images of mythical animals, night landscapes and symbolic figures. Although Widerberg’s printmaking belonged to an illustrative tradition, his pictorial narratives sprang from dreams and symbols rather than literary sources. 

From 1957 to 1960 Widerberg studied painting at the National Academy of Fine Art in Oslo under Professor Alexander Schultz, who encouraged Widerberg to travel to Italy “to find himself”. His excellent watercolour technique may well have influenced Widerberg’s early development of his skills in this medium in the mid-1960s.

Having completed his studies at the Academy, Widerberg continued to develop his woodcut technique. In 1963 he made his debut at the Norwegian Autumn Salon where he exhibited a large woodcut 'Landscape, Horses and Dogs' measuring 50 x 130cm. The scale of the woodcut was impressive; through clouds of tiny incisions, small figures appear covering the black surface of a panoramic moonlit hunting scene in a mysterious world undefined by time or place.

Over the next few years Widerberg explored the extent to which he could combine woodcut with other printmaking techniques. His skilful exploitation of the medium marked a parallel development in other media and at his debut exhibition at the Young Artists’ Association, also in 1963, he exhibited paintings, watercolours, drawings, etchings and woodcuts. The National Gallery, Oslo and the Riiks Gallery (the Travelling Gallery of Norway) both purchased woodcuts for their collections. In 1965, the Municipality of Goteborg also bought woodcuts and in the same year Widerberg was awarded the prestigious Printmaker Prize.

ETCHINGS

At the end of the 1950s and in the early 1960s Widerberg made a series of zinc etchings but they were completely overshadowed by his woodcut production. Later, he produced a few aquatints, etchings and planographs in small editions and no larger than 15 x 12cm. However, in 1986 he produced a folio edition of 70 copper etchings, as illustrations for a collection of poems by Harald Sverdrup. 

The largest production of metal prints, produced from 1979 to 1983, are his drypoint etchings. More closely linked to his drawings, the images are often intimate studies including portraits, life studies, loving couples and animals. Many are hand-coloured with watercolour or pastel.

LITHOGRAPHS

By the mid-1960s, Widerberg had all but exhausted his exploration of the woodcut and in 1967 he started making lithographs, a process he had previously worked with but now regarded as a more challenging technique. The work of the mid-1960s suggests an intermingling of elements, the building of colours and forms which he first developed with Eugene Pettersen, a printer who had worked with Edvard Munch. 

In 1973 Widerberg began working with the lithographer, Eystein Hanche-Olsen at the National College of Art, Crafts and Design. Hanche-Olsen, an erstwhile fire-eater, sword swallower and circus acrobat, shared Widerberg’s curiosity in finding new ways of developing the lithographic process. Abandoning the traditional rule of one stone for each colour printing, they prepared and applied multiple processes to the same stone. Colours of the thickest consistency were either specially ordered or made by Olsen himself. Widerberg had long since abandoned the use of lithographic transfers and his experiments with colour, paper and pressure now increased in their intensity. As the colouring and printing of the stone became more sophisticated, so too did his range of techniques, which included overprinting, colour spray, washouts and etching in the stone, eliminations and overlapping in the printing. Having previously made colour variations of some of his woodcuts, Widerberg now consistently made variations of his lithographs.

By the mid-1970s he began to introduce purely prismatic fields of colour in the so-called Iris effect. A limited range of colours: yellow, blue and red, sometimes with green, juxtaposed with intensified strength and tone became Widerberg’s hallmark. 

When Olsen died in 1984, one of his students Eric Solheim, continued the tradition of emotive, high-key prints. After a break of almost twenty years from the medium, Widerberg supplanted such lithographic work with a return to woodcuts working with a young printer Dag Rebeyrol. 

Although his lithographs and paintings are closely linked through the motif, Widerberg admitted that he had a completely different attitude to the two media. “A painting is complicated, a thing in motion. It can be corrected and reworked into quite another picture. A lithograph is a fixed thing. It is a simplification where one can only add or subtract, not rework.” 

Highly respected as a printmaker, he was elected to the printmaking panel on the Board of the National Organisation for the Visual Arts and in 1974 he received the highest honour given to a living artist, a retrospective exhibition of his prints at the National Gallery, Oslo. In the 1970s Widerberg’s career developed steadily. His breakthrough at the beginning of the decade led to an enormous interest in his paintings, but his lithographs soon held equal importance.

Volume I

Introduction ‘Frans Widerberg – The Printmaker’ by Hans Jacob Brun

Translated by Ruth Waaler

Published by Labyrinth Press, Oslo

ISBN 82 – 7393 – 008 – 4

Volume II

Essays by Sidsel Helliesen and Michael Tucker

Translated by Ruth Waaler

Published by Labyrinth Press, Oslo

ISBN 82 – 7393 – 112 - 9