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Frans Widerberg 1934 - 2017
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It was almost inevitable that printmaking would play a central role in Frans Widerberg’s artistic career.
From 1953 to 1955 (age 19), 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 graphic techniques including woodcut, engraving, etching, lithography and linocuts.
The concept that Printmaking was an art to be enjoyed quietly and intimately meant that students tended to focus on illustrating literary works. Consequently, book illustration became an important element of Norwegian graphic art.
In 1956, Widerberg spent six months at the Bergen College of Art, Craft and Design studying under the well-known Danish wood-cut maker Povl Christensen who specialised in producing small black and white illustrations of well-known books in xylography or woodcut engraving. Stimulated by this age-old technique, Widerberg produced a series of very small prints, somewhat livelier in their linearity than those of his teacher, but equally dramatic in the use of black.
Woodcut and not least xylograph seemed to be the ideal medium for Widerberg. He became familiar with most of the other printmaking techniques, but Christensen taught him how to master the burin in preparation for the more demanding engraving in xylography. Here, too, he worked in black and white and on a format no larger than 10 x 15cm, with editions of 3 to 8 prints.
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. This was the antithesis to the down-to-earth, anti-romantic attitudes which dominated Norwegian art at that time.
From 1957 to 1960 Widerberg studied painting at the National Academy of Fine Art in Oslo under Professor Alexander Schultz. He instilled in his pupils an understanding of the organisation of a composition and 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 as well as a painting. 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 to greater effect. His skilful exploitation of the medium marked a parallel development in other media. 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) purchased woodcuts for their respective collections. In 1965, the Municipality of Goteborg acquired woodcuts for their collection and in the same year Widerberg was awarded the prestigious Printmaker Prize.
Frans Widerberg 1934 - 2017
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In 1960 Widerberg designed the book cover for Unicorn Andre Bjerk’s collection of short stories. He met the writer possibly through his friendship with the actress Henny Moen who was married to Bjerke. In 1963 Widerberg was invited to illustrate Bjerk’s translation of Oscar Wilde’s one-act play Salomé, a symbolist melodrama which offered stirring possibilities for Widerberg’s melancholy and mystical art.
He began work on the Salomé theme with three zinc etchings but returned to woodcuts and throughout 1964 made a considerable number of impressions in varying sizes and formats. Widerberg kept close to Wilde’s text focusing on highlights in the plot and on the important characteristics of the main protagonists. Using an interplay of light and dark cross-hatching, he achieved a heightened visual sense of drama. Twelve prints were selected for the book.
The Salomé prints incorporated earlier themes and motifs which became central to his subsequent mature works: the encounter between the fulfilment of life and annihilation; sensuality as the driving force in human life (the embodiment of the Salomé figure), and the enigmatic messages from other spheres of reality, both as a threat and hope.
The Salomé motifs were subsequently presented as individual works in many different contexts but fitted so naturally into Widerberg’s printmaking that the connection to this project was only realised when this important work in Norwegian book design was eventually published in 1975.
Frans Widerberg 1934 - 2017
Salome
Frans Widerberg 1934 - 2017
Home
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- Salome
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- Peer Gynt
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- Moments
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Lithographs
By the mid-1960s, Widerberg had all but exhausted his exploration of the woodcut. 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 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.
“We experimented and had a wonderful time; it was pure madness. In a few months I had made 10 colour lithographs drawn freely on the stone.” Widerberg recalled.
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 all 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. A characteristic ever-shifting colour translucency created the impression of an open luminous space which is found in his best prints from this period.
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 were 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.
Frans Widerberg 1934 - 2017
Peer Gynt
The portfolio of illustrations for Henrik Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, published in 1985 by Clot, Bramsen and Georges in Paris, is a cardinal work in Widerberg’s print production. The folio includes 10 full-page images in colour and twenty smaller images in black and white on the text pages. It belongs to the French livre d’artiste
tradition and is produced in a deluxe format, with hand-set typography and is leather bound.
The theme and character of the work suited Widerberg who said “There is a Peer Gynt in all of us. I have found pictures in the text that I feel can express my own feelings. I try to give each of the pictures content. For me the images are in line with what I have always been doing. I can draw on material that is a continuation of what I have created earlier.”
As with the 1964 Salome series of illustrations in, Widerberg concentrated on creating pictures which capture specific critical plots or important aspects of the characters, but they are interpretations rather than illustrations of Ibsen’s text, which have been translated into Widerberg’s own pictorial visions.