ArtistNorwegianb.1909–d.1987
Anna-Eva Bergman
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Anna-Eva Bergman was born on 29 May 1909 in Stockholm to a Swedish father and Norwegian mother. After her parents divorced she grew up in Norway, and at seventeen she enrolled at the National Academy of Craft and Art Industry in Oslo before being admitted to the Norwegian National Academy of Fine Arts. In 1928 she traveled with her mother to Vienna to study at the Kunstgewerbeschule, and it was in Paris shortly afterward that she met German painter Hans Hartung. The two married in 1929 and lived between Paris, Germany, and Menorca. The marriage ended in 1939 and Bergman returned to Norway, where she remarried and spent the 1940s largely outside the art world.
The decisive shift came around 1948 when, encouraged by the surrealist painter Bjarne Rise, Bergman returned to painting and began moving away from figuration. By the early 1950s she had developed a personal visual language grounded in elemental forms - mountains, stones, stars, moons, steles, ships - drawn from Scandinavian nature and Norse mythology. She was careful to describe her practice not as "abstract art" but as "art of abstracting": the forms were always rooted in something concrete, distilled to their simplest expression.
From the mid-1950s onwards, Bergman began incorporating metal leaf into her paintings - gold, silver, aluminum, tin, copper, lead, bismuth - building them up in translucent layers and then scraping back to reveal the colors underneath. The result was a surface that seemed to hold and emit light simultaneously, giving the canvases an unusual stillness and weight. Works like "N°1-1957 Mountain" and "No 6-1957 Mountain" from this period already show the mature vocabulary: broad horizontal zones, a single elemental motif, and the shimmer of metallic foil catching the light at different angles.
In 1973 Bergman and Hartung - who had remarried in 1952 - built a villa and studios in Antibes, which became the Fondation Hartung Bergman after their deaths. The foundation, one of the world's larger artist foundations, maintains the site and their archive. Bergman received wider institutional recognition in her final decade, with solo exhibitions at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (1977) and major venues in Germany, Finland, and Austria. After her death in 1987, the scope of her work has only become clearer: the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid mounted a major retrospective in 2021, and the Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris presented a survey of more than 200 works in 2022-2023, including around one hundred works donated to the museum by the Hartung-Bergman Foundation. Her work is held at the Centre Pompidou, the Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris, the Nasjonalmuseet in Oslo, the Musée Picasso in Antibes, and institutions in Iceland, Israel, Italy, and Germany.
On the auction market, Bergman's work appears primarily at Norwegian and French houses. All 55 items recorded on Auctionist come from Grev Wedels Plass Auksjoner in Oslo, with paintings dominating alongside prints and works on paper. Top results include "N°1-1957 Mountain" at 880,000 NOK and "Un univers 1960" at 660,000 NOK. Internationally, her auction record stands at approximately 353,769 USD for "N°8-1955 4 formes", sold at Artcurial in Paris in 2023 - a result that reflects the renewed attention the Paris retrospective brought to her market. Prices for works on paper and prints remain considerably more accessible, making her one of the more approachable postwar European painters with a genuine institutional standing.