ArtistNorwegian
Arne Bruland
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Arne Schram Bruland was born on 23 November 1920 and died on 28 July 1980. He belonged to a generation of Norwegian artists whose entire artistic formation was shadowed by the German occupation — a circumstance that left a lasting imprint on both the urgency and the subject matter of his work.
His formal training began in 1939 at the Borough Polytechnic School of Art in London. When war reached Norway, Bruland continued his studies at an underground, illegally operated academy in Oslo from 1941 to 1943 — one of several clandestine art schools that operated as a form of resistance against the Nazi cultural apparatus then imposing itself on the State Academy and the Statens Kunstakademiet. He completed his studies at the State School of Craft and Design (Statens Handverks- og Kunstindustriskole) in Oslo from 1943 to 1945.
Bruland made his public debut at the Autumn Exhibition (Høstutstillingen) in 1946, and his first solo shows in 1947 and 1949 established him as a painter of powerful emotional charge. His formal language in this period oscillated between a gestural, stroke-and-stripe construction and a faceted interlocking of color and form that retained traces of figuration. Around 1950, works such as 'Protest' and 'Conflict' gave direct form to social critique: jagged, sharp-edged compositions in glowing, near-hallucinatory color. He was among the painters in Norway who in the 1950s made a committed case for abstract painting at a time when the debate between figuration and abstraction was still live and contentious.
By the late 1950s, Bruland had metabolized the psychological weight of the occupation years and turned his attention to the textures of ordinary life. He extracted motifs from his immediate surroundings — construction sites with skeletal building frames luminous against dark skies, horses in full motion, large female figures accompanied by doves, and above all an extended series of flower paintings. Around 1960 he arrived at a characteristic deep blue that suffused his landscapes and flower motifs, work drawn from his time in South Zealand (Denmark) and at Ekely outside Oslo. This chromatic signature gave his simplified realities a meditative, mood-saturated quality.
Alongside his studio practice, Bruland worked as a theatre painter. He created stage designs for the Studio Theatre and for Riksteatret, the Norwegian touring theatre, and from 1948 he held a teaching position at the State School of Craft and Design in Oslo. Works by Bruland are held in the Nasjonalmuseet collection in Oslo, including 'Dans' (Dance, 1949) and 'Protest' (1950). His paintings appear regularly at auction through Grev Wedels Plass Auksjoner.