ArtistNorwegianb.1912–d.1993
Arne Durban
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Arne Durban was born on 16 June 1912 in Kristiania, the city that would be renamed Oslo the following year. His path into sculpture was indirect: he trained first as a furniture designer at Statens Håndverks- og Kunstindustriskole before moving to the State Academy of Fine Arts in Oslo, where he studied sculpture under professor Wilhelm Rasmussen. He debuted at the Autumn Exhibition in 1933 with a child's head in soapstone and a bronze portrait bust of the wife of director Lorentz Vogt, two works that already established what would become the twin poles of his practice: intimate portrait sculpture and the depiction of the human figure at its most unguarded.
Durban spent the following decades building one of the most geographically distributed sculptural presences in Norwegian art. His works came to stand in more than thirty Norwegian cities, a reach achieved not through large-scale public commissions alone but through a sustained output of statuettes, interior sculptures, and smaller figurative bronzes that found their way into private and institutional collections across the country. He worked almost exclusively in bronze, a material whose capacity to register fine surface detail suited his approach: a controlled naturalism with no interest in drama or large gestural effects, characterized instead by restrained line and close attention to the body's quiet rhythms.
He was particularly associated with two types of subject. The first was portraiture of public figures: his 1959 monument to Oscar Mathisen, the speed skating champion, stands at Frogner Stadium in Oslo and shows the skater mid-shift, weight transferring from one leg to the other in a rare instance of movement in Durban's otherwise composed work. He also created a sculpture of museum founder Anders Sandvig and portrait busts of figures including Rudolph Thygesen and Henrik Groth. The second and perhaps more characteristic body of work was his series of children, standing, kneeling, sitting, rendered with the unidealized directness he brought to all his figure work. The best-known of these is "Verdens midtpunkt" (The Center of the World), a standing child examining its own navel, a life-size version of which stands in the city park of Porsgrunn.
Alongside his sculptural work, Durban maintained a parallel career as a writer and art critic. He wrote reviews for the newspapers Morgenbladet, Morgenposten, and Handels- og Sjøfartstidende, and held regular columns in the magazines Magasinet For Alle and Farmand. His critical writing extended to book-length studies, including a biography of Christian Sinding, a study of Gustav Vigeland, a monograph on Kaare Espolin Johnson, and "Norsk skulptur gjennom hundre år" (Norwegian Sculpture Through a Hundred Years).
Durban died on 18 March 1993 in Oslo at the age of 80, leaving behind a career that had shaped the visual landscape of Norwegian public space in ways that outlasted most of his contemporaries.
At auction, Durban's work appears almost entirely through Norwegian houses, with Grev Wedels Plass Auksjoner accounting for 59 of 65 recorded lots. The top results reflect collector confidence in his figurative bronzes: "Pike med due" (Girl with Dove) achieved 105,000 NOK, "Standing boy" reached 100,000 NOK, and "Tulle med and" (Tulle with Duck) sold for 90,000 NOK. These prices confirm sustained demand for the intimate child subjects that remain his most recognized work on the secondary market.