ArtistNorwegian
Bergman, Anna-Eva
1 active items
Anna-Eva Bergman was born on 29 May 1909 in Stockholm to a Swedish father and Norwegian mother. Her parents separated when she was only six months old, and she was raised by her maternal aunts in Norway. Showing early promise as a draughtsman, she enrolled at the School of Applied Arts in Oslo in 1925 and then at the Norwegian Academy of Fine Arts from 1926 to 1928. In 1928 she moved to Vienna with her mother and studied at the Kunstgewerbeschule, where experimental teaching methods shaped her approach to materials and form. She arrived in Paris in 1929, studied briefly at the Academie Scandinave, and there met the German abstract painter Hans Hartung. The two married the same year.
For nearly two decades Bergman worked primarily as an illustrator and press artist. During a period in Spain from 1932 to 1934 she produced satirical cartoons responding to the rise of fascism, and she contributed illustrations to European publications through the late 1940s. It was not until 1946 that she abandoned figuration entirely and committed to pure abstraction. By the early 1950s she had developed the formal vocabulary she would refine for the rest of her career: archetypal shapes drawn from memory of the Norwegian coastline - stones, mountains, horizons, planets, stellas - reduced to near-geometric silhouettes.
The most distinctive aspect of her mature work is the use of metal foil directly on painted canvas or board. She applied layer upon layer of gold and silver leaf, then scraped back through them to expose underlying colours. The result is a surface that is simultaneously ancient and luminous - one that reflects the viewer as if the work itself were a ritual object. Trips to northern Norway in 1950 and 1964 reinforced the mythic quality of her imagery, connecting her forms to Norse cosmology and the elemental severity of Arctic light. From 1952 onwards printmaking became an equally serious strand of her practice, and over the following three decades she produced 254 prints - etchings, woodcuts, and lithographs - working in Paris studios. These graphic works, catalogued in the 'GB' series by the Fondation Hartung-Bergman, served as a laboratory for testing motifs she would later develop in paint and foil.
In 1973 Bergman and Hartung settled permanently in Antibes, where they designed their house and studios themselves. She died there on 24 July 1987. The Fondation Hartung-Bergman, which they established, maintains a collection of more than a hundred of her works alongside those of Hartung, and in 2017 donated a significant group to the Musee d'Art Moderne de Paris. Major retrospectives followed at the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid in 2021, the Musee d'Art Moderne de Paris in 2023, and the Nasjonalmuseet in Oslo in 2023 to 2024, cementing her place among the central figures of mid-century European abstraction.
On the Nordic auction market Bergman is represented primarily through her graphic works. At Auctionist, all 11 items appear through Blomqvist in Oslo and consist of prints - lithographs, etchings, and woodcuts dated from 1951 to 1979. The strongest result in the database is 60,000 NOK for an untitled work from 1951, followed by 26,000 NOK for 'GB 25-1967 Formorkelse / Eclipse' and 19,000 NOK for 'Rod jord / Terre rouge' from 1970. Her auction record internationally stands at over 350,000 USD, achieved at Artcurial in Paris in 2023.