ArtistNorwegianb.1888–d.1969
Charlotte Wankel
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Charlotte Wankel was born on 12 May 1888 at the Kambo estate outside Moss, in Ostfold county, Norway, into a wealthy family that gave her both the means and the freedom to pursue a serious artistic education. She is now recognized as one of the first Norwegian painters to work within cubism and constructed abstraction, a position she reached through a sustained engagement with the Paris avant-garde that stretched across three decades.
Her formal training began at Harriet Backer's school of painting in Kristiania (now Oslo) from 1906 to 1909. On the advice of Henrik Sorensen, she traveled to Paris in 1909 with her sister Frida, enrolling at the Academie Matisse in 1910. Working under Henri Matisse placed her inside the most debated studio practice in Europe at that moment, and the experience sharpened her sense of color and simplified form in ways that would persist throughout her career.
After the First World War years in Norway she returned to Paris in 1922 and entered what proved to be the most decisive phase of her development. She enrolled at the Academie Moderne in 1925 and studied under both Fernand Leger and Amedee Ozenfant, the two figures most closely associated with Purism and the constructivist current running through French modernism. The synthesis she drew from these two teachers, Leger's bold machine-age forms and Ozenfant's cool, disciplined Purist palette, became the foundation of her mature style: tight, clear compositions governed by blue-gray, brown, yellow, ochre, and pink, with a sober restraint that set her apart from more expressive contemporaries.
Her Paris years brought direct participation in the European avant-garde. In 1925 she showed at the Art d'aujourd'hui exhibition, held as part of the Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs et Industriels Modernes, alongside Piet Mondrian, Pablo Picasso, Constantin Brancusi, Juan Gris, Sonia Terk, and Robert Delaunay. At her own initiative, she organized the landmark exhibition Otte skandinaviske kubister (Eight Scandinavian Cubists) at Kunstnerforbundet in Oslo in 1927, bringing the work of her Nordic peers into dialogue with the currents she had absorbed in Paris.
Wankel's works entered the collections of the Nasjonalmuseet for kunst, arkitektur og design in Oslo and the Trondheim Kunstmuseum. In 2019, Galleri F 15 in Moss mounted a substantial retrospective, 'Charlotte Wankel and L'Esprit Nouveau - Kambo-Kristiania-Paris-Hovik,' curated by art historian Hilde Morch, which brought renewed attention to the full arc of her career. Towards 1960 she found renewed energy, and her late works moved from the structured geometry of her Academie Moderne years toward more floating, organic abstractions, demonstrating a sustained will to push her own idiom forward.
She died on 2 August 1969 in Baerum. Auction records confirm her place in the Norwegian art market: her work 'By the Pier 1930' achieved NOK 660,000 at Grev Wedels Plass Auksjoner, and 'Donkey' sold for NOK 300,000. Her Wikidata identifier is Q1780957.