ArtistNorwegian
Erling Merton
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Erling Merton was born on 23 April 1898 in Lunner, a rural municipality in Innlandet, and spent his working life between Oslo and the landscapes of eastern and southern Norway. His parents were the painter Ernst Aschenbach and Magdalena Maria Larsen, placing him inside an artistic household from the start. He enrolled at the State Academy of Art in Kristiania in 1918, studying under Christian Krohg and Halfdan Strom until 1920, and complemented this with time at Pola Gauguin's painting school. Several study stays in Dresden and Paris followed, where he worked his way through both classical and contemporary European painting and broadened the visual vocabulary he would apply across the next four decades.
Merton's mature style is marked by a restrained, somewhat cool palette - predominantly blue-gray tones - applied to landscapes, interiors with and without figures, cityscapes, and still lifes. His treatment of surface is precise without being cold: an early work, 'Oldemors kjole' ('Grandmother's Dress', 1930, Nasjonalmuseet), builds the entire picture plane from short parallel horizontal strokes that give the painted fabric the soft, vibrating quality of an old textile. This sensitivity to material texture and disciplined formal structure runs through his painted output. His subjects are rarely dramatic; instead they hold a quiet attentiveness to the ordinary - a bowl of fruit, a harbor at dusk, a hillside - that gives the work its particular tone.
He exhibited regularly in Oslo from the 1940s onward, holding solo shows at Galleri Moderne Kunst in 1947, 1951, 1953, 1958, and 1959. The Nasjonalmuseet holds five of his works: 'Oldemors kjole' (1930), 'Italiensk landskap med akvedukt' (1933), 'Stilleben' (1933), 'Tulipaner' (1953), and 'Fjellknaus' (1964) - a span of over thirty years of production.
In the early 1950s, Merton's practice expanded into serigraphy, or silk-screen printing, after he encountered American artist Edward Landon, who had come to Norway on a Fulbright Research Fellowship to introduce the technique to European artists. Merton became one of the first artists in Norway to work with serigraphy on a serious scale, and remained one of the very few to sustain it over time. The medium suited the same formal qualities that characterized his painting: clear edges, controlled tonal ranges, and an interest in surface as an expressive material. In 1973, six years after Merton's death, Lunner municipality purchased 20 paintings and 33 screen prints to install in the new municipal hall at Roa - a civic recognition of his ties to the region where he was born.
On Auctionist, Merton is represented by 13 lots, predominantly handled by Grev Wedels Plass Auksjoner, with one additional result from Gomér och Andersson in Nyköping. His top recorded sale is 'Blomstereng 1942' at NOK 12,000. Other results include 'Oppstilling med frukt' at NOK 6,000, and multiple works from the 1930s and 1940s - 'Aftensol 1934', 'Fiskeskøyte og fjell 1948', and 'Skjargardlandskap med rodat 1944' - each reaching NOK 5,000. The price range reflects his position as a solidly documented mid-tier Norwegian modernist whose work continues to move through the Norwegian secondary market.