ArtistNorwegianb.1917–d.2007
Guy Krohg
0 active items
Guy Vidil Krohg was born on 27 July 1917 in Kristiania into what may be Norway's most storied artistic dynasty. His father was the painter Per Krohg, his grandfather the painter and journalist Christian Krohg, and his grandmother Oda Krohg, all of them central figures in Norwegian and Scandinavian modernism. His mother, Cecile Marie Vidil, was French. Growing up partly in Oslo and partly in Paris, where Per Krohg maintained an atelier, Guy absorbed the rhythms of French bohemian life from early childhood. He later described drawing alongside his father as a boy, copying scenes from Bertolt Brecht's Threepenny Opera before he reached his teens.
After completing his French baccalaureat in the mid-1930s, Krohg returned to Oslo and enrolled at Statens Handverks- og Kunstindustriskole, where his father was among the instructors. He went on to study at the Norwegian National Academy of Fine Arts under Axel Revold from 1937 to 1939. He made his public debut at the Autumn Exhibition in 1937 and received his first theater commission the same year, a pairing that defined the double track of his career. The decade that followed established him as a painter of Parisian street life, cafes, and Metro interiors, work informed by both the French Post-Impressionist tradition he had absorbed as a child and the more expressionist currents circulating in Oslo.
From the late 1930s onward, Krohg became one of the most sought-after scenographers in Norwegian theater. He worked for Oslo Nye Teater, Studioteatret, Det Norske Teatret, and Nationaltheatret across five decades, designing sets for productions including 'Et dukkehjem' (1971) and 'Den gale fra Chaillot' (1973). His final major commissions came in the 1990s: 'Albertine' at Oslo Nye Teater in 1993 and 'Trollspeilet' at Nationaltheatret in 1997, when he was nearly eighty. His ability to move between the canvas and the stage, and to carry the same sense of color and spatial construction across both, made him an unusual figure in Norwegian cultural life.
As a painter, Krohg's work covers a broad register: figure studies, village scenes, market traders, dancers, and still lifes. Titles in the Auctionist database such as 'Gronnsakhandler 1948', 'Torvhandlere 1975', and 'Dansere 1950' give a cross-section of these recurring preoccupations. His National Gallery holding 'Vintersol' (1954) represents the warmer, more lyrical side of his output. He also worked as an illustrator and later as a writer: in 1991 he co-authored the illustrated memoir 'Tankenes reise' with his wife, the actress Sossen Krohg, and in 1995 published a biography of his father. He died on 19 October 2002 in Oslo at the age of 85.
At auction, Krohg's work appears primarily at Norwegian houses. On Auctionist, all 13 items in the database have passed through Grev Wedels Plass Auksjoner (12 lots) and Nyborgs Auksjoner (1 lot), confirming that his market is concentrated in Oslo. Recorded prices in our database range from NOK 2,000 to NOK 8,500, with 'Landsby' achieving the highest result at NOK 8,500, followed by 'Torvhandlere 1975' at NOK 7,500 and 'Gronnsakhandler 1948' at NOK 5,000. While prices sit at a modest level compared to his father's market, his theater work and the prestige of the Krohg name give his paintings a clear contextual value for collectors focused on Norwegian cultural history.