ArtistNorwegian
Kåre Martinsen
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Kåre Willy Armand Martinsen was born in Oslo on March 18, 1912, and spent his formative years navigating the Norwegian capital's overlapping craft and fine art institutions. His initial training, from 1928 to 1930, was as a commercial painter at the State School of Crafts and Applied Art in Oslo - a pragmatic beginning that grounded him in material handling and applied technique before he turned to the fine arts. From 1935 to 1939 he enrolled at the State Academy of Fine Art in Oslo, where the dominant influence on his development was the Danish painter and theorist Georg Jacobsen, whose insistence on strict formal composition and underlying structural order left a lasting mark on how Martinsen approached the organization of a picture surface.
Study trips to France and Italy opened a different channel of influence. Martinsen encountered the work of Pierre Bonnard, whose saturated, interior-lit color and freely constructed surfaces offered an alternative to the structural severity of Jacobsen. The tension between these two poles - rigorous composition on one side, glowing chromatic intensity on the other - became a defining characteristic of his mature work. His earliest paintings carry a heavier, more restrained palette, but over time his color scale lightened and his contrasts sharpened, moving toward the warm, deeply saturated quality that became his signature.
Martinsen worked across both figure and landscape subjects. His figurative paintings, including mother-and-child compositions and interior scenes, share the same rich colorism as his outdoor landscapes, where the Norwegian countryside is translated into expanses of warm, contrasting tone. The breadth of his public collection presence reflects his standing within the Norwegian art establishment of the mid-twentieth century: his work entered the National Gallery in Oslo, the Bergen Art Gallery, the Stavanger Permanent Gallery, and the Lillehammer painting collection, among others.
His recognition extended to competitive commissions. In 1952 he won first prize in a competition for the decoration of Moss gymnasium, and in 1962 he took first prize in the graphics competition 'Art for Hospitals.' These institutional successes ran alongside a sustained exhibition career within Norway. In his testament of 1981 he established the Kåre Martinsen Legat, a fund distributing annual grants to graduating students at the State Academy of Fine Art - a gesture that extended his investment in Norwegian artistic life beyond his own practice. He died in Oslo on April 1, 1986.
On the auction market, Martinsen's works appear exclusively through Grev Wedels Plass Auksjoner (GWPA) in Oslo, which specializes in Norwegian art from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. All 11 of his items in the Auctionist database are catalogued at that house. Top recorded prices include 'Bondegården' (1966) and 'Mor og barn' (1944), both achieving 10,000 NOK - results consistent with a painter who holds a solid position within the Norwegian secondary market for mid-century figurative work.