ArtistNorwegian
Knut Rumohr
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Knut Lindstrøm Rumohr was born on 21 December 1916 at Frønningen, a remote forest estate in the Lærdal valley of Sogn og Fjordane with no road access. Growing up surrounded by fjords, mountains, and dense boreal forest, he absorbed a landscape that would become the hidden architecture of his entire body of work.
He trained first at Bergen kunsthåndverkskole from 1934, then moved to Oslo for studies at Statens Håndverks- og Kunstindustriskole from 1935 to 1941 under Per Krohg, and simultaneously at Statens Kunstakademi under Jean Heiberg and Georg Jacobsen from 1938 to 1941. Heiberg and Jacobsen grounded him in classical geometric composition theory, an alternative to the freewheeling modernism then in circulation - a discipline that anchored even his most gestural later work.
Rumohr debuted as a graphic artist at the Høstutstillingen (Autumn Exhibition) in Oslo in 1939, and throughout the 1940s and early 1950s worked primarily in black-and-white woodcut. His prints displayed a characteristic sensitivity to tonal gradations in grey, exploiting the grain and resistance of the wood block rather than fighting against it. During the 1950s he moved into color woodcuts and began systematically pushing toward abstraction, taking folk art motifs, rosemaling patterns, and the textures of Norwegian textile traditions and dissolving them into compressed, vibrating fields of color.
A repetitive strain injury eventually forced him away from printmaking entirely. He turned to tempera on canvas, which he mixed himself according to traditional emulsion recipes, and the shift opened a second, arguably more intense phase of his career. His abstract canvases layered palette-knife application with scraping and overpainted glazes to build surfaces where color seemed to emanate rather than sit. Critics described the effect as color lyricism - compositions that avoided pure harmony, preferring unresolved tensions between values that pressed against each other with heat.
In 1962 he represented Norway at the Venice Biennale alongside Rolf Nesch, a significant recognition at the height of international interest in European abstract expressionism. His work entered the collections of the Nasjonalmuseet in Oslo, MoMA in New York (holding Composition IV and The Bullfighters, both 1954), the British Museum in London, and the Victoria and Albert Museum. Major public commissions included decorative schemes for Hotel Viking, Hotel Continental, Kvikne Hotel, Sjøkrigsskolen, Dikemarks Hospital, Høyanger Samfunnshus, Sogndal High School, and Lærdal City Hall. He also illustrated books, including Alexander Kielland's novel Arbeidsfolk.
He was awarded the Houens legat in 1945 and the Henrichsens legat in 1953. Through the 1980s and 1990s he maintained up to four exhibitions annually and supported himself primarily through sales. After his death on 31 October 2002, prices for his work rose substantially.
On the auction market, Rumohr appears primarily at Norwegian houses. The bulk of his secondary market volume - 43 of 45 recorded items on Auctionist - has passed through Grev Wedels Plass Auksjoner in Oslo, with a small number at Nyborgs. His work spans painting, prints, and drawings, with the top result being Presten (1966) at NOK 74,000, followed by The Stone Thrower (1949) at NOK 60,000 and Composition (1988) at NOK 35,000. These results reflect a market that takes his graphic output as seriously as his canvases.