KunstenaarNorwegian
Aage Storstein
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Aage Storstein was born on 26 July 1900 in Stavanger, Rogaland, into a Norway still defining its modern cultural identity just decades after independence. He moved to Paris in 1920 to study at three of the French capital's most rigorous ateliers for international students: Académie Ranson, Académie de la Grande Chaumière, and Académie Colarossi. That exposure placed him in direct contact with the aftermath of Cubism and Fauvism as living debates rather than historical movements. Returning in 1926, he studied further under Henrik Sørensen and Per Krohg, two Norwegians who had trained under Henri Matisse and carried his principles of colour structure and compositional discipline back north.
The paintings Storstein produced through the late 1920s and early 1930s are among the most formally ambitious Norwegian canvases of the interwar period. Works such as "Bathing Boys" (1929) and "The Engaged Couple" (1930) apply a Cubist fragmentation of planes to Norwegian subjects, building solid, weighty figures from interlocking geometric passages without dissolving them into pure abstraction. The violin player subjects of the same period extend the same approach, the instrument's angles and curves offering a natural vocabulary for faceted treatment. These works sit at the intersection of Parisian modernism and Nordic figuration, showing an artist who had absorbed the lessons of Cézanne and the Cubists and was applying them to his own social and natural environment.
In 1937, Storstein exhibited at the World Exhibition in Paris alongside artists from forty-four countries. The following year he won the competition for the decoration of the West Gallery of Oslo City Hall, a commission that would define his public reputation. He completed the mural cycle in time for the hall's official inauguration in 1950, having worked on it across the years of German occupation. The paintings depict Norwegian history, mythology, and civic life in a Cubist idiom that gives monumental scale to everyday scenes and national narratives alike.
From 1946, Storstein taught at the Norwegian National Academy of Fine Arts and eventually became head professor, a position that placed him at the centre of Norwegian art education for a generation. Among those he taught were Gunnar S. Gundersen, Halvdan Ljøsne, and Rolf Aamot. His 1961 retrospective at Kunstnernes Hus, Norway's largest gallery, drew on both public and private collections and confirmed his status as a figure whose influence ran through postwar Norwegian painting at institutional and individual levels.
His work is held in the Nasjonalmuseet collection in Oslo. He died on 7 May 1983 in Norway.
Storstein's auction market is concentrated almost entirely at Grev Wedels Plass Auksjoner in Oslo, which handles all 59 lots recorded in the current dataset. Prices reflect the considerable weight his City Hall commission and teaching legacy carry in the Norwegian market: "The Engaged Couple" (1930) sold for 2,200,000 NOK in 2025, setting a personal record; "Bathing Boys" (1929) achieved 1,250,000 NOK; "Violin Player" (1929) reached 620,000 NOK; and a later version of "Bathing Boys" (1954-1968) sold for 400,000 NOK. These results position Storstein firmly among the most valuable Norwegian modernists currently trading at auction.