KunstenaarNorwegian
Else Hagen
0 actieve items
Else Hagen was born on 21 September 1914 in Eydehavn, a small industrial community near Arendal in Aust-Agder. Her father Sverre Hagen worked at the Nitriden electrochemical plant as an interpreter for the French management, and Hagen later recalled her childhood there with warmth. She moved toward art deliberately and systematically, attending Statens Håndverks- og Kunstindustriskole from 1930 to 1933 before enrolling at the State Academy of Fine Arts in Oslo, where she studied from 1934 to 1938 under Axel Revold, Jean Heiberg, and Georg Jacobsen, teachers who transmitted a rigorous post-Cézannian approach to form and colour.
Hagen's formation coincided with the Nazi occupation of Norway, but she did not take the path many contemporaries chose, landscape as national resistance symbol. Instead, she turned her attention to the body and its social staging. Her early interest in ballet left a mark on her painting: figures move with a particular physical awareness, and the plasticity of gesture carries emotional weight that no caption or title could fully supply.
What defines her mature work is the commitment to depicting women not as symbols or archetypes but as people inhabiting complex social situations, bored, jealous, tender, conspiratorial, exhausted, defiant. In the decades following World War II, when Norway's cultural life promoted a narrow domestic ideal, Hagen's paintings operated as a quiet counter-narrative. Her women keep secrets, form alliances, endure humiliations, and occasionally break free. The palette is expressive without being decorative; the figuration is abstract enough to feel modern, concrete enough to feel true.
Her transition into monumental public work was both a professional breakthrough and a signal moment in Norwegian cultural history. In 1950 she won the competition to decorate Nøtterøy Realskole, becoming the first woman to receive a public decoration commission in Norway. Over the following three decades she completed more than nineteen monumental works for schools, town halls, and churches across the country.
The most substantial of these is Samfunn (Society), a 40-square-metre stone mosaic executed in slate, marble, and smalto for the stairwell of the Storting, the Norwegian parliament, between 1960 and 1966. It is among the most significant post-war public artworks in Norway, and it secured Hagen a studio in the castle stables while she completed it. Other commissions followed at Tromsø Airport, the University Library in Bergen, the Norwegian School of Sport Sciences, and Postgirobygget.
Hagen also served in numerous institutional roles: board member and then chairman of Kunstnerforbundet (1970-1979), member of the National Gallery's acquisitions committee (1970-1978, 1982), and member of the Expert Council for Intellectual Works (1973-1978). She was married to Arne E. Holm and died on 17 August 2010.
The retrospective exhibition "Between People," organized jointly by Stavanger Art Museum, Trondheim Kunstmuseum, Nasjonalmuseet, and Kunstsilo, toured four Norwegian venues between 2024 and 2026, a delayed institutional recognition for an artist whose influence had long been acknowledged by peers but insufficiently examined in public. The Hyperallergic review of the Oslo showing described her as working with "vibrant, disquieting" paintings that feel "defiantly ahead of" their time.
On the auction market, Hagen's prices reflect her standing as a significant figure rather than a market curiosity. Of 82 lots tracked on the platform, 80 have passed through Grev Wedels Plass Auksjoner in Oslo. Her top result is "Roles cast" at 600,000 NOK (approximately 64,000 USD at time of sale), followed by "Huldra" (1950) at 450,000 NOK and "Authority" at 220,000 NOK. These are substantial figures by Nordic standards, and they place Hagen among the more commercially significant Norwegian post-war painters.