KunstenaarNorwegiangeb.1880–ov.1945
Per Deberitz
0 actieve items
Per Aass Deberitz was born on 27 March 1880 in Drøbak, a small coastal town south of Kristiania (Oslo). When he was two years old his family relocated to Borre, a village near Horten in Vestfold, and it was there that his artistic inclinations first took shape. In what would prove to be one of the more unusual circumstances in Norwegian art history, Edvard Munch rented lodgings with the Deberitz family during the summers of 1885 and 1886. The young boy received painting materials from Munch and was encouraged to experiment - an early encounter that left a formative imprint even if the two artists would develop in quite different directions.
Formal training came later. Between 1898 and 1899 Deberitz studied with Oscar Wergeland at the Norwegian National Academy of Craft and Art Industry in Kristiania. He then supplemented this with private lessons during the summers of 1899 and 1900 from Hans Gude, the veteran romanticist landscape painter, at Gude's villa "Sølvkronen" in Horten. These two teachers represented opposite poles - the academic institutional tradition and the older naturalist landscape school - and Deberitz absorbed something from both before eventually moving toward a very different sensibility.
The decisive turn came with his extended stay in Paris from 1909 to 1910, where he studied under Henri Matisse. This placed Deberitz in the thick of the French modernist revolution at a pivotal moment. The contact with Matisse's approach to color, simplified form, and surface pattern filtered into Deberitz's own work and aligned him firmly with neo-impressionism - a current that was arriving in Norway with considerable energy in those years. His handling of light and color thereafter bore the unmistakable influence of what he had absorbed in Paris.
His breakthrough in Norway came at the 1914 Jubilee Exhibition at Frogner in Kristiania, where his painting "Badende gutter" (Bathing Boys) attracted serious attention. The work exemplified his central preoccupations: the human figure in outdoor settings, sunlit coastal scenes, and a paint surface built up with a mosaic-like application of color. He returned repeatedly to the coasts and islands of southern Norway - Skåtøy in the Kragerø archipelago was a recurring location - where the light, water, and rocky shores gave him the motifs he worked with throughout his career. Nudes, portraits, and figure compositions were equally central to his output alongside the landscapes.
Deberitz exhibited regularly and built a solid reputation during the interwar decades. His work entered the collections of institutions across Scandinavia, including the National Gallery in Oslo, the museums in Stavanger, Lillehammer, Drammen, and Bergen, as well as the Ateneum in Helsinki and Moderna Museet in Stockholm. He died in Oslo on 14 October 1945.
At auction, Deberitz appears primarily at Norwegian houses. His 42 recorded auction items are concentrated at Grev Wedels Plass Auksjoner in Oslo (41 lots), with a small number at Nyborgs Auksjoner. Top prices have reached NOK 160,000 for "Kvinne og barn i kystlandskap" (1942) and NOK 150,000 for "Kvinneakt" (1928). The range of top lots confirms that coastal figure subjects and nudes consistently command the strongest prices, while his wider landscape production trades at more modest levels.