OSLO — Look closely at Else Hagen’s paintings and beneath the rainbow of festive colors lurk clouds of feminist anxiety. A mother ignores her playing children as fighter planes hover outside. A woman wearing garter belts stares into the mirror as she prepares for a rendezvous. A group of girls huddle under a tree, their heads turned sadly to the ground.
Hagen is best known in Norway for her monumental installations from the 1960s and 1970s and deserves as much attention as her intimate oil paintings from the Middle Ages. These canvases form the beating heart of Else Hagen: Between people at the National Museum, the first museum retrospective of the late artist. A more appropriate subtitle might be “Between Women,” for how often Hagen probed the tensions, envy, frustrations, and tender bonds between female subjects.
In “The Secret” (1945), four girls tower over an open book, their curled bodies forming a bright mass of yellow, orange and red. To their left, a girl with a sable bob watches silently, one bare foot crossed behind the other. Outside the circus-colored room, a dark crowd of men in hats moves unconsciously. But within the hometown, the uncovered pages suggest a stolen diary, with a young woman’s innermost thoughts available for the amusement or judgment of others.
The complex female psychology depicted in Hagen’s vibrant, disturbing paintings feels defiantly ahead of its time. This is partly because her work speaks to the interiorities of women whose communal situation – excluded, humiliated, sexualized, infantilized and alienated within the domestic sphere – is so often relegated to the background, if not outright rejected as content worthy of artistry. attention. Hagen’s feminist consciousness is not rooted in a romanticized vision of peaceful matriarchs and sisterly daisy chains. In “Floral Priest Collar” (1956/7), a lonely young woman wears only a flower necklace and a paper skirt, and blocks her face behind her hands, as if to say, “You can’t have me” to the passing viewer . .
Hagen’s women keep secrets, break oaths, gossip and play games, just as they link arms, feed children, get bored and get frisky. The artist gives female experiences the depth and dignity they deserve And honors the edges that define them. Women are not heroes or saints, but flawed human beings who must navigate grueling, if often banal, challenges. It is no surprise to hear that, in the midst of “housewives eraIn Norway, Hagen persistently pursued a career as a leading visual artist even after becoming a wife and mother, and encouraged other women of her time to do the same. “For a time,” the artist once said of her experiences in the 1950s, “it became almost as important for me to shake myself and my fellow women from their slumber and apathy as it was to make paintings.”
Despite the pedestrian character of their environment, the canvases vibrate with energy. In “The Roles Assigned” (1950), one of Hagen’s largest paintings, three naked women are surrounded by floating, crumpled newspaper. Two wear white masks with red lips, but the third – her eyes focused on something off-screen and her mouth open in shock – has her mask removed with one hand while the other reaches around the central woman’s neck. On the far left, the masked face of another woman appears in profile, as if to voyeuristically assess the conflict. Faceless male silhouettes form a pattern in the background, small against the female bodies; as in “The Secret,” they seem completely marginal to the drama of the scene.
In “Self-Portrait” (1940) – painted when Hagen was just 26 years old, newly married and four years away from having her first child – half of her face is a warm salmon and the other half an icy teal. Just as special as the color is this woman’s subtly imperious expression. Her gaze is slightly downcast and her loose hair catches a streak of sun. She looks effortlessly chic, but slightly pensive. She is, just like Hagen’s oeuvre, unashamedly modern.
Else Hagen: Between people runs until January 26 at the National Museum of Norway (Brynjulf Bulls plass, Oslo, Norway). The exhibition was organized by the Stavanger Art Museum, the Trondheim Art Museum, Kunstsilo and the National Museum and curated by Øystein Ustvedt.
