Jan Kjaerstad - The Seducer

‘I’ll buy it,’ said his grandmother, already making towards the office. Which is how Jørgine Wergeland became one of the first people in Norway to acquire a painting by Jens Johannessen, an artist who would in years to come be highly esteemed and frequently described as one of the foremost painters, if not the foremost painter of his generation and who, on several occasions — and I admit he has a point — has asserted that the railings surrounding Norwegian art need to be torn down, and soon. Not only that, with this purchase Jonas’s grandmother sparked off a veritable landslide, with Johannessen’s paintings selling unexpectedly well, so well in fact that the elderly painter Henrik Sørensen, who would sometimes buy a picture in order to encourage a young artist, had to go home empty-handed, having turned up somewhat late in the day, clad in his ubiquitous grey coat.

As far as Jonas Wergeland’s grandmother and her background is concerned, I regret that I needs must confine myself to presenting a few facts. Jonas’s maternal grandmother and grandfather came from Gardermoen in Ullensaker county, but after the death of his grandfather, Oscar, during the war, Jørgine Wergeland moved to Oslo where she took up residence in Oscars gate, for no other reason than that she felt this was something her husband would have appreciated. I should perhaps also mention that this flat in Oscars gate was a fair-sized one, his grandmother having arrived in the city with a tidy sum of money in her handbag, although thereby hangs another tale entirely. The main point, so far as this story is concerned, is that in the years immediately after the war, as well as being an erstwhile smallholder or, as she herself used to say, a country bumpkin, Jonas’s grandmother adopted two other personalities. She quite simply became Winston Churchill, just as she also became a patron of the arts and collector, with the result that every time Jonas visited her, he was filled with the same sense of eager expectation. When she opened the door would she be an ordinary grandmother, given to talking about the old days at Gardermoen, tending the cattle, his grandfather’s shoemaking skills; or would she be Winston Churchill, making the V-sign and mumbling on about his dramatic escape from a prisoner-of-war camp during the Boer War, an account peppered with a host of colourful words, although where she had picked those up Jonas had no idea; or would she, as she ushered him into the long hallway of the flat, get straight to the point, asking him, all businesslike, whether he had seen any paintings by a young man called Håkon Bleken? ‘With such a washed-out name,’ she would say, ‘that man must have a terrible hankering for colour!’

To Jonas Wergeland’s credit, it must be said that, like his mother, he did not regard these multiple personalities as a sign of madness, as most other people did — people who did their utmost to have her locked up in an institution. To Jonas’s mind, Jørgine was the perfect grandmother, with three deep creases in her brow which were constantly changing, rather like the trigrams, those three broken parallel lines found in the Chinese book of wisdom and divination, the I Ching ; a grandmother who could be feeding the ducks one day, rambling on about this and that, to turn, the next day, into an astute, single-minded, steely patron of the arts. Not to mention her Churchill days, which were, for Jonas, absolute gala performances but which I regret I cannot go into here. What I would just like to make clear is that, all unwittingly, Jonas learned a very important lesson from his grandmother: that the inner nature of a human being is not as easily mapped out as all that, and that it is, in essence, pretty much unfathomable.

From the flat in Oscars gate, it was only a short walk for Jørgine Wergeland to a dimly-lit, smoke-filled establishment on Uranieborgveien called Restaurant Krølle, at that time a favourite haunt of many Oslo artists, writers and other nonconformist individualists who in later life would look back on those dingy premises with their hideous wrought-iron fittings and greasy walls with a good deal of nostalgia and indeed regarded it as one of their most important seats of learning; and it was here, in these subsequently so legendary surroundings — far more so than Theatercaféen — by listening in to the passionate discussions conducted over the beer glasses, that Jonas’s grandmother picked up tips about promising young painters who would be prepared to sell their pictures for next to nothing, or a bottle of cheap whisky come to that. I know of many people who recall the old lady with the three deep and shifting creases in her brow as an eccentric feature of Krølle’s — just ask the poet Stein Mehren, who spent several hours one evening conducting an evenly-matched conversation with Jonas’s grandmother on the subject of non-figurative art, after which she generously — and this was most unusual for her patron of the arts persona — treated the gifted young poet to two of the house’s traditional smørbrød : one with meatballs and one with bacon and egg.

It was after one of these long evenings among Krølle’s Bohemian patrons that Jørgine invited Jonas to accompany her to a tenement in Gabels gate. They climbed right up to the top floor then made their way to the end of the airing loft where she knocked at the most Spartan of doors with a washbasin outside it. The door was opened by a young man with features which Jonas would instinctively have described as Roman; at first it looked like he might turn them away, but Jørgine Wergeland persuaded or as good as bullied him into eventually, rather apprehensively, allowing them to step inside a room, not very big, which seemed to Jonas to reek more of horse than of turpentine. This little room, with two skylights and a ladder leading to a sleeping platform, was home to the painter, his wife and their small baby. Jonas found it hard to imagine that anyone could live in such conditions, but maybe it was all part and parcel of being an artist who had, according to his grandmother, already had his pictures turned down several times for the Autumn Exhibition.

The painter told them that he had just returned from a visit to the royal stables, which were quite close by, where he had been making some sketches. A large anatomical model of a horse, with all of the musculature clearly defined, was set up on a big, homemade table. Out of the blue, Jørgine asked whether she could buy a couple of his paintings, and the young man with the Roman features, realizing that in the face of such perseverance there was nothing for it but to give in, nodded towards the wall on which his pictures, the majority of them quite small, were hung. Jørgine Wergeland promptly proceeded to inspect the canvases and motioned to Jonas to take a look at them too.

And again … there was no mistaking it: when Jonas’s eye fell on the picture on the easel, he had the feeling of a soft feather, ‘as if from an angel’s wing’, being run all the way up his spine and coming to rest at the nape of his neck, making his hair stand on end and wringing a shudder from him. Jonas Wergeland would never find it possible to put this inner frisson into words and far be it from me to try, all I will say is that it had nothing to do with having a trained eye, nor was it subject to the taste of a particular day and age, or one specific place — he would later experience exactly the same thing when faced with works of art, old and new, from every corner of the globe, from Egyptian sculptures to acrylic paintings by the aborigines. Jonas Wergeland simply had an innate appreciation of perspective, balance, proportion, the play of colour — I am deliberately generalizing here, reluctant as I am to be drawn into pointless debates as to what makes for a good work of art.