For gallery owner Jérôme Poggi, Anna-Eva Bergman (1909-1987) is “the missing link between an American aesthetic and a European aesthetic”. Unlike most of her contemporaries, the artist raised in Norway, the least densely populated country on the continent, forged an experience of nature in contact with fjords and glaciers, these grandiose landscapes whose telluric force and sacred through pure forms and the use of metal sheets which will become his trademark. Today, the art market is reconsidering the work of the Norwegian whose price is measured by the growing desire it arouses in museums.
Emancipation
If the art historian Karin Hallandsjo compares her to Mark Rothko, it is to Hans Hartung, master of lyrical abstraction, that her biography links her closely. The two artists meet in Paris, the capital of modern art in the 1920s, and marry very quickly. Anna-Eva is very young and chooses to share the life of the one “with whom there is enough to live the great life of an artist”. Both are scholars, work on theory and wonder a lot about art. They love and respect each other but she quickly understands that, for a couple of artists, it is preferable not to work with the same materials. In 1937, Anna-Eva took the measure of Hans’ rise to artistic power.
She realizes that her emancipation will have to go through what she has deepest in herself and makes the difficult decision to separate from him: “I have to make my way alone in this world (…). For that, I must be free to have time and take care only of my work. » It is this journey, daring for the time, and the long introspective quest for an original personality that this beautiful film recounts through excerpts from his notebooks read by Charlotte Rampling and bathed in the extraordinary light of the Scandinavian landscapes. The first major retrospective currently dedicated to him by the Paris Museum of Modern Art should finally make rediscover this largely unknown artist in Europe.
Sunday May 7 at 5:45 p.m. on Arte. Franco-German documentary by Simone Hoffmann (2023). 50 mins. (Available in replay until July 9, 2023 on Arte.tv).
