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Johannessen - Selbstbildnis -1922.  Norway

Johannessen - Selbstbildnis -1922. Norway

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Public domain photo of drawing, 20th century, free to use, no copyright restrictions image - Picryl description.

Aksel Waldemar Johannessen grew up in the slums of Hammersborg, a district of Oslo. He later attended the National School of Arts and Crafts, where he studied sculpture under Lars Utne. In 1907, Johannessen married his former classmate Anna Nilsen, and their relationship produced two daughters. Around 1910 the couple moved to Gjøvik, where Johannessen worked in a furniture company as a woodcarver and furniture designer. At the beginning of World War I, he returned to Oslo with his family and began to paint. Johannessen developed his own complex world of images and thoughts, which found expression in a realistic and socially critical art. In 1921, doctors diagnosed his wife with cancer, and Aksel Waldemar turned more and more to alcohol. Weakened in health, Aksel Waldemar Johannessen died of pneumonia. Johannessen's paintings were exhibited for the first time after his death. The eminent Norwegian critic Jappe Nilssen, discoverer and best friend of Edvard Munch, wrote perhaps the best review of his career: "...I can hardly remember having seen anything like it in Nordic painting." Munch himself said, "...no better pictures are being painted today. Johannessen was then forgotten and only rediscovered in 1990 by the art collector Haakon Mehren. The play "The Forgotten Painter" by Alexander Kratzer (premiered in 2011 with Harald Bodingbauer as Aksel Waldemar Johannessen and Thomas Schächl as Haakon Mehren, directed by Andreas Baumgartner) brings the story of the rediscovery to life.

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Date

1922
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Wikimeida Commons
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public domain

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1922 drawings in norway
1922 drawings in norway