A tapestry by Gerhard Munthe acquired by Orsay

4/5/24 - Acquisition - Paris, Musée d’Orsay - Purchased from the Oscar Graf gallery, a large tapestry by the Norwegian Gerhard Munthe (ill. 1) joins the collections of the Musée d’Orsay, which is continuing its active policy of acquiring Scandinavian art, regularly reviewed on our pages. It adds a new name to the corpus of Norwegian Art Nouveau already conserved and essentially represented by Lars Kinsarvik, whose second piece of furniture, a two-body cabinet, was snapped up at a public auction in Copenhagen at Bruun Rasmussen in November 2018. We had not mentioned it on our pages and so reproduce it here (ill. 4). It will certainly take its place alongside it in the new decorative arts rooms, whose reopening date, still on the median level on the Seine side, has not yet been set [1]. This new purchase is also in keeping with the museum’s long-standing commitment to providing an international overview of Art Nouveau production, as demonstrated by its recent acquisition of a vase-aiguière from the Hungarian Zsolnay factory in Pécs (see news item of 30/3/22).

1. Gerhard Munthe (1849-1929)
« This is how love lights up in the heart », 1898
Wool and cotton - 288 x 225 cm
Paris, Musée d’Orsay
Photo: RMN-GP/S. Crépy

See the image in its page

Initially recognised as a landscape painter, Gerhard Munthe turned to the decorative arts in the 1890s, in particular tapestry, for which he executed numerous watercolour cartoons. Together with the painter Erik Werenskiold, he headed up a colony of artists known as the ‘Lysaker Circle’, who were opposed to the teaching of the Norwegian Academy of Fine Arts, and who defended the idea of renovating the fine arts by integrating the applied arts. As the museum notes, the latter, and the art of tapestry in particular, which had enjoyed its heyday in Norway from the mid-seventeenth to the early nineteenth century, were seen as the ideal medium for expressing an original national style at a time when the country was…