Four Artists

Charlotte Wankel began to paint portraits at a relatively late stage in her career. The painting’s stylized idiom, with its flat fields of pure colour and highly condensed pictorial space, is characteristic of her portraits from the 1930s. Wankel is also known for her geometric, abstract paintings from the 1920s. Like Thorvald Hellesen, Ragnhild Keyser, and Ragnhild Kaarbø, she was closely associated at the time with the radical art community in Paris. She had lengthy stays there and studied at the Académie Moderne under Fernand Léger and Amédée Ozenfant.

This group portrait juxtaposes two of her colleagues from the Paris years, Ragnhild Keyser and Ragnhild Kaarbø (to the left), with two other Norwegian artists, Henrik Sørensen and Joronn Sitje. Sørensen was a key figure in Norwegian art in the mid-1930s, while Sitje was one of his students. Sørensen dominates the portrait with his towering presence and conspicuously oversized hand. Is the gesture meant as a friendly greeting or a strict admonishment? The principal figure’s mix of favour and rejection hints at the ongoing shift in the era’s artistic orientation: on the one hand the avant-garde experimentation of Keyser, Kaarbø, and Wankel herself, on the other hand the romantic expressionism of Sørensen and Sitje.

Wankel was in her younger years a student of Sørensen’s, and in the 1920s he defended her and other Nordic cubists against the disapproving critics of the era. This would subsequently change, however, and Wankel’s group portrait can be seen as thematizing the artistic climate of the time.