Art in everything

Transcription

Øivind Storm Bjerke
This is a room that I find particularly interesting. 

Narrator
You are listening to Øivind Storm Bjerke, professor of art history at the University of Oslo. 

Øivind Storm Bjerke
In this room, there’s one work that’s the key to understanding everything else in the room. That work is Oluf Wold-Torne’s decorative frieze, a watercolour dating from 1918. It incorporates elements that are extremely traditional: rose painting and designs from traditional domestic crafts. And Norwegian artists at that time, in the eighteen-nineties and the early twentieth century, were in a way rediscovering the art of rose painting, which is a traditional folk art in Norway. And they legitimized this folk art by treating it not as something backwards-looking or nostalgic, but as something that they could incorporate into their modern or modernistic art.  

Narrator
In England at this time, the Arts & Crafts movement was well established and the role of the artist within the decorative arts was a subject of intense debate in Europe, including here in Norway. 

Øivind Storm Bjerke
Should the person who conceived the work also make the final, physical version? Or should a craftsman be engaged, or perhaps it should be put into industrial production? In this room, we see examples of all of these approaches.  

The decorative frieze was intended as a wall-painting, of course, and we can imagine how the room where the frieze was installed would have been furnished ideally with furniture designed by Wold-Torne himself. The table would have been laid with tableware designed by Wold-Torne in collaboration with the porcelain manufacturers Egersund Fayance or Porsgrunn Porselen. Even the knife you used might have been artistically designed by Wold-Torne, and ideally also the ceiling and wall mouldings along with everything else, perhaps even the windows, in the form of stained-glass paintings, designed by the same artist.  

In other words, the idea that a single artist would be responsible for the design of the whole room and everything inside it was the ideal result of the type of artistic endeavour represented by Wold-Torne.