The Seducer

The Connoisseur

Jonas was eight years old. It was late April, one of those classic, longed for April days buzzing with regenerative energy. The pavements were dry and inviting and one could almost see, or feel in one’s bones, that the trees in Studenterlunden were working fit to burst to rid themselves of their black, spiky appearance; that the green, that mentally invigorating green, was straining against its thin sheathes. It was hardly coincidental that Jonas Wergeland should have discovered his gift on just such an incomparable spring day, a day simply zinging with light and latent colour.

Jonas and his grandmother were walking from Oscars gate down through Slottsparken. Jonas had swapped his winter boots for thin-soled shoes and had the same delightful sensation of lightness which he imagined a creature must have when it sheds its skin. Feeling as though he had hundreds of tiny springs in the sole of each shoe he headed straight for that magical spot on the corner of Karl Johans gate which went by the name of Studenten, where they sold ice creams in every imaginable form and colour; a place heavy with the tropical aromas of vanilla and bananas and the most obvious point to make for when one had just switched from winter boots to light spring shoes, so much so, in fact, that Jonas could tell that his shoes themselves were all set on going there, but his grandmother was resolutely pulling him in the opposite direction, towards Fridtjof Nansens plass and the twin towers of the town hall. ‘Business before pleasure,’ she said firmly.

Is this the most crucial story in Jonas Wergeland’s life?

Shortly afterwards they found themselves inside the Society of Artists building, in a bright, white room, its four walls lined with paintings, and the room itself crowded with people not only because it was a Saturday but because this was the opening of the first exhibition by a young Norwegian painter. Jonas stood quite still, listening to the hum of voices and watching the people circling the room expectantly, as if this — their clothes, their facial expressions — were more interesting than the works of art. ‘What do you think?’ his grandmother whispered. Jonas had been expecting to be bored out of his skull, but as he ran an eye more or less unconsciously over the walls it was caught and held by one painting, as if some sort of visual glue were preventing his eye from moving on.

‘It was a royal-blue egg cup that made me aware of the silver thread running down my spine,’ Jonas was later to say.

Standing there, looking at this picture, Jonas felt a shiver run through him — or, not a shiver, but a faint and yet quite distinct tickling sensation that worked its way slowly from his tailbone to the nape of his neck; a very pleasant, almost erotic, sensation which finally concentrated at a point between his shoulder-blades.

‘That one over there is … nice,’ he said, pointing.

I would ask you to bear with me for dwelling for a moment on this painting, seeing that it does, after all, represent a watershed in Jonas Wergeland’s life. This was far from being anything in the nature of ‘Bridal Procession in Hardanger’ or any of those other large-scale, hyper-realistic canvases to which children are usually so readily drawn; this was an unassuming little picture, a still life: a bright-blue egg cup sitting on a blue table set against a green wall, with a pear lying next to it on a yellow napkin. So simple and yet so complex. Jonas moved a little closer, thinking that it must be the violet field, a triangle stretching out — cryptically — behind the eggcup, that had seized his attention, or maybe it was the pale-blue brushstroke directly below the pear. Jonas stood there, growing more and more fascinated, endeavouring to take in the very palpability of the picture, the thick layers of paint, the play of light and shade on the yellow napkin and, as he let his eye wander over the picture as a whole, how all of the colours fell into the same scale, most of them broken by white, rendered lighter: a tonal effect which caused the canvas to come alive and glow with a tremendous — and here he searched for a word he never used but which now, confronted with this picture, seemed perfectly natural — beauty.

‘I’ll buy it,’ said his grandmother, already making towards the office. Which is how Jørgine Wergeland became one of the first people in Norway to acquire a painting by Jens Johannessen, an artist who would in years to come be highly esteemed and frequently described as one of the foremost painters, if not the foremost painter of his generation and who, on several occasions — and I admit he has a point — has asserted that the railings surrounding Norwegian art need to be torn down, and soon. Not only that, with this purchase Jonas’s grandmother sparked off a veritable landslide, with Johannessen’s paintings selling unexpectedly well, so well in fact that the elderly painter Henrik Sørensen, who would sometimes buy a picture in order to encourage a young artist, had to go home empty-handed, having turned up somewhat late in the day, clad in his ubiquitous grey coat.

As far as Jonas Wergeland’s grandmother and her background is concerned, I regret that I needs must confine myself to presenting a few facts. Jonas’s maternal grandmother and grandfather came from Gardermoen in Ullensaker county, but after the death of his grandfather, Oscar, during the war, Jørgine Wergeland moved to Oslo where she took up residence in Oscars gate, for no other reason than that she felt this was something her husband would have appreciated. I should perhaps also mention that this flat in Oscars gate was a fair-sized one, his grandmother having arrived in the city with a tidy sum of money in her handbag, although thereby hangs another tale entirely. The main point, so far as this story is concerned, is that in the years immediately after the war, as well as being an erstwhile smallholder or, as she herself used to say, a country bumpkin, Jonas’s grandmother adopted two other personalities. She quite simply became Winston Churchill, just as she also became a patron of the arts and collector, with the result that every time Jonas visited her, he was filled with the same sense of eager expectation. When she opened the door would she be an ordinary grandmother, given to talking about the old days at Gardermoen, tending the cattle, his grandfather’s shoemaking skills; or would she be Winston Churchill, making the V-sign and mumbling on about his dramatic escape from a prisoner-of-war camp during the Boer War, an account peppered with a host of colourful words, although where she had picked those up Jonas had no idea; or would she, as she ushered him into the long hallway of the flat, get straight to the point, asking him, all businesslike, whether he had seen any paintings by a young man called Håkon Bleken? ‘With such a washed-out name,’ she would say, ‘that man must have a terrible hankering for colour!’

To Jonas Wergeland’s credit, it must be said that, like his mother, he did not regard these multiple personalities as a sign of madness, as most other people did — people who did their utmost to have her locked up in an institution. To Jonas’s mind, Jørgine was the perfect grandmother, with three deep creases in her brow which were constantly changing, rather like the trigrams, those three broken parallel lines found in the Chinese book of wisdom and divination, the I Ching; a grandmother who could be feeding the ducks one day, rambling on about this and that, to turn, the next day, into an astute, single-minded, steely patron of the arts. Not to mention her Churchill days, which were, for Jonas, absolute gala performances but which I regret I cannot go into here. What I would just like to make clear is that, all unwittingly, Jonas learned a very important lesson from his grandmother: that the inner nature of a human being is not as easily mapped out as all that, and that it is, in essence, pretty much unfathomable.

From the flat in Oscars gate, it was only a short walk for Jørgine Wergeland to a dimly-lit, smoke-filled establishment on Uranieborgveien called Restaurant Krølle, at that time a favourite haunt of many Oslo artists, writers and other nonconformist individualists who in later life would look back on those dingy premises with their hideous wrought-iron fittings and greasy walls with a good deal of nostalgia and indeed regarded it as one of their most important seats of learning; and it was here, in these subsequently so legendary surroundings — far more so than Theatercaféen — by listening in to the passionate discussions conducted over the beer glasses, that Jonas’s grandmother picked up tips about promising young painters who would be prepared to sell their pictures for next to nothing, or a bottle of cheap whisky come to that. I know of many people who recall the old lady with the three deep and shifting creases in her brow as an eccentric feature of Krølle’s — just ask the poet Stein Mehren, who spent several hours one evening conducting an evenly-matched conversation with Jonas’s grandmother on the subject of non-figurative art, after which she generously — and this was most unusual for her patron of the arts persona — treated the gifted young poet to two of the house’s traditional smørbrød: one with meatballs and one with bacon and egg.

It was after one of these long evenings among Krølle’s Bohemian patrons that Jørgine invited Jonas to accompany her to a tenement in Gabels gate. They climbed right up to the top floor then made their way to the end of the airing loft where she knocked at the most Spartan of doors with a washbasin outside it. The door was opened by a young man with features which Jonas would instinctively have described as Roman; at first it looked like he might turn them away, but Jørgine Wergeland persuaded or as good as bullied him into eventually, rather apprehensively, allowing them to step inside a room, not very big, which seemed to Jonas to reek more of horse than of turpentine. This little room, with two skylights and a ladder leading to a sleeping platform, was home to the painter, his wife and their small baby. Jonas found it hard to imagine that anyone could live in such conditions, but maybe it was all part and parcel of being an artist who had, according to his grandmother, already had his pictures turned down several times for the Autumn Exhibition.

The painter told them that he had just returned from a visit to the royal stables, which were quite close by, where he had been making some sketches. A large anatomical model of a horse, with all of the musculature clearly defined, was set up on a big, homemade table. Out of the blue, Jørgine asked whether she could buy a couple of his paintings, and the young man with the Roman features, realizing that in the face of such perseverance there was nothing for it but to give in, nodded towards the wall on which his pictures, the majority of them quite small, were hung. Jørgine Wergeland promptly proceeded to inspect the canvases and motioned to Jonas to take a look at them too.

And again … there was no mistaking it: when Jonas’s eye fell on the picture on the easel, he had the feeling of a soft feather, ‘as if from an angel’s wing’, being run all the way up his spine and coming to rest at the nape of his neck, making his hair stand on end and wringing a shudder from him. Jonas Wergeland would never find it possible to put this inner frisson into words and far be it from me to try, all I will say is that it had nothing to do with having a trained eye, nor was it subject to the taste of a particular day and age, or one specific place — he would later experience exactly the same thing when faced with works of art, old and new, from every corner of the globe, from Egyptian sculptures to acrylic paintings by the aborigines. Jonas Wergeland simply had an innate appreciation of perspective, balance, proportion, the play of colour — I am deliberately generalizing here, reluctant as I am to be drawn into pointless debates as to what makes for a good work of art.

The canvas on the easel depicted a group of horses and riders, with a large mirror in the background in which the riders were seen reflected, all executed in earth tones: ochre, umber, sienna, a tinge of Indian lake, but although the main impression was of brown, Jonas’s eye was immediately caught by a shimmering light underlying the sombre, muted hues, a golden sheen which seemed to speak of an invisible energy. ‘From the royal stables,’ the painter said kindly, somewhat surprised by Jonas’s absorption in the painting, going on to add: ‘The horse is the one animal most closely akin to man.’ When Jonas stepped right up close to the painting he noticed a number of unaccountably fine brushstrokes on the hindquarters of one of the horses, which, incredible as it may sound, offered him a glimpse into another dimension.

Jørgine needed only to look at Jonas. His face said it all. At the age of eight, Jonas Wergeland was an art connoisseur. He had no idea how this had come about, it just happened: he had a Geiger counter inside him that was triggered by fine works of art. He also picked out a landscape for his grandmother: ‘from Torvø’ they were later informed.

‘I’ll take them,’ Jørgine announced without further ado. She counted out 1200 kroner and laid the banknotes on the table next to some blue jars. Jonas had the idea that the painter thought this was too much, that he was almost embarrassed. ‘But you haven’t signed them,’ she said.

He signed the pictures. ‘Frantz W.,’ it said in ochre with a touch of white, this being long before the days when Widerberg opted for a palette of pure primary colours, simplified his name to Frans and became one of Norway’s most highly acclaimed and best-selling painters, his pictures becoming so ubiquitous in the form of prints, calendars and posters in thousands of homes that they were well on the way to becoming archetypes in themselves, every bit as much as the archetypes he endeavoured to portray.

Later in life Jonas would wonder whether he had possessed this gift for evaluating pictures from infancy. However that may be, it was when he was with his grandmother that he became aware of it, and there is no doubt that here we see the roots of what many regard as Norway’s greatest television talent of all time, namely, the ability to be able to tell right away when a picture is good, or could be good, or a scene, for that matter, in those instances where the pictures were to be shown on a screen. And, I might add, in years to come Jonas Wergeland would also make use of his remarkable inbuilt antenna when taking his exceedingly selective and very fruitful pick of Norway’s women.

But at the age of eight this tingling between his shoulder-blades was not something to which he gave much thought — in any case he had no idea what use he could make of it, in real life as it were. In time his grandmother’s interest in art also petered out, and she concentrated instead on perfecting her life as Winston Churchill, particularly in the years following the great man’s death as if, at long last and with some relief, she could be the only Churchill alive. But during the years when his grandmother’s art collecting was at its height, Jonas simply allowed her to take advantage of him, making no objection, obediently singling out a picture here and a picture there, perhaps because these gallery visits always wound up, as a reward, at the Studenten ice cream parlour. From that point of view, Jonas Wergeland was as easy to please as a sniffer dog when it is given a titbit for having sniffed out some concealed substance that it alone was capable of finding. When you come right down to it, and when you are only eight years old, there is nothing to beat that work of art known as a banana split, served in a bowl shaped like a half-moon, in that childhood paradise on the corner of Karl Johans gate, a place which even smelled as heaven must smell: of halved bananas, chopped almonds, strawberry jam and hot chocolate.