Norwegian Painter Christian Krohg at the Musée d’Orsay

In the 1880s, Norwegian art experienced an unprecedented golden age. Among its finest exponents was Christian Krohg, to whom the Musée d’Orsay is devoting an unprecedented but partial exhibition.

After Edvard Munch (2022) and Harriet Backer (2024), the Musée d’Orsay closes a trilogy devoted to Norwegian painters of the turn of the 20^th century with Christian Krohg (1852-1925), a master of naturalism. Bringing together some fifty genre scenes dealing with the quest for emancipation, the exhibition shows an artist who was particularly sensitive to the social issues of his time, sometimes to the point of radicalism. In 1886, the Norwegian authorities censored his novel Albertine – a veritable pamphlet denouncing the regulation of prostitution – while he was working on his major painting, Albertine to See the Police Surgeon (1885-1887). The son of a lawyer and a civil servant, and the grandson of a minister, Krohg became, despite his bourgeois origins, the leader of a protest and libertarian bohemian movement, a feminist and a loving father from the very beginning, through his brush and his pen. While Christophe Leribault, former president of the museum, chose to highlight the artist, curator Servane Dargnies-de Vitry and her Norwegian counterpart Vibeke Waallann Hansen, who was behind the Christian Krohg retrospective at Oslo’s National Museum in 2012, are responsible for the exhibition’s design. The Parisian exhibition brings nothing new to the table. Divided into four sections the exhibition treats the same themes: social class and the human condition. Entitled “Framing”, the first section illustrates the world of fishing, which the artist observed in Skagen, a small village in northern Denmark, where he stayed several times between 1879 and 1894. It reveals portraits of sailors in the middle of the sea, closely framed, as if to underline the heroic character of these last-chance rescuers in the event of a storm.

This evocation of Norwegian society through slices of life is commendable, but does it reveal the Norwegian’s pictorial singularity?

The next section evokes a privileged class, this time urban, with magnetic portraits of the intellectual and artistic elite, cosmopolitan and Scandinavian. That of Krohg’s wife Oda, also a painter – but represented here by only three paintings – shows a modern woman, uninhibited and radiant. The third section is dedicated to the underprivileged, prostitutes and the destitute, whose stigmatization Krohg denounces, and the last, with scenes of family intimacy between generations, to a social model of solidarity and hope. This evocation of Norwegian society through slices of life is commendable, but does it reveal the pictorial singularity of the Norwegian, who never ceased to doubt himself as an artist? As he wrote in his memoirs in 1921: “I don’t know which of the moderns influenced me. But I tried first to imitate Bastien-Lepage and secondly, the Impressionists. In short, I wanted to take part in the radical program. But I had as little understanding of the Impressionists as I did of the Old Masters”. The painter’s hesitations, which explain his consensual style, are barely mentioned, with repeated references to Manet and Caillebotte for comparisons of motifs and compositions… rarely of style. The paintings of Erik Werenskiold and Christian Skredsvig would have shed an entirely different light on their friend’s work: a naturalism that consists in identifying with the model in his everyday life, not in his deepest feelings. This is what Edvard Munch, his pupil, would do.

Worth Seeing
“Christian Krohg (1852-1925). Le peuple du Nord”
Musée d’Orsay
Until July 27, 2025
musee-orsay.fr