Anna-Eva Bergman, 1909-1987 : Voyage Vers L'intérieur

Exhibition at the Musée d'Art Moderne, Paris, 31 March - 16 July 2023

Free and visionary, Anna-Eva Bergman (1909-1987) is a key artist of post-war painting, whose work is a tribute to the beauty of nature, the landscapes of the North and the Mediterranean.

Exhibited throughout the world during her lifetime (notably at the Musée d'Art Moderne in Paris in 1977), the Norwegian artist remains insufficiently recognised in Europe. Her work, with its singular pictorial language based on a vocabulary of pure forms, now requires a broader reconsideration in the field of art history alongside the work of her contemporaries, including Hilma af Klint, Georgia O'Keeffe and Sonia Delaunay.

This exhibition catalogue brings together a collection of works by Anna-Eva Bergman - including Stele No. 2, acquired during the artist's lifetime, and the hundred or so works from the Hartung-Bergman Foundation's donation to the MAM - supplemented by photographs, drawings and archival documents. The book analyses in particular the wealth of plastic techniques used by Bergman and the very specific use of a material that has become his signature: metal leaf (gold, silver, aluminium, tin, copper, lead, bismuth).

Various essays explore the artist's relationship to drawing and caricature, to architecture, his use of the golden ratio, as well as the reception and exhibition of his work after the war, his relationship to the great masters of the past and to his contemporaries such as Barnett Newman, Ad Reinhardt and Mark Rothko.