Etiopia was also shown in 1939 at the New York World’s Fair, bu… On a trip to Dresden, Germany, as a young woman, she immersed herself in the work of Vermeer, Goya and El Greco. Since repaired, this scarred work, with its explicit message of global solidarity, has become an emblem of collective memory, lending its name to a 2014 exhibition at the Henie Onstad Arts Center, south of Oslo, in which artists responded to the events of that day in 2011. Through close reading of the left-leading newspaper Dagbladet, Ms. Ryggen followed with horror the rise of fascist powers in Europe. She paid close attention to the rise of fascism in Europe, and made work in direct response to it. Following the formal traditions of 17th and 18th century Norwegian folk textile arts, her works combine figurative and abstract elements. Johnson’s beagle made headlines after the president had lifted the dog by its ears during a photography shoot. “Etiopia” was shown in the Norwegian pavilion at the Paris Expo of 1937. Why Hannah Ryggen, largely written out of art history following her death in 1970, has undergone such a remarkable revival over the past decade might be put down to several factors: her powerful graphic sensibility, the choice of tapestry as her medium and her fearless engagement with the dark times in which she lived, which have powerful resonances with our own. Her 1935 tapestry 'Etiopia' (Ethiopia) was triggered by Benito Mussolini’s invasion of the African country. Ms. Ryggen’s tapestry was torn and showered with splinters of glass and other flying debris. 2017 Hannah Ryggen/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Nordenfjeldske Kunstindustrimuseum. Among the earliest works is the frieze-like “Etiopia,” Ms. Ryggen’s furious response to the Italian occupation of Ethiopia in 1936. According to Emma Ridgway, senior curator at Modern Art Oxford, “We Are Living on a Star” is now considered too culturally important to risk its traveling for exhibition abroad, but 15 sizable works by Ms. Ryggen, who died in 1970, are on display through Feb. 18 at the Oxford museum, in the first major examination of the artist’s work in Britain. OXFORD, England — On July 22, 2011, Hannah Ryggen’s tapestry “We Are Living on a Star” was hanging in the Cabinet Building in Oslo’s Regjeringskvartalet, or government quarter, when a car bomb exploded in the street outside. "Hannah Ryggen". Portraits of the Emperor Haile Selassie and Italy’s King Victor Emmanuel III are set above a large geometrically patterned rug panel suggesting Ms. Ryggen’s kinship with African weavers. After moving to a remote area near Trondheim, Norway, in 1924, she and her husband Hans lived off the land they farmed. Even in such company, Ms. Ryggen’s work was censored: An upper portion of the tapestry, showing Benito Mussolini’s decapitated head held aloft by an Ethiopian soldier, was folded over to avoid offending Italians. OXFORD, England — On July 22, 2011, Hannah Ryggen’s tapestry “We Are Living on a Star” was hanging in the Cabinet Building in Oslo’s Regjeringskvartalet, or government quarter, when a … Toward the end of her life, Ms. Ryggen turned her gaze to the United States. While Ryggen was included in several major international exhibitions in the 1950s and '60s, she remains largely unknown outside of Scandinavia. ”She was horrified by reports of the war, and was angry that coverage of the brutal loss of life in another country had been overshadowed by the media focus on the behavior of President Johnson as an individual,” the curator said. Having relied on media sources for inspiration throughout her working life, Ms. Ryggen’s disquiet over the way the president’s public behavior could draw our focus away from more important international issues seems, as with many of the artist’s other concerns, remarkably prescient. In Godal, Anne Marit. Neither love nor military intervention could protect the Ryggen family: two years later Hans was imprisoned. Spinning wool from her … Opstad, Jan-Lauritz. Created after a decade of self-education, Ms. Ryggen’s first mature political tapestry “Fishing in the Sea of Debt” (1933), shows starving families drowning in a blood-red fjord while a plump debt-collector’s wife looks on from her picnic blanket. [3] Etiopia was also shown in 1939 at the New York World’s Fair, but there was a cloth covering the part of the scene with a spear piercing through Mussolini’s head. Her turn to tapestry, and with it, her interest in craft traditions and the eccentric compositions of medieval art, was explicitly political. Hannah Ryggen is considered one of the foremost Norwegian tapestry artists of the 20th century. A tapestry was a mobile messenger: it could be nimbly rolled up, transported and displayed without sustaining damage as a painting might. [1], She was a pacifist who subscribed to Scandinavian feminist and leftist journals, and was active in the Norwegian Communist Party and international workers’ movements. Her 1935 tapestry 'Etiopia' (Ethiopia) was triggered by Benito Mussolini’s invasion of the African country. “Blood in the Grass” (1966), the final work in the exhibition, shows President Lyndon Johnson as a scarlet cowboy, a dog at his feet, beside a lawn of tufted green wool, through which seeps a violent red. Born to a working class Swedish family in 1894, Ms. Ryggen trained as a portrait painter before turning to the loom. With its strong, roiling colors, and expressionistic style, the work suggests the influence of the Norwegian artist Edvard Munch. Næss, Inga Elisabeth. Self-trained, she worked on a standing loom constructed by her husband, the painter Hans Ryggen. According to Marta Kuzma, although Ryggan "shared and affinity with Käthe Kollwitz, who also selected as her narrative the social, spiritual, and political disorder of her time, Ryggan bypassed Kollwitz's tendency to draft allegorical figures (such as Black Anna) and instead identified historical individuals who forged, installed, and enabled the totalitarian regime in those years – Mussolini, Hitler, Göring, Quisling, Churchill, and the Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun. [4], Hannah Ryggen (right) and Hans Ryggen about 1935-1940, Kuzma, Marta, "Hannah Ryggen" (No.067 in 100 Notes - 100 Thoughts / 100 Notizen - 100 Gedanken), dOCUMENTA(13), Hatje Cantz, Germany, 2012, "Art with a Purpose: Notes on Hannah Ryggen's Tapestries", "Documenta 13: Hannah Ryggen (Contemporary Art Daily)", "The Anti-Fascist Tapestries of Hannah Ryggen", "Hannah Ryggen at Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt", The woman who kept Hitler and Churchill in stitches: Hannah Ryggen Woven Histories review, In Pictures: Hannah Ryggen’s Defiantly Anti-Fascist Tapestries, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hannah_Ryggen&oldid=990930969, CS1 Norwegian Bokmål-language sources (nb), SKBL template using Wikidata property P4963, Wikipedia articles with BIBSYS identifiers, Wikipedia articles with KULTURNAV identifiers, Wikipedia articles with RKDartists identifiers, Wikipedia articles with SUDOC identifiers, Wikipedia articles with WORLDCATID identifiers, Articles needing translation from Norwegian Wikipedia, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. 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