Provenance:
In a Swiss private collection since approx. 1980.

Thorvald Hellesen is one of the long-forgotten Norwegian modernist artists. It was only in 2023, 104 years after Hellesen had his first and last exhibition in Norway, that the National Museum in Oslo presented the artist's work to a wider public with the show "Thorvald Hellesen. Pioneering Cubism".

Hellesen's long absence from the Norwegian art canon may also be related to the fact that he spent most of his adult life in France.
The artist emigrated to Paris in 1911, where he came into contact with the central figures of Cubism through the group ‘La Section d'Or’. He subsequently experimented with a range of Cubist strategies, whereby his preoccupation with the work of his friend Fernand Léger was formative.

In the early 1920s, Hellesen began to explore the possibilities of painting as a pure surface. He developed compositions in which references to the outside world disappeared, and colours, textures and geometric forms came to the fore. By emphasising the surface, the artist consciously engaged with the two-dimensional nature of painting and used it as a starting point for new aesthetic forms of expression.¹

In contrast to the art criticism in his home country, the avant-garde movements showed keen interest in Thorvald Hellesen's painting. Amédée Ozenfant, for example, wrote in 1921: "Peu de grandes expositions ont été cette année aussi charmantes que le Salon des Indépendants. Parmi les cubistes, Hellesen est l'un des plus intéressants, justement parce qu'il paraît avoir une esthétique définie où la couleur et la forme jouent de façon bien systématique."²

And Theo van Doesburg even claimed that Hellesen's use of colour had a decisive influence on his French colleagues when, referring to the Salon des Indépendants of 1920, he said: "The two strongest personalities, the Norwegian painter Th. Hellesen and Fernand Léger, operate with constructions of primary colors. The distinctively Nordic influence of the former is already making its mark on many proponents of the colorless French form of Cubism".³

¹ Cf. Ingvild Krogvig. “The Rise and Fall of Norwegian Abstraction in the Twenties”. In: Gladys C. Fabre und Jan Torsten Ahlstrand (ed.). Electromagnetic. Modern Art in Northern Europe, 1918-1931. Ostfildern 2013. p. 81 – 99.
² Amédée Ozenfant under his pseudonym Vauvrecy, in L’Esprit Nouveau N° 5, 1921, p. 603.
³ Theo van Doesburg, cited in Krogvig 2013, p. 85.