Review: Alf van der Hagen «Sonja. Conversations with the Queen »

Non-fiction

Publisher:

Press

Release year:

2021

«Surprisingly candid conversations»

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BOOK: Queen Sonja has said of King Harald: “He used to say that he was flatfooted up to his ears when he went to exhibitions with me.”

It is a surprisingly candid Queen Sonja who reveals this to Alf van der Hagen in his new book «Sonja. Conversations with the Queen ». Conversation books have become a special distance for the cultural writer van der Hagen. He has previously invited us into the minds of people like Dag Solstad, Kjell Askildsen, Henning Hagerup and Suzanne Brøgger.

And now the queen. An assignment that should initially result in an article, has become an entire book. The chemistry between the interlocutors was true, you can already see that in the introduction where van der Hagen outlines his progress plan for the interview: “I think it’s basically an advantage that the queen is not sitting here prepared for the teeth?”, He says. ‘I’m completely blank, me. You control this, ”she replies.

Nobel Prize in Graphics

This is no ordinary royal biography of state visits, hereditary princes and princesses or tours of the kingdom. The mainstay is the queen and the art. Art lover Sonja, art collector Sonja, artist Sonja. The starting point is the 10th anniversary of the international art foundation she has founded, the Queen Sonja Print Award (QSPA). It is on its way to becoming one of the world’s most prestigious art prizes, a kind of “graphics Nobel Prize”, as some have called it.

Alf van der Hagen is thus with the queen; the book’s theme does not exactly invite to tiaras and ribbons. But there is no doubt that she comes from a furnished home. Young Sonja had posters of Matisse and Cézanne in the girls’ room in Tuengen avenue. As a 14-year-old, she ran and copied Picasso drawings and was already attracted to Cubist forms.

Wizard Weidemann

The parents were interested in art, and collected Henrik Sørensen paintings, but it was the friendship with Johan Stenersen, nephew of the famous collector Rolf M. Stenersen, that shaped the young girl’s artistic taste and lifelong interest. The two were at the age of 16 when they started visiting the studio of Jakob Weidemann, who then lived at Vinderen. There they discovered something completely different than what hung on the walls at home: “After that, I have always been fascinated by the modern, and never really turned back to the classic tradition,” she says. Weidemann became her guide into modern art.

Johan Stenersen was to become an artistic mentor for her. They shared a view of art that she has formulated as follows: “Do not look back, look ahead, that is what is exciting and challenging. Something to resist! ” It was in a company with Johan Stenersen that she met him who – many long waits later – would become her husband, and eventually a companion in the galleries.

Erotic icon grows up

Samlet with love

Today, the Queen has a private art collection of just over 1,200 images. She started collecting long before she got married. Bought works con amore, she says, without any plan for what she would go for, as real collectors have. Intuition, she believes herself, while others have stated that she is in possession of “a third eye”, ie a separate view of what is good.

Several of her pictures are reproduced in the conversation book, but one in particular has a telling story to it. It hangs in the queen’s own office at the castle, has the title “For example I” and is painted by Liv Ørnvall. The motif is a woman walking up a huge flight of stairs. The queen began to count all the steps when she saw the painting for the first time, some twenty steps, and thought that she just had to have that picture. There were just as many steps she herself had walked, ie all the years she walked around the Castle without having her own office. She constantly had to move around, before she finally got a corner room that in her time had been King Oscar’s billiard room.

“In that picture, it is as if I am going to climb all these stairs at the Castle… I felt a great insecurity, and sometimes I just felt like a shadow,” she says. She makes no secret of the fact that she felt unwanted in a strongly male-dominated and militarized environment. Liv Ørnvall’s female figures were such as “never dare to put their toe in the water, but sit and doubt their purse and are afraid of everything in this world”.

S for Sonja

As is well known, the queen has emphatically moved out of the shadow world. The artistic collaboration with Ørnulf Opdahl, Kjell Nupen and later Magne Furuholmen, has not only resulted in QSPA, the international foundation whose purpose is to promote graphics as an art form. She herself became so involved in the creative process, that she now appears as an independent graphic artist, under the signature «S». Not HMD (Her Majesty the Queen), just S, for Sonja. She calls it her free space. This is where Alf van der Hagen has served as an excellent guide.

Shocking openness and literary insight in a strong conversation book

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