Two long yellow curtains hanging from the ceiling flank the doorway through which we enter the museum’s exhibition area. The walls are covered with paintings stretching from floor to ceiling, and smaller paintings hang on top of these colourful works. There are patterned carpets here and there on the floors, and selected pieces of furniture are also placed in the rooms. A film camera moves out into a landscape to the sound of birdsong. The chirping mingles with the faint sound of clocks in other rooms. In the middle of the floor in the largest gallery, there is a desk placed on a carpet woven in nuances of yellow, blue and green. On the desk is a book bound in red leather with gold lettering. The inscription Samling Halvdan Hafsten (Collection Halvdan Hafsten) and eight names provide one of the few textual clues about the background for the capacious artistic installation we are about to experience.

The Halvdan Hafsten Collection is the starting point for the exhibition The Forbidden Forest, a Gesamtkunstwerk, a total work of art, created by Andreas Siqueland (b. 1973). Stavanger Art Museum has managed the Halvdan Hafsten Collection ever since its 208 works and a large accompanying archive were given to Stavanger Faste Galleri in 1984. At the collector’s request, the pictures have mostly hung in the same place in a separate wing designed especially for them. They are made by artists with an established presence in Norwegian art history. The paintings and drawings are by Alexander Schulz (1901–1981), Harald Dal (1902–1972), Erling Enger (1899–1990), Kai Fjell (1907–1989), Reidar Aulie (1904–1977), Ragnar Kraugerud (1909–1987), Thorbjørn Lie-Jørgensen (1900–1961) and Arne Ekeland (1908–1994). Some of the pictures were made before or during the Second World War, others later. What stories do we tell our visitors about the artworks today? How are they rendered relevant after 40 years in the museum?

Wanting to challenge ourselves in our work with historical collections, we invited Andreas Siqueland to create an exhibition both about and with the Halvdan Hafsten Collection. We chose Siqueland because he has spent quite some time exploring landscape painting, a genre well represented in Hafsten’s collection. Some of the artists, for instance Erling Enger, Harald Dal and Thorbjørn Lie-Jørgensen, often created ‘pure’ landscape paintings. In Arne Ekeland’s pictures, the landscape of Eidsvoll, where he lived most of his life, provides an interesting backdrop for the political scenes in his paintings. In Ragnar Kraugerud’s works, the figures almost melt into their surroundings. His group portraits are marked by a simplified expression – it is almost as if he wants to express the essence of a person’s insoluble connection to nature. For Kai Fjell, fragments of landscapes are part of the layered mosaics that surround central figural scenes. Alexander Schultz’s nature subjects divulge the artist’s avid interest in colour and composition. Reidar Aulie paints urban landscapes and spaces as backdrops for the labours and struggles of humanity. We at the museum were interested in how Siqueland’s painterly investigations could converse with the works of these artists. In his book A Picture and a Box, Siqueland examines how his own paintings are influenced by being made in different geographical locations.² Inspired by plein air painting, he has painted landscapes in diverse places around the world. Could the landscapes in Hafsten’s collection function as a new frame of reference for Siqueland’s painterly project?

A Critical Look at the Art Institution

Since the 1960s artists have created works that shed light on the managerial responsibilities of art institutions. This so-called institution-critical art seeks to expose what happens to artworks that end up in an institution, and the power the institution’s staff wields over the works. Artists such as Michael Asher (1943–2012), Daniel Buren (b.1938) and Hans Haacke (b. 1936) reveal the social context surrounding artworks in institutions. Asher and Buren look especially at how museums’ physical surroundings affect us, while Haacke’s investigations are important for exposing the commercial interests linked to museums and the relationships between them. Other artists such as the Guerrilla Girls (an artist group founded in 1985) critically explores the amassing of collections and the criteria used to determine whose works end up in museum collections.

Artistic practices such as these are consequential for Siqueland, who in earlier projects has explored the flexibility of art institutions.⁴ At the start of this present project he was also greatly inspired by the work of the museum director Alexander Dorner (1893–1957). The decade before Hafsten started his collecting activities, Dorner came up with revolutionary ideas about how museums could present their collections in so-called ‘atmosphere rooms’. This he demonstrated in the Hannover Landesmuseum, and also later, through his practice at Rhode Island School of Design.⁵ With a will to disrupt the traditional chronology in museum displays, Dorner presented artworks in thematic contexts. When he came to Rhode Island School of Design, he challenged the exhibition format by, among other things, removing the traditional display cases so that the objects on show would have stronger aesthetic appeal. To create spaces that gave viewers the opportunity to get closer to the objects, he dismantled the barriers the museum had set up around the objects. Inspired by Dorner’s work, Siqueland wanted to challenge both Stavanger Art Museum as an institution and its handling of the Halvdan Hafsten Collection, first and foremost by examining the regulations that are crucial for ensuring the safety of the artworks, for instance how the museum carefully monitors the amount of light to which the works are exposed, but also the institutional practices that have developed over time, such as the way works are often hung side-by-side on white or uniformly coloured walls and accompanied by labels with information about the artist and the artworks. Siqueland experienced these and other institutional measures as inhibiting the public’s ability to engage with the artworks on their own terms. In this exhibition project, Siqueland was always on the side of the artworks. It was therefore also natural for him to challenge the collector’s intentions. The considerations that have led the art museum to exhibit the works in a certain way these last years have always started with the collector’s interests.

The Collector’s Interests

Halvdan Hafsten (1905–1993) was the son of a successful scrap dealer and spent his working life in a rubber factory. His employer, the factory owner P.W. Røwde, had many interests. Among other things, he was for several years the consul for the Kingdom of Hungary. Hafsten assisted him in this work, and after many years of service was honoured with a chancellor title from that country. The title must have been important to Hafsten because it is often mentioned in interviews.⁶ Hafsten grew up in the family’s home at Grefsen in Oslo.⁷ Since he did not start a family himself, he continued to live in his childhood home along with his mother. After her passing, he assumed ownership of the house and lived there for the rest of his life. His collecting activity, he claimed, started almost by accident. He saw a picture by Bjarne Engebret on the wall of an acquaintance’s home. He knew Engebret because they had grown up in the same neighbourhood. He then contacted the artist and said he wanted to buy a picture. It was the painting From Aker Shipyard. Workshop (Fra Akers Mek. Workshop) and showed the sternpost of a ship.⁸ Engebret eventually became an important adviser for Hafsten as he built his art collection. He realised he possessed no art historical expertise himself, so was eager to receive advice from professionals. Another important adviser was Pola Gauguin (1883–1961), son of the famous painter Paul Gaugin (1848–1903), who for a time ran a painting school and worked as an art critic in Oslo.⁹

Hafsten eventually became close friends with the artists whose works he collected. Although he started with Engebret, he ended up concentrating on eight other artists and continued to collect their works for the rest of his life. In a note preserved in his archive, he writes about his personal relationships with the artists. Short texts give us insight into a time marked by social and material challenges during the Second World War. The scarcity of food and other goods, plus the difficulties of trying to have a normal social life, also complicated the situation. Clearly, Hafsten placed great value on his friendships with the artists.

Andreas Siqueland was given access to the archive while working on the exhibition, but he found little that could elucidate the collector’s personal commitment to the works he collected. There are short texts which some of the artists have written about the pictures in the collection,¹¹ yet nowhere in the archive do we get an impression of Hafsten’s own assessments, thoughts or impressions of the artworks. He explains neither why he chose these eight artists nor the specific pictures. Even so, he clearly states that the collection represents the ‘best’ of Norwegian art and that it has great art historical value.¹² We know Hafsten lived with his collection for several decades before giving it to the museum towards the end of his life. There are a few photos from his home showing him surrounded by his pictures. We see him hosting parties with his siblings and other relatives, standing in white-walled rooms furnished with historical furniture

This strategy also underscores that the museum’s white, ‘neutral’ walls are a historical construction dating back to Alfred H. Barr Jr. (1902–1981), first director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. To present modern art in the best possible way and to focus attention on the artworks, Barr modernised the museum’s interior.¹³ In contrast to the historical interiors in older museums, the new modern museum was furnished with light grey walls devoid of décor. This revolutionary choice made a tremendous impact on all the world’s art museums, and it has long been the standard for how art should be presented. It is still a common assumption that artworks need calm and space around them in order to be seen to full advantage.¹⁴ In the French salons in Paris in the 1800s, paintings were hung at several levels on the walls. Artists strove to have their works hung at eye level in order to be noticed. Pictures mounted near the floor or high up on the wall gained far less attention from the public. When the artist and curator Mieke Bal exhibited her filmic works in combination with selected works by Edvard Munch in the Munch Museum in 2017, she chose to hang some of Munch’s paintings near the floor.¹⁵ The simple strategy had a striking effect. These two examples illustrate just how little is needed to break the norm and disrupt our expectations for how pictures should be hung and presented in a museum. When Siqueland exhibits paintings layer-on-layer by hanging works from the Halvdan Hafsten Collection on top of his own works, the effect is almost overwhelmingly radical. Another important point in the exhibition is that the relation between the mural-like works and the easel paintings mounted on top of them are emphasised in different ways; this instigates painterly dialogues between the pictures from Hafsten’s collection and those made by Siqueland.

Painterly Dialogues

Reidar Aulie is known for his political images of life in Norway during the interwar period. His pictures reflect an interest in the individual, and he highlights human challenges with empathy and personal involvement. His subjects are usually painted naively, with relatively unrefined brushstrokes in a restricted palette of earthy tones and a few bright colours. In the exhibition, Siqueland mounts Aulie’s pictures atop two large wall paintings executed in light pastel colours. The motifs put one in mind of branches, trees and plants depicted in separated fields, somewhat like a patterned drapery. The light, bright colours can be experienced as competing with the earthy colours in Aulie’s pictures. We must actively shift our gaze from the large background paintings to Aulie’s narrative images. The large paintings have a certain naïveté, just as do Aulie’s. They can draw a connection to illustrations in a children’s book. Aulie’s paintings inspired Siqueland to think of the French painter Henri Rousseau (1844–1910). Rousseau, who was mostly self-taught and never travelled outside of France, is known for painting jungle scenes with lush green vegetation and exotic animals. Siqueland suggests a dialogue between Aulie and Rousseau with his large Rousseauesque paintings. The intense, painterly encounter can be read as a proposal to think anew about Aulie’s pictures in a European context.¹⁶ The drapery-like paintings can also draw a connection to stage curtains, a jubilantly painted overture to all the tristesse and seriousness, but also to the humour that can be found in Aulie’s paintings.

Dissolved Time

The Forbidden Forest is a visually explorable exhibition that invites us to study colours, shapes and painterly passages and to see connections between Siqueland’s works and historical works of art. This visual experience is also attended by a significant soundtrack. The chirping of birds from the film Forest Karaoke emphasises the fluid relationship between outside and inside. Another sound, however, is more subtly present in the exhibition rooms and requires even greater attentiveness to be heard. In the exhibition there are three clocks with mechanisms from different historical epochs. They allow us to listen to the march of time. Siqueland has painted landscape fragments on the clocks, as if to make them blend with the exhibition’s scenography. As artworks, they recall Edvard Munch’s depiction of a large floor clock in the painting Between the Clock and the Bed (Mellom klokken og sengen). When the clocks chime – at different times because they are set differently – the musical sounds from the historical timepieces will perhaps remind us that different time periods are activated in the exhibition.¹⁷

Several works in Hafsten’s collection were made before and during the Second World War. Harald Dal’s forest interiors from Nesodden, which we see at the start of the exhibition, were painted while Norway was caught up in war in the 1940s. The local forest scenes acquire a different emphasis when we think of how the world looked just a short distance from the peaceful play of shadows outside Dal’s windowpane. At the same time, the painterly dialogues between Siqueland’s artworks and the older paintings seem able to erase the distance in time. When the artist foregrounds painterly connections between his own works and the historical paintings, the dialogues and interaction become more important than diachronic time. This sense of timelessness, which is emphasised by the presence of the unsynchronised historical clocks, supports Siqueland’s desire to break with art-historical categorisations and open up for individual experiences of the works in Hafsten’s collection.