Paintings 1945 – 1992: Elsa Thoresen

The burning-mirror of imagination
Elsa Thoresen’s late paintings  

Art is not a private nightmare, not even a private dream,
it is a shared human connection that traces the possibilities

of past and future in the whorl of now.

Jeanette Winterson
Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery

Art takes time. Not just to create but also to experience. Crammed together in a gallery space, Elsa Thoresen’s paintings demand that we ignore everything around them. “When was the last time you looked at anything, solely, and concentratedly, and for its own sake?” the writer Jeanette Winterson asks in her essays on art. According to Winterson, art is inherently subversive, regardless of whether it upholds or challenges prevailing norms. It expands our vision. Elsa Thoresen’s paintings do the same.

In many respects, her visual language is distinctive and well-defined, even though the style may vary. But her works do not readily lend themselves to being classified or tied to a specific period. What unites them is the artist’s ability to capture something that lurks under the surface. Something that is sensed rather than seen. That the universe vibrates? That all life has its own frequency?  

Elsa Thoresen’s life map spans several countries and two continents. She was born on 1 May 1906 in Minnesota, USA, and died on 20 August 1994 in Seattle. As an artist, however, her identity was rooted in Europe, where she lived for many years, and where her practice was originally formed. She grew up in the USA but studied at art colleges in Oslo and Brussels. Together with her husband, the Danish artist Vilhelm Bjerke-Petersen, Elsa Thoresen became a part of the avant-garde movement that pursued surrealism fervently in the 1930s, not just as an art style but as an approach to life. Her circle included Wilhelm Freddie, Harry Carlsson, Franciska Clausen and Rita Kernn-Larsen.

Elsa Thoresen and Vilhelm Bjerke-Petersen lived in Denmark until 1944, when the atrocities of the Second World War forced them to flee to Sweden with their two children. In Sweden, Thoresen affiliated herself with the Halmstad Group and exhibited in Stockholm, Karlstad, Örebro and Karlskoga.

Surrealism is often associated with a set of male artists, including Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst and Man Ray. But the surrealist movement was also an opportunity for women to challenge patriarchal demands and bourgeois norms through their art and lifestyle. Meret Oppenheim, Leonora Carrington and Kay Sage are some important examples. Thoresen met many pioneers of surrealism personally. One sign of recognition was that her works were shown at the prestigious Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme in Paris in 1938, organised by the surrealist theoretician André Breton and Paul Éluard, possibly the movement’s most important poet. In 1947, she was the only woman in the Danish group at the international surrealist exhibition at Galeri Maeght.  

In Thoresen’s paintings from the 1930s, we can sense parallels with René Magritte’s figurative surrealism, where everyday objects verge on disintegrating in mental landscapes. In a lighter style, but in Magritte’s spirit, Thoresen undermines our trust in the image. In the late 1940s, however, her art changes. The links to literature and figuration, which are common in surrealism, begin to dissolve. While the motifs still allude to the organic and nature, the reference to vague inner landscapes is stronger. Through art, she looks inwards and enters another dimension.

In 1953, after divorcing Bjerke-Petersen, Elsa Thoresen moved back to the USA with her children. She married Johnny Gouveia the same year, whom she had met in 1947 during an extended sojourn in New York. Their life together in Seattle was rather different from her time as a celebrated artist on the European art scene. But she continued to paint even out of the limelight. Her imagination navigated a timeless, imaginary universe.

Thoresen creates her Microcosmos series between 1965 and 1980 – 20 small oils, sparkling gems of colour and shape in an enigmatic dance on singularly small panels. These works, preserved by the artist’s daughter, remained in obscurity for decades. Their first public showing was at Galleri Belenius in Stockholm in 2023.

Thoresen’s late paintings blend echoes of surrealist paradoxes with the infinite potential of abstraction. Details may mislead our eyes into discerning traces of something we recognise and can identify. But the characteristic exaggerations and figurative tendencies of surrealism have already given way to a more abstract and visually poetic imagery. It is as though the shapes in Thoresen’s art had matured outside historic time, untainted by current trends. In her abstract art, which she indulged in during her US years, everything and nothing is possible. Movement remains, however, but more like a perpetual rather than feverish energy. Sometimes, cohesive sequences are outlined with distinct contours. More often, forms and colours merge lightly on the way to dissolution. The compositional centre is hard to fixate. The eye is sucked into enigmatic spaces that seem to expand beyond the picture frame.

Artists sometimes offer valuable clues to the interpretation of their art. Elsa Thoresen rarely relies on words, however. Unlike her early works, her late paintings are untitled. These pieces leave us guessing. Every attempt to read them is one among countless possibilities. There is nothing wrong with that, of course. On the contrary, it proves the infinite potential of art, in line with Albert Einstein’s adage that imagination is more important than knowledge. In Thoresen’s paintings, the emphasis is on ambiguity. Here, art is the burning-mirror of imagination, where visions never congeal into paradigms. We are tossed back and forth, between micro- and macrocosms, through associations that dovetail without adhering to any exact, premeditated principle. As if the slumbering paintings had been awakened and increase their vibrations every time our gaze meets them.

Joanna Persman
Kraków, December 2024

Elsa Thoresen 

Born 1906 in Benson, Minnesota, USA. Died 1994 in Seattle, Washington, USA.

Elsa Thoresen was a Surrealist painter who lived and worked in Norway, Denmark, Sweden and the USA. Thoresen studied at Statens håndverks- og kunstindustriskole in Oslo 1924 – 1927, at Statens Kunstakademi in Oslo 1927 – 1930 and at the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Brussels 1928 – 1929. Thoresen lived in Copenhagen between 1935 – 1944. Escaping the Nazi occupation of Denmark in 1944, Thoresen lived and worked in Stockholm and spent her summers in Halmstad. She moved back to the USA in 1953 where she lived until her death.

Thoresen’s work was shown at the Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme in Paris in 1938, organized by surrealist theorist André Breton and possibly the movement’s most important poet Paul Éluard. In 1947 she was the only woman in the Danish group at the International Surrealist Exhibition in the Galerie Maeght in Paris.

During the years 1935 – 1953, Thoresen was married to the artist Vilhelm Bjerke-Petersen. The couple collaborated on mural projects in Copenhagen, travelled and exhibited together. Spending their summers in Halmstad, they formed close ties to the Halmstad group.

Thoresen’s later paintings became more abstract, drawing the viewer into the quiet intimate smaller format, to take part of what appears to be almost a choreography of movement of shapes.

After her passing, Thoresen’s works have been shown in museum exhibitions in Louisiana, Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, COBRA Museum voor Moderne Kunst, Amstelveen, Holland, Artipelag, Stockholm, Musée de Montmartre, Paris and Cascadia Art Museum, Edmonds, WA, USA.