To Jonas Wergeland’s credit, it must be said that, like his mother, he did not regard these multiple personalities as a sign of madness, as most other people did — people who did their utmost to have her locked up in an institution. To Jonas’s mind, Jørgine was the perfect grandmother, with three deep creases in her brow which were constantly changing, rather like the trigrams, those three broken parallel lines found in the Chinese book of wisdom and divination, the I Ching; a grandmother who could be feeding the ducks one day, rambling on about this and that, to turn, the next day, into an astute, single-minded, steely patron of the arts. Not to mention her Churchill days, which were, for Jonas, absolute gala performances but which I regret I cannot go into here. What I would just like to make clear is that, all unwittingly, Jonas learned a very important lesson from his grandmother: that the inner nature of a human being is not as easily mapped out as all that, and that it is, in essence, pretty much unfathomable.
From the flat in Oscars gate, it was only a short walk for Jørgine Wergeland to a dimly-lit, smoke-filled establishment on Uranieborgveien called Restaurant Krølle, at that time a favourite haunt of many Oslo artists, writers and other nonconformist individualists who in later life would look back on those dingy premises with their hideous wrought-iron fittings and greasy walls with a good deal of nostalgia and indeed regarded it as one of their most important seats of learning; and it was here, in these subsequently so legendary surroundings — far more so than Theatercaféen — by listening in to the passionate discussions conducted over the beer glasses, that Jonas’s grandmother picked up tips about promising young painters who would be prepared to sell their pictures for next to nothing, or a bottle of cheap whisky come to that. I know of many people who recall the old lady with the three deep and shifting creases in her brow as an eccentric feature of Krølle’s — just ask the poet Stein Mehren, who spent several hours one evening conducting an evenly-matched conversation with Jonas’s grandmother on the subject of non-figurative art, after which she generously — and this was most unusual for her patron of the arts persona — treated the gifted young poet to two of the house’s traditional smørbrød: one with meatballs and one with bacon and egg.
It was after one of these long evenings among Krølle’s Bohemian patrons that Jørgine invited Jonas to accompany her to a tenement in Gabels gate. They climbed right up to the top floor then made their way to the end of the airing loft where she knocked at the most Spartan of doors with a washbasin outside it. The door was opened by a young man with features which Jonas would instinctively have described as Roman; at first it looked like he might turn them away, but Jørgine Wergeland persuaded or as good as bullied him into eventually, rather apprehensively, allowing them to step inside a room, not very big, which seemed to Jonas to reek more of horse than of turpentine. This little room, with two skylights and a ladder leading to a sleeping platform, was home to the painter, his wife and their small baby. Jonas found it hard to imagine that anyone could live in such conditions, but maybe it was all part and parcel of being an artist who had, according to his grandmother, already had his pictures turned down several times for the Autumn Exhibition.
The painter told them that he had just returned from a visit to the royal stables, which were quite close by, where he had been making some sketches. A large anatomical model of a horse, with all of the musculature clearly defined, was set up on a big, homemade table. Out of the blue, Jørgine asked whether she could buy a couple of his paintings, and the young man with the Roman features, realizing that in the face of such perseverance there was nothing for it but to give in, nodded towards the wall on which his pictures, the majority of them quite small, were hung. Jørgine Wergeland promptly proceeded to inspect the canvases and motioned to Jonas to take a look at them too.
And again … there was no mistaking it: when Jonas’s eye fell on the picture on the easel, he had the feeling of a soft feather, ‘as if from an angel’s wing’, being run all the way up his spine and coming to rest at the nape of his neck, making his hair stand on end and wringing a shudder from him. Jonas Wergeland would never find it possible to put this inner frisson into words and far be it from me to try, all I will say is that it had nothing to do with having a trained eye, nor was it subject to the taste of a particular day and age, or one specific place — he would later experience exactly the same thing when faced with works of art, old and new, from every corner of the globe, from Egyptian sculptures to acrylic paintings by the aborigines. Jonas Wergeland simply had an innate appreciation of perspective, balance, proportion, the play of colour — I am deliberately generalizing here, reluctant as I am to be drawn into pointless debates as to what makes for a good work of art.
The canvas on the easel depicted a group of horses and riders, with a large mirror in the background in which the riders were seen reflected, all executed in earth tones: ochre, umber, sienna, a tinge of Indian lake, but although the main impression was of brown, Jonas’s eye was immediately caught by a shimmering light underlying the sombre, muted hues, a golden sheen which seemed to speak of an invisible energy. ‘From the royal stables,’ the painter said kindly, somewhat surprised by Jonas’s absorption in the painting, going on to add: ‘The horse is the one animal most closely akin to man.’ When Jonas stepped right up close to the painting he noticed a number of unaccountably fine brushstrokes on the hindquarters of one of the horses, which, incredible as it may sound, offered him a glimpse into another dimension.
Jørgine needed only to look at Jonas. His face said it all. At the age of eight, Jonas Wergeland was an art connoisseur. He had no idea how this had come about, it just happened: he had a Geiger counter inside him that was triggered by fine works of art. He also picked out a landscape for his grandmother: ‘from Torvø’ they were later informed.
‘I’ll take them,’ Jørgine announced without further ado. She counted out 1200 kroner and laid the banknotes on the table next to some blue jars. Jonas had the idea that the painter thought this was too much, that he was almost embarrassed. ‘But you haven’t signed them,’ she said.
He signed the pictures. ‘Frantz W.,’ it said in ochre with a touch of white, this being long before the days when Widerberg opted for a palette of pure primary colours, simplified his name to Frans and became one of Norway’s most highly acclaimed and best-selling painters, his pictures becoming so ubiquitous in the form of prints, calendars and posters in thousands of homes that they were well on the way to becoming archetypes in themselves, every bit as much as the archetypes he endeavoured to portray.
Later in life Jonas would wonder whether he had possessed this gift for evaluating pictures from infancy. However that may be, it was when he was with his grandmother that he became aware of it, and there is no doubt that here we see the roots of what many regard as Norway’s greatest television talent of all time, namely, the ability to be able to tell right away when a picture is good, or could be good, or a scene, for that matter, in those instances where the pictures were to be shown on a screen. And, I might add, in years to come Jonas Wergeland would also make use of his remarkable inbuilt antenna when taking his exceedingly selective and very fruitful pick of Norway’s women.