This biography is republished in full with kind permission from The Art Story – Hannah Ryggen.
Born: 21 March 1894, Sweden
Died: 2 February 1970
Country most active: Norway
Also known as: Hanna Josefina Maria Jönsson
Hannah Ryggen is a vital and unique figure in the story of modern art, particularly within the Nordic countries. Trained as a painter and educated in the Old Masters, she became a weaver in order to engage with the folk traditions of her native Norway. Yet Ryggen shied away neither from the experiments of twentieth century art nor the horrors of twentieth century politics, producing stark modernist murals that told stories of love, life, war, death, and hope in a potent visual language. Museum director Philipp Demandt describes Ryggen as “undoubtedly one of the most important Scandinavian women artists of the twentieth century.”
Childhood and Education
Hanna Josefina Maria Jönsson was born into a working-class family in Malmö, Sweden in 1894. Her mother was a domestic servant and her father was a factory worker. Of her humble upbringing, Ryggen once stated, “my mother started to go out to work when she was eleven years old; my father started at Kockum’s shipyard when he was fifteen years old. Work took up all their lives.” Her parents were keen for Ryggen and her two siblings to achieve a good education and to learn the value of hard work. For Ryggen, this meant studying to become a teacher. At nineteen she began her first job, working in an elementary school in Gryt, Sweden. Around this time she added an “h” to the end of her first name although the reason for this is unknown.
Early Training
Ryggen did not take to teaching. As art historian Marit Paasche explains “she was neither good with children nor adept at giving instruction.” However, Paasche continues, “the teaching profession gave her economic independence, as well as offering long summer holidays.” Nonetheless, after making several visits to a particular art exhibition in Malmö, Ryggen began to pluck up the courage to consider an alternative career and undertook an art course during her summer break. Excited by what she had learned Ryggen enrolled in several college courses when her teaching responsibilities began at the start of the next school year. Balancing her work demands, Ryggen studied intermittently for the next six years under German artist Fredrik Krebs receiving a classical training. She was especially drawn to the work of Rembrandt. Krebs also encouraged her to take a study trip to Dresden, Germany during the summer of 1922 so she could broaden her artistic knowledge by visiting and sketching in museums. On this trip Ryggen met her future husband, a Norwegian named Hans Ryggen, who was also studying art in Germany at the time.
Mature Period
Upon returning home from Germany Ryggen made two decisions that would shape the rest of her life. Firstly, she chose to continue her relationship with Hans, initially via letters from Sweden to Norway, her partner’s home country. The pair eventually became engaged. Secondly, Ryggen, who until that point had worked primarily as a painter, switched to weaving. There is much speculation as to why. Certainly, Sweden had a vibrant tradition of folk arts and craft and this heritage may have inspired her. Moreover, in Dresden, she probably spent time with Hans’s teacher, artist Otto Lange. As Paasche explains, “in addition to painting, Lange designed interiors and made textile samples and handicrafts….The possibility that he may have influenced Hannah’s decision to switch from painting to weaving cannot be dismissed.” Whatever the underlying reasons, Paasche continues, Ryggen “realized early on that she could express something in weaving that she could not in painting….The creative process involved in weaving was also-time consuming in quite a different way from painting. It required discipline, and that suited Hannah’s temperament.” Of her somewhat unexpected decision to shift medium the artist once stated: “suddenly there awoke in me a desire to do something with my hands. I could not paint like Krebs and still be myself. It suddenly occurred to me that I would weave pictures.”
Ryggen initially struggled with the mechanics of weaving . It was not until Hans designed her a special loom, one that she could easily manipulate and control, that she began to excel in her artmaking. Looking back on this tough apprenticeship Ryggen described the loom as “an instrument of torture….I had to teach myself to weave. The warp was too narrow and I fussed and yanked at the threads and beams….And by the time I’d woven just four small tapestries, I was exhausted….Then I got to know Hans, and we moved to Norway. Hans is a creative genius. Everything I need, he invents, you know. He built me a loom – the world’s greatest loom, which I could operate with my feet and work much more easily with. I have had it for twenty-three years and have woven all my large tapestries on it.”
Ryggen married Hans in September of 1923 and continued to teach until he could establish a home for them in Norway. Hans came from a farming family and while he, as the eldest son, was supposed to take on management of the family’s land he passed this responsibility on to his brother and instead purchased a small, manageable plot which would allow him and Hannah to work on their art while raising crops and livestock to support themselves. Ryggen joined her husband on their farm in Ørlandet, Norway in March of 1924. Two months later they welcomed their only child, a daughter they named Mona.
These early years of marriage were a period of adjustment for Hannah. Life on the farm was difficult. At first, the couple’s home did not even have running water or electricity. They supplemented their income by selling Hans paintings, while Hannah taught locals how to dye fabrics. Of those first years on the farm, Ryggen stated, “we were struggling desperately to pay debts, feed and clothe ourselves, and for what we actually felt our lives were meant to be in this world…But life was good, we wore ourselves out….Life was rich, filled with work and beauty.” Ryggen grew particularly close to the animals she and Hans kept, thinking of many of them as pets and struggling when they had to be sold. She depicted some of these animals in her artworks, such as her tapestry Yes, We Love (1950), which includes a goose of whom she was particularly fond. An earlier work, Us and Our Animals (1934), features several of the farm’s animals alongside the artist and her family.
As well as providing subject-matter, living on a farm allowed Ryggen to work with nature to make her materials. When it came to dyeing her wool – which came from the sheep on her farm – Paasche explains that “the goal was to extract as many hues as possible from her natural surroundings … gradually the attic of ‘Rønnan’ (as they dubbed their little house) was filled with dyed skeins of wool in countless shades created from goat willow bark, bird cherry, haircap moss, birch leaves, heather, common lichen, Scots pine bark…, and more. Every nuance of color corresponded to a specific entity in nature. Through the creation of color [Ryggen] took her immediate surroundings out into the greater world, and by her choice of subject matter, the world at large came closer to them. The wool and linen that she used were also pure product of her environment.” Her favorite color, a particular shade of blue she referred to as “pot-blue,” was perhaps the most complicated to make. She collected drunk men’s urine and mixed this with materials such as orange peel and birch leaves, leaving the mixture to steep before using to turn the wool green and, finally, blue on exposure to air. Only then was the color right for use in her tapestries.
Despite the demands of her daily life Ryggen spent a large portion of her days making art. After Hans sold a portion of the farm to pay off debts income became a less pressing concern so Hannah was free to spend still more time weaving. This led to her first exhibition of tapestries, which were shown next to Hans’s paintings at an exhibition in 1926. While life on the farm was somewhat isolated, Ryggen was very aware of world events and the effects of government actions on working people’s lives. She was openly sympathetic to communism and tapestry-making proved an unlikely outlet for this sentiment. She began to weave complex narratives into her tapestries that visualized her views, resulting in highly political works addressing themes such as unfair working conditions and the rise of fascism. Contemporary political figures such as Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini even appeared in her works. This was highly original given the homely, rustic, and historically-minded connotations of her medium. As Paasche explains, “what is exceptional…and distinguishing about [Ryggen] is that she so explicitly uses the news and information as subject matter for her art. Unequivocally, and with full confidence in what art can achieve, she depicts international conflicts, and in so doing allows her political convictions and her denunciations full expression. She wished Mussolini dead, so she showed him being killed, skewered in Ethiopia (1935)….[She] believed Nazism had a stranglehold on the world, and consequently she wove Death of Dreams (1936) and 6 October 1942 (1943).”
The second half of the 1930s was a productive period for Ryggen. She created several large tapestries and began to gain a reputation beyond her home country, with several works appearing in prominent international shows. One of her tapestries was included in the Norwegian Pavilion of the World Fair in Paris in 1937 and was then shown in New York in 1939. Ryggen’s family life, however, was less happy. She and her husband grew increasingly concerned about their daughter’s health. In 1940 she began having seizures and it later became clear she was suffering from epilepsy. While the Ryggens were trying to raise money to travel with Mona to Copenhagen for treatment, the Nazis invaded Norway, putting an end to their plans.
The Nazis became a stifling presence in the Ryggen’s lives, building an airbase in their village and housing many prisoners of war there. Seeing first-hand the mistreatment of these prisoners and the horrors of war, Ryggen began to create works about war and fascism, a theme that would sustain her practice after the war. She later said of this time that she and her family were “living on the edge of a grave.” The worst part of the war was in May 1944, when the Nazis arrested and imprisoned Hans for resistance activities. Weaving was the only thing that stopped Hannah going mad; her tapestry, Grini (1945) presented a visualization of her time apart from her husband and her desire for his safe return.
To her relief, when the war ended, Ryggen was reunited with her husband. They returned to a form of normality, working on the farm and making art. They even managed a trip to Paris, and Hannah’s work was shown in a 1946 exhibition at the Museum of Art and Design in Copenhagen. While the folk tradition was strong in Norway, and weaving was a recognized art form, Ryggen pushed herself towards more modern themes and influences. She was interested in the art she had seen during her stay in Paris, including the work of Henri Matisse. She felt a particular kinship with Pablo Picasso, whom she would eventually depict in one of her tapestries. According to Paasche, Ryggen became “increasingly less interested in the spatial or three-dimensional aspect of a motif…the more she worked with weaving, the more she understood that it was the picture plan that had to be pursued.” Later, Ryggen was even inspired by the Dada movement, including collage works by artists such as Hannah Höch. The weaver incorporated a collage style into later, large-scale works such as Trojan Horse / The Picasso Tapestry (1949-56).
Later Period
The peace that Ryggen, Hans and her daughter found after the rough years of the war was short lived. Hans was diagnosed with tuberculosis in 1953 and succumbed to the illness three years later, in December 1956. Overcome with grief, Ryggen left the farm and moved to Trondheim, where she set up a studio. Artmaking proved to be Ryggen’s one true comfort after Hans’s death, though her sorrow manifested itself in her 1958 tapestry, We Are Living on a Star, which depicts their love.
The other themes she could not abandon, even later in her career, were those of politics and social injustice. After the war Ryggen continued to use her tapestries as vehicles for political statements, addressing subjects as varied as the nuclear arms race of the 1950s and the Vietnam War. Her reputation as an artist also continued to grow, with accolades including a large retrospective in her native Sweden in 1962 and her selection to represent Norway at the Venice Biennale in 1964.
In line with her strong views on social justice, Ryggen firmly believed that her art should be for everyone, not just for the rich. She sought whenever she could to display her works to the public at large. As Paasche explains, “many of Hannah Ryggen’s works functioned as condemnations of injustices suffered by specific individuals and groups. To be effective, they had to be viewed in a public setting….Ryggen felt that making ‘politically-oriented art for the rich’ was an absurd concept, and that if she had lived in a worker-governed state her ‘tapestries would decorate schools and meeting halls’. Her concern was to reach the general public.” In expression of this belief, she gifted seven tapestries to Norway’s Museum of Decorative Arts in 1965.
Ryggen was fortunate enough to recognize the trailblazing aspects of her art in her own lifetime. At the same time, she knew that she might still be pigeonholed though her connections to perceived folk-art traditions. Of this, Ryggen once stated, “But do you know that I am the only weaving artist in the world, the very beginning of woven art. I feel like someone on a desert island. I’m sure some people will try to strangle me when they begin to understand what these tapestries are actually about. Corruption and cliques are everywhere. Painters are becoming anxious about having me in an exhibition because I steal all the attention and the good critique from them. I am relegated to and eternally lost in the applied arts museums and I will not end up there. I am a free artist.” Continuing to work until the end, Ryggen died in 1970 at the age of seventy-five.
The Legacy of Hannah Ryggen
The legacy of Hannah Ryggen’s work is manifold. Through her chosen medium of weaving she helped to expand the definition of modern art. Defying the often held misconceptions of critics that materials such as ceramics, fabrics, and thread are better suited to “craft” than to fine art, Ryggen helped to elevate tapestry to the status of a true modernist artform. According to art historian Marit Paasche, “that Hannah Ryggen considered weaving and using vegetable dyes to be the most fitting vehicles of artistic expression to convey something essential about both her own life and the character of European society from 1930 to 1970 is in itself deeply fascinating.” Today we can recognize the influence of Ryggen’s work on several generations of modernist and experimental textile artists, including important figures such as Cecilia Vicuña, Sheila Hicks, and Magdalena Abakanowicz.
Simultaneously, Ryggen brought Norwegian art to a broader, more international audience. Paasche again: “her art emerged in a formative period for Norwegian society and its welfare state: from the desperation of the 1930s and acute class struggle, through the German occupation, to the establishment of the Norwegian consensus-based social democracy. Thus her art is also a part of modern Europe.”
Equally important, through her tapestries Ryggen made strong statements about the politics of the day, social injustices, and gender inequalities. This allowed her art to serve as a chronicle of world events during the second half of the twentieth century. As Paasche explains, “the concept of the independent free individual is central in Hannah Ryggen’s art, yet it is also an integral part of the fabric of society and the natural world. Ryggen’s work combines idealism – faith that the world can be a better place – with a belief in the function and value of art as both idea and action, and as a ‘moveable mural.’ Her tapestries can be admired for the power of their beauty, but they can also be borne like banners. Hannah Ryggen understood well how to weave the political into a monumental format that was bound neither to a specific place nor an architectonic framework.”