Five museums in the Norwegian city of Trondheim show to what extent the legacy of the “weaver against Hitler”, Hannah Ryggen, is still relevant today and will be continued.

They can draw on plenty: The "Nordenfjeldske Kunstindustrimuseum", the national museum for handicrafts and design in Trondheim's old town, dating from the brick modern era of the 1920s, calls by far the most of Ryggen's tapestries its own.

Born in Malmö in southern Sweden in 1894, the painter settled in 1935 on Ørlandet, a coastal region one hundred and two kilometers from Trondheim, with her Norwegian artist husband Hans, whom she had met during her training in Dresden while studying the old masters.

And that in the most modest of circumstances, in a hut measuring just fifty square meters.

Stefan Trinks

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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In this self-imposed exile, Ryggen finally decided against painting on canvas, choosing instead the direct and indissoluble weaving of the dyed wool and linen into the texture itself: in keeping with its essence, it went from surface to depth, from embellishment to connection.

Her tool is the loom, not the brush, as she once said.

In the solitude of Ørlandet, without electricity, Ryggen used a particularly smooth-running loom that her husband had built for her to produce the tapestries, some of which were many meters long retrospective at the Frankfurt Schirn in autumn 2019.

She bravely weaved against Hitler

Several points come together in the extraordinary appreciation of the artist Ryggen.

Politically completely uncompromised, she bravely wove against Hitler, Mussolini and other dictators in the thirties;

until her death in 1970 she remained the image weaver, challenging high political authorities in wool, just like her ancient predecessor Arachne, the finest weaver on earth who had challenged the goddess Athena herself to competition.

Ryggen's "Etiopia (Äthiopien)" from 1935 may only be a good one and a half meters high;

On its almost four meters in length, however, something amazing happens: the Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie can be seen, black hands stretched out in supplication, a warrior and Benito Mussolini's head, which is pierced by a spear.

Like Picasso's "Guernica", the ruthless carpet was exhibited at the Paris World Exhibition in 1937, but the scene of the penetration, which could have been seen a good half meter on the far right, was not expected of the public at the time.

Unlike Ryggen, the curators were afraid that the Italian fascists would take revenge on them and made the dictator's violent death, shown by the artist clairvoyantly, invisible by rolling up the last piece of the carpet.

who wanted to know

could still know in 1937 what this courageous artist had immortalized in her historical fabric.

From such intertwined acts of civil obedience, the special respect for Ryggen results.