His grandmother registered his reaction and gave his hand an extra little squeeze. ‘I’m in one of these pictures too,’ she said, with a slight quiver in her voice. Little did Jonas know that this was absolutely true and that, due to a highly unconventional contribution to the war effort, Jørgine Wergeland genuinely had earned the right to be there.
Some years later, when Jonas gained admission to the Town Hall again, during opening hours this time, in broad daylight, and was able to take in the main hall at one glance, the initial impact almost blew him away. He stood in the middle of the marble floor, in the middle of that huge hall and stared round about him until his neck ached, marvelling at Henrik Sørensen’s bright-hued oil painting on the end wall and Alf Rolfsen’s vibrant patterns of light and shade on the side walls. After a while, however, he became conscious of a vague sense of disappointment. Nothing could compare with the experience of that spring night when he had gone round the Town Hall with his grandmother and Einar Moe, when he had brought the rooms, the pictures, to light a bit at a time; built them up into a whole by himself – images and associations which in many cases were possibly more fascinating than what he now beheld.
It says something about the strength of this memory that many years later, even beneath a parasol on a deserted beach in Montevideo, he could still call to mind some of those imaginative mosaics. After a long, dreamlike tour of his memory – it might have lasted hours, it might have lasted twenty seconds – it was as if, sitting in that deckchair with his eyes fixed on the waves, he suddenly woke up. He understood what it was, above all, that had been implanted in him that night: an appreciation of a project bordering on the impossible. Even as a boy, equipped only with a torch, he had grasped the magnificence of the concept, the power of the vision behind the decorations in Oslo Town Hall. Was there an idea for television here? To create just such circles of light? Present fragments of a greater whole? Pick out, shed light on, people in a crowd?
His thoughts went to his grandmother. He could have done with a dose of her rabble-rousing spirit as he lounged there in that deckchair on the silver sands, gazing out across the Rio de la Plata as if waiting for an idea to come drifting ashore, in the form of a message in a bottle, without him having to lift a finger. Once, his grandmother had looked deep into his eyes and said: ‘Jonas, there’s too much Hansen in you and not enough Wergeland. You’re going to have to find the rebel within you.’ She would have been appalled if she could have seen him now, lying flat out on a deserted beach in far-off Uruguay. Or maybe she would have understood: he lay there remembering Bo Wang Lee, he lay there looking for something to take with him. A key concept. Material which could be turned into television programmes. Television that was different. Not Hansen programmes, but Wergeland programmes. Dangerous programmes.
Jonas’s grandmother was certainly qualified to talk about rebellion; she had always been something of a disruptive element. When Jonas staged his protest in the Town Hall Square, dared to shake his fist at a superior opponent, he thought not only of those nocturnal childhood wanderings among edifying frescoes, but also, and to as great an extent, of his grandmother – and of another inspiring episode in which she played a leading role.
Thanks to Winston Churchill, Jørgine Wergeland had early on acquired a taste for all things British. She had, therefore, one favourite spot in Oslo, a place she would often take a walk around during the war, to bolster her spirits: the English Quarter on Drammensveien, overlooking Solli plass. This exceedingly tasteful residential area – a jewel in the city’s crown – consisted of one long, two-storey building with a three-storey corner building to either side of it. It derived its ‘English’ epithet from the internal layout of the buildings, mansion flats occupying several floors, and not from its outward appearance which, with its domes and pitched roofs, was more reminiscent of the French neo-Renaissance style. But as far as Jørgine Wergeland was concerned the place was as English as N0.10 Downing Street.
Then, in the early sixties, the most outrageous, not to say unbelievable thing happened. What the bombers did not succeed in doing during the war, Oslo District Council decided to do. They proposed to tear down the English Quarter. Now, although Jørgine Wergeland took a murderously dim view of property developers – for reasons which will later become clear – she was not opposed to every form of urban renewal. But this lovely group of buildings was not only laden with personal memories of wartime, it was in itself utterly unique, an architectural gem. The English Quarter was quite simply part of the capital’s memory. ‘This provincial little town will be left even more devoid of history and bereft of atmosphere if we don’t preserve the best from every age,’ Jørgine muttered under her breath.
It is astonishing to note, today, how few people protested and how little stir this barbaric and incredibly short-sighted decision caused. When the impercipient members of the city council swanned into the Town Hall in June 1961 they completely overlooked the elderly, cigar-smoking lady who had made her stand outside and who, besides being absolutely furious that such a decision should be taken in this of all buildings, was holding aloft a placard inscribed with an injunction which every schoolchild had been taught to heed: ‘Do not erase!’ But the city fathers flouted all the rules of good behaviour and passed the planning bill, thereby also passing sentence of death on the English Quarter.
Some people may, however, recall a photograph published in the one vigilant Oslo newspaper, a picture which they had to smile at over their morning coffee. It was a picture of an elderly lady facing up to a massive demolition crane with her handbag raised, as if she were being subjected to a brutal robbery in broad daylight. Which is not, in fact, too far from the truth. That fateful year – which would also see both the Cuban Missile Crisis and a mining explosion in Nye Ålesund on Svalbard which led, some months later, to the downfall of the Gerhardsen government – also got off to a bad start. On one of the very first afternoons in January a twenty-eight ton, motorised monster rumbled across the pavements on Drammensveien, heading straight for the English Quarter’s gracious, but oh, so impermanent façades, and the aforementioned photograph was taken during the half hour when Jørgine Wergeland and her raised handbag managed to prevent the one-ton, cast-iron ball on that mobile crane from smashing into something that was as dear and precious to her as a loved one’s face. To her this was a living building, a personal reminder of Winston Churchill, but it did no good. Nor did her words: ‘Shoo!’ she cried – as if she were addressing some mangy old mutt. ‘Shoo! Away with you!’ In the course of that afternoon and evening, the greater part of the English Quarter’s irreplaceable façades overlooking Drammensveien were reduced to a heap of smoking rubble.
Jonas had cut out and saved this photograph of his grandmother. Although in world terms its significance may have been minimal – this illustration of a righteous, but hopeless struggle, an urban patriot waving her handbag at a giant crane – for him personally it had as much symbolic value as the later picture of the lone student with the shopping bags trying to stop the tanks on Tiananmen Square in Beijing – he, too, seeming to be saying: ‘Shoo! Away with you!’ It is also worth noting that with this doughty demonstration Jørgine Wergeland pretty much gave the starting signal for all the protest marches which, later in the decade, would pass along this very street, Drammensveien, on their way to the American and Soviet Union embassies.
Even before she found out about the civic vandals and their plans, Jonas’s grandmother had proudly shown him round the English Quarter, frequently in connection with a visit to Sol Cigar’s aromatic premises further down the street. Jonas thought the façades looked rather like the casing of an organ – greater compliment could no building receive. Each time they stood there on Solli plass and Granny described to him the mansion-style apartments behind the red-brick facing, with library and dining room, butler’s pantry, maid’s room, study and dressing room, she would finish by saying: ‘Remember this.’ After it was torn down, Jonas and his grandmother would, therefore, sometimes take
a walk over to Lapsetorget, stand with their backs to the West Side Baths and take it in turns to describe those richly adorned buildings which they pictured rising up before them, with all their balconies and cornices, doorways and towers, as if the new Industry and Export House in its seventeen-storey tower block simply did not exist.
Jonas reaped the benefits of this powerful memory when he applied for a place at the College of Architecture. In the so-called home project which constituted the first round in the selection process and determined whether one would go on to the two-day entrance exam at the college, applicants were asked to take a well-known place and produce something which expressed their feelings about it. What Jonas Wergeland did was this: inside a box from which he had removed the two long sides he hung three panels of thin fabric, like gauze. On the first panel he painted the grey façade of the Ind-Ex building. On the fabric in the middle he painted the English Quarter, those matchless, now demolished buildings, reproducing them in minute detail, in a glowing red with yellow cornices and cornerstones. The viewer saw it as a ghostly form showing through the transparent fabric façade of the Ind-Ex building, so luminously clear and distinct that it seemed more real than the drab tower block in front of it. And on the third gauze panel, at the very back, he painted a very small, shimmering white building out of his own head, a house unlike any other. It was only just discernible through the two stretches of fabric in front of it, like a tiny, shining organ deep inside a transparent body. The funny thing was – Jonas himself would notice this eighteen years later – that this imaginary building prefigured, with uncanny exactitude, the façade of Oslo’s elegant new courthouse.
Later, one of the college professors would say that it was Jonas’s home project he had fallen for. ‘It looked almost like an X-ray photograph,’ he said. Jonas, for his part, gave his grandmother the credit. Had it not been for her rebellious spirit he would never have got into the College of Architecture.
The foundations of Jørgine Wergeland’s heroic concern for the city had, however, been laid long before her attempt to stop a monster with a demolition ball from attacking the English Quarter. Her civic mindedness, not to say passion, reached its peak immediately after the Second World War, when she suddenly came into a fair bit of money, a proper fortune, in fact.
Jørgine Wergeland was, in her own eyes, one of the victors of the war and when she unlocked the door of the flat in Oscars gate again, after a period of involuntary exile in Inkognitogaten, it was with a clear conscience that she lit a cigar and raised her fingers in a V-sign. Unlike Churchill, though, she was not only a wartime leader, but also a person capable of coping with peace. As soon as she acquired the money she instituted a conscientious search for a worthy peacetime project, a venture in which to invest it. Although she never thought of it as ‘her’ fortune. ‘It belongs to the people of Norway, and that’s that,’ she announced to a somewhat worried Åse Hansen, Jonas’s mother.
It did not take Jørgine long to see that she might have had one particular aim in mind all along, and that this might also have been the underlying motivation behind a war effort which almost surprised even Jørgine herself. The fact is, you see, that she had conceived an interest at a very early stage for the new Town Hall in Oslo – right from the time when the proposal was first put forward and an Architecture and Planning competition announced towards the end of the First World War. She followed the successive alterations to Arnstein Arneberg’s and Magnus Poulsson’s winning design as if they were episodes in a thrilling serial, the ending of which no one could predict. She enjoyed – nay, nigh on adored – monitoring the gradual metamorphosis from medieval-inspired fortress, by way of the Gothic style, National Romanticism and Neo-Classicism to four-square Functionalism. She positively cheered when she saw the final drawings, the clean lines of the main form also embodying certain historical elements. What she applauded most of all were the two block-shaped towers which gave the building a Janus-like countenance. Something inside her said: Yes, that’s just how it should be. Afterwards it would also occur to her that it made a fine, frank heraldic device for a country which had rendered such equivocal resistance during the war.
When Jørgine travelled into town from the family smallholding at Gardermoen on some errand or other, she always made a point of popping down to Pipervika to see how work on the building was progressing, especially once things speeded up in the mid-thirties and the solid mass of reinforced concrete began to rear upwards in pyramidic majesty. And many’s the time during the war when she derived encouragement and comfort from a walk down to the harbour to inspect the Town Hall, which Norway expected would be completed as soon as the bloody Germans had been run into the sea.
So when the war was over it seemed only natural that she should decide to invest her money in this. Or at least: the building was finished, but the artistic decoration of it, an uncommonly grandiose project – certainly for Norway – was far from completion. The war had not only delayed the work, it had also prompted several of the artists to make changes to their original sketches. Henrik Sørensen was now painting the return of the royal family into his vast picture on the end wall, and over at the mural in the East Gallery Per Krohg was in the midst of adding a section depicting Grini prison camp, guarded by huge, armour-plated earwigs.
In the early summer of the year after the war ended, Jørgine attended an exhibition at the Art Society in which Alf Rolfsen, a painter who had already come to her attention and who had, what is more, lost a son in the war, was showing a fresco depicting the occupation. This work was so warmly received and spawned so many letters to the newspapers that Rolfsen was asked to reproduce it as a mural for the east wall of the Town Hall’s central hall. What is not commonly known is that Jørgine Wergeland also had a large hand in this. In a letter to the people in charge of the Town Hall decorations she offered to cover the costs of Rolfsen’s long picture. Jonas’s grandmother understood something which would be lost on Norwegian politicians of the future, even at a time when the country was virtually swimming in capital: that nothing pays off better than investment in the arts. Good art creates lasting meaning, an asset which, in due course, becomes so great that it can no longer be measured in terms of money.
Although she did not know it, Jørgine’s offer could not have come at a better time. Because at that very moment a number of the artists working on the largest decorations for the Town Hall happened to be asking for additional funds, due to the increased cost of materials. And this was a problem, since the estimated budget for the project had already been exceeded. Consequently, when Jonas’s grandmother was invited up to the office of the person in charge, it was with great pleasure that he accepted her generous gift. Jørgine Wergeland’s contribution went into a common fund, but she received a verbal assurance that the lion’s share of the money would be earmarked for Alf Rolfsen’s large, and as yet uncompleted, painting. So although there are no official documents in which it states in black and white that Jørgine Wergeland paid for this mural – on the donations list issued for the inauguration of the Town Hall in 1950 only her name and the tidy sum she contributed are given – she knew, as did the people in charge of the finances and, not least, Alf Rolfsen himself, that she was the one who had paid for the occupation frieze. This was Jørgine Wergeland’s gift to the Norwegian people. The way she saw it, it was also reparation for an act of betrayal, made with German money so to speak.
Staff at the Town Hall soon got used to having an elderly woman with a countenance remarkably similar to that of Winston Churchill popping in to see how the work was coming on and have a chat with the artists, who looked like so many workmen, hard at it on their scaffolding and ladders in hats and spattered overalls, applying paint to the wet plaster. But her keenest interest was reserved, of course, for Alf Rolfsen’s thirty-metre long picture of the occupation years and the way it progressed in a mesmerising zig-zag fashion: men hiding in the forest, the air raid in April, the Gestapo forcing entry to houses, the execution of resistan
ce fighters, underground activities, the men of Milorg, the secret military organisation. Life in the prisoner-of-war camps, liberation. Standing there, looking at the fresco, surrounded by the smell of paint and damp plaster, she remembered the war again, almost every single day of it, and in her mind she quoted the words of her favourite statesman: I was all for war. Now I am all for peace.
As often as possible Jørgine took the opportunity to have elevenses with Alf Rolfsen and his friend Aage Storstein. The latter had just been forced to chip off and repaint the whole of the end wall in the Western gallery because the colours were too pale – painting al fresco was no joke. They usually had their snack in the Festival Gallery, from where they could look down on the Royal Wharf and the Nesodden ferries and across to the Akers Mek shipyard, which Axel Revold had captured, in somewhat abstract fashion, in the now completed fresco on the end wall of the room in which they sat. They were great times, those, also for the two artists, whose discussions on the pitfalls of painting were all the livelier and wittier for having an audience; they frequently ended up sitting there half-an-hour longer than they ought, Rolfsen with his pipe and Jørgine with a Romeo y Julieta, Winston Churchill’s favourite cigar. Alf Rolfsen did most of the talking. Jørgine quickly took a liking to this burly character with the strong face. He was also a wonderful storyteller. Sometimes when they were alone, while he was painting the wall, he would start to tell her, quite unprompted, about his travels: to Athens and the Acropolis, or to Paris where he had met, among others, the Mexican artist Diego Rivera, soon to deck what seemed like acres of his homeland’s wall space with vivid colour. ‘But there’s nothing to beat Rome,’ he confided to Jørgine as she stood there savouring the smells of plaster and pipe tobacco. ‘I saw the frescos of Michelangelo and Raphael at the Vatican. They gave me a whole new conception of the relationship between images and space.’ He climbed down and stepped back a couple of paces. ‘What do you think?’
The Discoverer Page 54