By Phillip Odden March 29, 2020
What we think of today as traditional Norwegian Folk Art developed in Norway a few centuries ago. Folk Art was very popular in Norway from roughly 1750 to1850. At that time Norway was ruled by the King of Denmark. Art production was controlled by guild laws so if you wanted to make art for sale you needed to belong to a guild and follow government regulations. These regulations were more easily enforced in cities. The further you were from the law the easier it was to do folk art—that is, art made my common folk. So, the traditional Norwegian folk art that we think of these days was a product of fairly isolated rural communities.
Rural folk artists were very poor. Their culture was not based on money, since common people generally didn’t have money. Rather, it was a barter-based economy. Rural artists made art, decorative items, in trade for basic needs such as a place to live or food.
After about 1860, the time of our civil war, emigration swept across Norway as well as other countries in Europe. This happened at the same time that a tourist industry started to develop in Norway and the industrial revolution was taking hold. Rural artists could begin to make money by making items tourists wanted to purchase. Still, rural people remained uneducated and dirt poor. Public schools didn’t begin to spread until about 1860.
As a person who has practiced folk art for the past 40 years I have often wondered: why did these exceedingly poor rural folk choose to decorate their homes, tools, and items used in everyday life? With regard to social justice, education, and food security these people were on the bottom of society. Because of the lack of hygiene and very limited health care, many were sick with diseases that were not understood and had no remedy.
I think the need to make and decorate had to do with basic human dignity and pride. Making and decorating things helped people feel better about themselves in rough times. It gave then something to do. Laying around and doing nothing but worry isn’t healthy. Having handmade decorative items in their lives offered people a degree of self-respect and connected them with their ancestors who had themselves survived a difficult world. Staying busy helped people stay out of trouble and left meaningful art in their homes for generations to come.
Often, what we see in museums and printed in books are the finest examples of folk art from the golden age. But, if you are fortunate enough to kick around rural Norway you soon realize that the nearly every home in the isolated communities contained lots of folk art, and most of it was not done by highly skilled hands. Not everyone had access to high quality tools. In fact tools were limited and of poor quality. They made the best with what they had. They learned from one another. The cream floated to the top. The better and more respected folk artists set the trend. Folk art evolved, changed and was renewed as artists respected what was done in the past while looking ahead to changing wants and needs.
