User:Urve/Astri Aasen

Astri Aasen (1875 – 1935) was a Norwegian painter. She spent most of her life in the Trondheim, and in the early twentieth century, was taught to paint by Harriet Backer in Oslo. She created a series of portraits of those who attended the the first Sámi assembly in 1917, which were acquired by the Sámediggi (Sámi parliament) in the late twentieth century. That is where many of her portraits now reside.

Early life
Aasen was born in 1875 to Anna Christine Næss and Nils Aasen. Her father was a jeweler, and her mother died of tuberculosis when Aasen was two. Following her mother's death, her father married the aunt of Aasen, and they cared for the four siblings. Her father died when she was about 12 years old.

Career
When she was 25 years old (around the year 1900), she became a retoucher in the city of Ålesund and began painting. Starting three years later, and continuing between 1907 and 1909, she was trained by the painter Harriet Backer in Oslo (then Kristiania). Her painting was that of "uncomplicated naturalism", creating portraits without adding extraneous interpretation. Following the death of her parents, she spent most of her life in the Norwegian city of Trondheim, where she had at least one exhibition and lived with her sister. She exhibited in several cities over the course of her career as a painter—including Paris, Capri, Florence, and Naples—but regularly came back to Trondheim. She was also taught by Asor Hansen, Viggo Johansen, Christian Krohg, Halfdan Strøm, and Léon Bonnat, between 1900 and 1912.

Between 6 February and 10 February 1917, the first Sámi assembly took place, a transnational conference joining together the Sámi of Norway, Sweden, Russia, and Denmark. The event was pivotal in Sámi political consciousness, and was one of the first that spoke to a Sámi state. She visited the assembly to create a series of pastel portraits of the attendees, some of which were named after specific people (such as one for Thorkild Jonassen), and some of which were nondescript (such as Old Sámi Woman). The portraits mostly depict the chests and heads of figures, and all of them were drawn in a quick manner.

One of these portraits was that of the South Sámi political rights activist Marie Finskog, who lived from 1851 to 1927, and spoke of the Sámi's economic situation as not being due to any inherent poverty of the group, but as the result of an "oppressed situation". In Aasen's portrait, Finskog wears a green dress—a colored garment (a gákti) that was earlier hindered by pastor Lars Levi Laestadius's violent branch of Laestadianism, and increased in popularity in the 1840s. Bart Pushaw, a historian of the circumpolar region, said Aasen was aware of acts of violence connected to Laestadianism—such as the Kautokeino rebellion of 1852 in Kautokeino—when she painted Finskog. The portrait was evidently done quickly, with pieces of the underlying yellow canvas seen throughout, such as in Finskog's green dress. This quick and unpolished portraiture allowed Aasen to paint others in the conference, and gives her portrait of Finskog what Pushaw describes as a "more imaginative and even modern rendering" through rejecting "precise verisimilitude". She also gifted some of her portraits to her sitters; while she created three paintings of Thorkel Jonassen, she gave him one.

Death and legacy
About a month after her birthday in 1935, Aasen died of a stroke. She was 60 years old. Eight years later, Trondhjem's art association created a memorial exhibit of her work, and her family established an annual scholarship for young painters in her name: Astri Aasens Gave (Astri Aasen's Gift).

Much of her portraiture of the Sámi congress was recovered in 1995, and was obtained by the Sámediggi (Sámi parliament) in Kárášjohka in 1997. Her gifted portrait of Jonassen was also acquired by the Sámediggi; one of her portraits of him became a postcard, and another was acquired by one of Norway's museums in Lierne. As of 2021, her paintings of the congress remain in the Sámediggi's collections.