Chemin de fer I / Jernbane I

Painted at the height of Ragnhild Keyser’s career in Paris, Chemin de fer I / Jernbane I (one of her most accomplished paintings) bears testimony to Keyser’s greatness. The painting (whose title means railway) also exemplifies the artist’s embrace of the Purist style pioneered by Fernand Léger (1881 - 1955) and Amédée Ozenfant(1886 – 1966, French cubist painter and writer who, together with Charles-Edouard Jeanneret [later known as Le Corbusier], founded the Purist movement).

Purism was a movement, taking place between 1918 and 1925, that influenced French painting and architecture. As mentioned above the movement was led by Ozenfant and Le Corbusier (1887 – 1965, Swiss-French architectural designer, painter, urban planner and writer, who was one of the pioneers of what is now regarded as modern architecture), with Léger as a principal associate. The Purists formulated an aesthetic doctrine, born from a criticism of Cubism, stating that objects should be represented as elementary forms devoid of detail. The main concepts, an attempt to restore regularity in a war-torn France post World War I, were presented in their short essay Après le Cubisme (After Cubism) published in 1918.

Unlike what they saw as ‘decorative’ fragmentation of objects in Cubism, Purism proposed a style of painting where elements were represented as robust simplified forms with minimal detail, while embracing technology and the machine. Purism culminated in Le Corbusier’s legendary Pavillon de l'Esprit Nouveau (Pavilion of the New Spirit), constructed for the 1925 Exposition internationale des arts décoratifs et industriels modernes (International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts) in Paris. This pavilion exhibited Modernist furniture as well as works by Juan Gris (1887 - 1927) and Jacques Lipchitz (1891 - 1973). Following this exhibition the relationship between Le Corbusier and Ozenfant declined.

As in other masterpieces by Keyser (all of them, interestingly enough, painted in the same year), like Composition I (1926, oil on canvas, 129.5 x 65.1 cm, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut, U.S.A.), Composition II (1926, oil on canvas, 81.3 x 30.5 cm, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut, U.S.A.), Composition III (1926, oil on canvas, 81.3 x 40 cm, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut, U.S.A.) and Armour (1926, 109.5 x 50 cm, the National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design in Oslo), the artist began with a sketch of the depicted object/objects. She then flattened these shapes and solidified the intervals between them, eventually arriving at a composition that appears almost entirely abstract. Norwegian art historian Steinar Gjessing writes (in Norsk kunstnerleksikon, I-IV, 1982-1986):

From 1924 (or 1925), K. studied under Fernand Léger at the Académie Moderne, and her paintings from the next few years are realised in a strictly constructive idiom. The subject is often an arrangement of everyday objects, a chair, an urn, a stack of books, etc. and sometimes also a human figure or torso, but the motif is subjected to a drastic process of abstraction and transformed into a concretistic flat composition where only a few characterising profiles suggest the starting point. At this time she was also working with non-figurative compositions, easel paintings akin to Léger’s ‘peinture murale’. The individual, usually monochrome, geometric form elements are precisely defined; a limited sense of space is created by carefully calculated plane shifts. The compositions are kept in a well-balanced, strongly limited colour scheme with an emphasis on white, grey, black and brown. Occasionally, stronger colour contrasts are introduced, but without disturbing the harmonious order. The paintings are soberly executed in an impersonal manner and, in a Norwegian context, represent surprisingly mature and consistent solutions to constructive problems. With her non-figurative works, she occupied a very independent position among Léger’s students.

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