Astri Aasen

Content sourced from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Astri Aasen (1875–1935) was a Norwegian painter known for naturalistic portraits. She spent much of her life in Trondheim and trained in Oslo with Harriet Backer around 1903–1909. She also studied with several other artists in the early 1900s.

She was born on September 3, 1875, to Anna Christine Næss and Nils Aasen. Her mother died when Astri was two, and her father later remarried her aunt. She had siblings who also faced hardship in their youth.

Aasen began as a retoucher in Ålesund and started learning to paint in Bergen when she was about 25. She lived and worked in Trondheim for most of her life, though she exhibited in many cities, including Paris, Capri, Florence, and Naples.

In February 1917, the first Sámi assembly brought together Sámi people from several countries. Aasen visited the gathering and quickly painted a series of pastel portraits of the attendees. Some portraits were named after specific people, such as a portrait of Daniel Mortensen, while others were more general. The portraits usually show shoulders, heads, or chests and were done with a fast, loose technique. One portrait, of Marie Finskog, shows her wearing a green gákti, a traditional Sámi dress.

Aasen often gave portraits to the people she painted. She created several paintings of Thorkel Jonassen, a Sámi activist who argued for civil rights. After the conference, some observers described the portraits as exotic, while others saw them as evidence of Sámi social reformers.

Astri Aasen died of a stroke on October 10, 1935, at the age of 60. Eight years later, Trondheim’s art community held a memorial exhibit in her honor, and her family started an annual scholarship for young artists named Astri Aasen’s Gift.

Many of her Sámi portraits were recovered in the 1990s and were acquired by the Sámediggi (the Sámi Parliament) in 1995–1997, where they remain part of the collection. A portrait of Jonassen became a postcard, another was bought by a museum, and another was shown in a Sámi youth school in Snåsa.

Her early sketchbooks, including a drawing from when she was 14, are held by the Trondheim Art Association. They show her interest in portraiture, interior scenes, and abstract geometric shapes. As of 2021, her Sámi congress portraits are kept in the Sámediggi collections.