Ragnhild Keyser

Ragnhild Keyser was 22 years old when she arrived in Paris in 1911. During the First World War, she studied with Pola Gauguin at home in Oslo, but returned as soon as she could to the Mecca of art and her artist friends. Together with the Swede Solvig Sven-Nilsson (later married to the artist Erik Olson), Ragnhild Keyser started at André Lhote's painting school Académie Montparnasse and also participated in his summer courses in south-west France. In 1925, Ragnhild Keyser was recommended by her friends and fellow artists Otto G Carlsund and Florence Henri to start with the cubist Fernand Léger. She settles in well and combines Léger's theories with those she has learnt from André Lhote, the Brazilian Araujo and the futurist Gino Severini, who was very popular in Paris at the time. That same year, Ragnhild Keyser exhibited at ‘L'Art d'Aujord'hui’ and in the winter of 1926 at the ‘Salon des Indépendantes’. At the latter exhibition, she sold three oils to the American artist Katherine S. Dreier and her art collection ‘Sociéte Anonyme’. During the 1920s, Dreier bought a significant art collection, assisted by Kandinsky, Mondrian, Campendonk, Schwitters, Léger and Marcel Duchamp, among others. The collection was later donated to the Yale Museum, New Haven, USA, where Ragnhild Keyser's paintings can also be found today.
Ragnhild Keyser created geometric flat pictures in which a shape only gives a hint of a face, a hand, etc. because of its position on the picture surface. In the same spirit as her friend, the Swede Knut Lundström, Keyser sought to juxtapose planes of colour to create chords and plasticity. Her works rarely appear on the auction market.