Henry Moore

Arild Wahlström was a Norwegian industrialist and managing director and later chairman of Sande Tresliperi A/S and Sande Paper Mill A/S. In addition to business and sport, Wahlström had a great interest in art and art collecting, which he shared with his wife Aasta. At their home in Holmenkollen, the couple built up an extensive collection of major Norwegian and international works. Wahlström travelled extensively and liked to combine his trips with visits to galleries and artists. He developed close relationships with a number of artists and met Poliakoff, Henry Moore, Soulanges, Manessier, Singier and many others. Three times he was invited to visit Picasso in the south of France with the gallerist Kahnweiler, but each time business intervened, which was a great disappointment. Wahlström's great interest in Picasso's prints had been awakened after the war, during a business trip to Paris in 1946. On a small side street, the Wahlström couple had discovered a picture of a woman's head in an art shop. ‘It was so beautiful - we were both immediately taken by it. It was something extraordinary.’ The incident led to intensive collecting and resulted in one of the world's largest private collections of Picasso prints, with over 1000 prints. In 1982, Arild Wahlström donated almost 500 of these prints, including the entire Vollard suite, to the National Gallery in Oslo.