Ragnhild Keyser

The American collector Katherine Dreier, co-founder of the Société Anonyme, a society promoting modern art in the United States, came across the work of a Norwegian painter in Paris in 1926. That encounter brought Ragnhild Keyser's paintings to the International Exhibition of Modern Art at the Brooklyn Museum in 1926 and 1927, beside leading names of the European avant-garde.

Keyser was born in Kristiania, today's Oslo, in 1889, and trained there with the painters Harriet Backer and Pola Gauguin, a son of Paul Gauguin. In 1920 she moved to Paris and passed through a series of teaching studios, working with André Lhote and Roger Bissière, and from 1924 to 1926 with Fernand Léger at his Académie Moderne. Cubism was her starting point. She moved towards flat, clear geometric forms, close to Purism, the machine-age style of Amédée Ozenfant and Le Corbusier.

In 1925 she showed at L'Art d'aujourd'hui, a large international avant-garde exhibition in Paris, alongside Picasso, Léger and Sonia and Robert Delaunay. Her most important work dates from 1925 to 1927. She died in Oslo in 1943, at 53. Armour, painted in 1926 at the height of her Paris years, is now in the National Museum in Oslo.