Arne Kavli was born in Bergen in 1878, his father was from Trondheim, his mother from Østfold. His father was an actor, he died when Arne was 11 years old. His mother had already seen her son as a toddler crawling on the floor and drawing what was within his line of sight, a pair of shoes under the bed.
Two paintings in this exhibition - one from 1895 and one from 1896 clearly testify that Arne Kavli, already at the age of 16-17, had a good grasp of the motif. Since then he has painted and painted, and has not had time for anything else. He who may seem indolent personally, never takes a vacation.
I believe to have read in a thick book that Arne Kavli as a painter began as a romantic and continued as an impressionist. It does not fit. Romantic painting idealizes nature, and after 1880 we have in this sense only had one romantic painter, Harald Sohlberg. No Norwegian painter has been an impressionist in the strict technical sense.
Like Thorvald Erichsen and several others, Kavli has painted with dark colors with impulses from the study of the old masters. At Jæren he found the dark colors in nature, and he has only expressed what he really saw with these sad landscapes. Several years later he set up the easel in places where the trees were sparkling green and the sky blue with white clouds. And at Grimstad where he has spent most summers for the last 25 years, there are flocks of young girls with red, blue, white and yellow dresses on the pier, in the garden with the old fruit trees sun-umbrellas shine over tables and benches, and sailboats lie in the harbor. He has painted all this, it is beautiful and to the delight of many.
It is now 10 years since Arne Kavli last held an exhibition in Kunstnernes Hus. When one visited Arne Kavli in Tollbodgaten during the dark years of the war, it shone from the walls in all colors, and we left with a promise of summer. And now we can go to Kunstnernes Hus and make sure that the promise has been fulfilled.
Walther Halvorsen.