Catalogue Raisonné
About
Magnus G. Mathisen
My name is Magnus G. Mathisen and I'm a big art history nerd. I am from Oslo, Norway, and when I was a child, my father worked at a Scandinavian airline company. As an employee he received discounted tickets to destinations around the world, and because of this our family would often travel to different destinations in Europe every time we had a break from school. Both my parents have a big interest in art, and my sister and I would be taken to at least one art exhibition at each destination we visited. As you might imagine, as a little kid my enthusiasm for visiting these museums wasn't always that great, but today I am really grateful for being shown such a vast variety of art.
My biggest inspirations
Although my parents might be the direct reason for my interest in art, with my father an active collector and my mother a walking Wikipedia, there are other major influences that both sparked my interest in art and inspired me to create this project.
One of them is my grandfather, who died when I was only one year old. Sadly I didn't get to know him, but he produced a huge volume of paintings, lithographies, wood carvings, sculptures and drawings, which allowed me get to know him through his art.
The other one is a man named E.H. Gombrich, whose legendary book 'The Story of Art' was one of the major reasons for the creation of Catalogue Raisonné. Gombrich had an incredible talent for communicating complex and foreign ideas, all the while staying humble and unpretentious. I would dare to say that everyone can relate to the feeling of looking at a piece of art at the museum, and not understanding what all the fuss is about. Approaching the world of art, and learning about art history and art appreciation is an intimidating effort for everyone, but there really is no need for it to be that way.
The reason I started this project
I am a big fan of incremental learning, and I wanted to expand on my art history knowledge. So to force myself to do daily mini-studies on art works and artists I like, I decided to write a post for every new thing I learned. This perfectly combined my two passions; learning new stuff, and then talking about the new stuff I have learned. I hope that learning about beautiful art, and receiving new, curated droplets of knowledge is as enjoyable for you as it is for me.
Why it's called Catalogue Raisonné
A catalogue raisonné (literally "reasoned catalogue") is a comprehensive and authoritative collection of all known artworks by a given artist. The reason I chose it as the name for this project is that I wanted my posts both to provide value by themselves, but also to provide value collectively in the sense that anyone reading them might discover connections between styles, periods, artists, and artworks, that are not easily seen when admiring any of these works in isolation. So the collection of my posts, articles and emails are similar to a Catalogue Raisonné, but it is not restricted to any one artist, style or period.
