Frida Johansen

Frida Felicia Johansen (Copenhagen, Denmark, 1943)

Frida Johansen is a Danish economist who pursued her career at the World Bank, participating in many kinds of development projects in Africa and Asia. For professional reasons she moved to the USA, and currently resides in McLean, Virginia. Sister of the ceramicist Tove Johansen, Frida has played a key role in keeping the artist’s legacy alive.

The ceramist Tove Brigitte Johansen was born in 1932 in Gentofle, Denmark, but developed her career mainly in Argentina and in the USA, where she earned a solid reputation. In Denmark, she had studied at the Holte Gymnasium private school in Copenhagen and graduated with a degree in Fine Arts in 1949. In early 1950 she moved with her family to Buenos Aires and there she continued her studies under Fernando Arranz López, the artist from Madrid who had worked in the studio of Daniel Zuloaga in the former church of San Juan de los Caballeros in Segovia. Arranz had moved to Buenos Aires in 1927 and was in charge of founding the country’s first public ceramic schools, which were associated with the university. And so, Johansen began her career at the National School of Ceramics in Buenos Aires, founded and directed by Arranz. After the death of her mentor, in 1980 she moved to Virginia, USA, where she set up a new workshop and began to forge a reputation for herself. She won awards in several art competitions organized by the Public Art Program of the state of Maryland where, thanks to her art career, she was able to secure permanent residency in the USA, where she died in 2009.

Johansen’s works are characterized by a refined glazing, gilding and enamelling technique that reflected both Spanish and American influences. She is known for her large-scale works, murals in both private and public buildings such as the Atucha nuclear power plant in Buenos Aires and the Santa Florentina Cathedral in Campana[1], Buenos Aires, although she also made small-format pieces like sculptures, vases and plates. In her works one can appreciate an aesthetic connection with the ceramic work of several avant-garde Spanish artists from the post-war period, such as the Parpalló group, though especially worth underscoring is the bond with the aesthetic renewal of the period between the two world wars conveyed to her by her mentor Fernando Arranz.

The ceramist’s death in 2009 encouraged her sister Frida Johansen to donate works from her personal collection to museums in various countries. The donor focused on Spain because of the aesthetic connection between her sister’s work and the Spanish tradition tracing back to Zuloaga. For this reason, she made donations both to the National Museum of Decorative Arts in Madrid as well as to the González Martí National Museum of Ceramics and Decorative Arts in Valencia. The museum has eleven pieces by Tove Johansen and two by Fernando Arranz coming from the donation made in 2011.

The works by Fernando Arranz López in the museum’s collection (CE1/18109 and CE1/18115) reflect the artist’s post-cubist and constructivist post-war style influenced by the avant-gardes. Tove Johansen herself had donated a collection of works by her master—including drawings, prints, photographs and ceramic pieces—to the regional government of Castilla y León (Museum of Segovia), which held the first solo show dedicated to the artist in 2011.

With regards works by Tove Johansen donated by her sister, the National Museum of Ceramics possesses pieces from different periods in the artist’s practice. For instance, in this exhibition one can see a plate dating from 1947 (CE1/18116), unique in the sense that it is the only piece preserved by the museum from the artist’s formative period in Denmark, before moving with her family to Argentina. Referring to her period in Buenos Aires, one of the most outstanding pieces of the donation is a sculptural figure depicting two fisherwomen, dated in 1955 (CE1/18112). This work was awarded an Honorary Prize in the exhibition held at the National School of Ceramics in Buenos Aires that year. Finally, the museum also preserves works from the ceramist’s US period. Worth underscoring is a dark-coloured plate (CE1/18106) decorated with gold depicting the facade of the entrance to the Prado Museum in Madrid known as Puerta de Goya, a testament to the artist’s skill in decorating using fine lines. In this work the artist adapted a design made by the architect Alfredo Rodríguez Orgaz and published in the book El Gran Prado, in 1993.

[1] Mural made jointly with the Argentinian artist Raúl Soldi.

Patricia Garzón Serrano