Objects of the Elements

The rediscovery of an important American surrealist painter

Elsa Thoresen (1906–1994), born in Minnesota to Norwegian immigrant parents, studied at the School of Arts and Crafts and the Academy of Fine Arts in Oslo and at the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Brussels.

After marrying Danish artist Vilhelm Bjerke Petersen in 1935, she began working in a surrealist style that brought her recognition in Europe. She was one of only a few women to be included in the International Surrealist Exhibition of 1938 in Paris. André Breton reproduced Thoresen's Atmospheric Landscape (1936) in his Abridged Dictionary of Surrealism, published for the exhibition. Elsa became friends with several prominent European surrealists, including Sophie Taeuber-Arp. In 1938 Taeuber-Arp reproduced Thoresen's Abstrakt komposition in the magazine Plastique, which she served as editor.

Aside from a brief stay in Paris in 1938, Elsa and Vilhelm lived in Denmark from 1935 until 1944, when the couple and their children relocated to Sweden. There, they befriended and worked alongside the Swedish Halmstad Group of modernist and avant-garde painters.

After World War II, the couple spent time in the United States before returning to Sweden in 1947. That year, Thoresen's work was included in the International Exhibition of Surrealism, organized by Marcel Duchamp, André Breton, and Aimé Maeght at the Maeght Gallery in Paris.

Elsa and Vilhelm divorced in 1953. She remarried and relocated to Seattle, where she focused her painting on lyrical, biomorphic abstractions until her death in 1994.

David F. Martin is an internationally recognized art historian and curator who has brought attention to neglected artists of the Pacific Northwest. For over thirty years he has focused on women, Asian American, and LGBT artists active in the mediums of painting, printmaking, sculpture, and photography.