Hariton Pushwagner
Artist who fought personal problems to produce work focusing on the travails of modern urban life
HARITON PUSHWAGNER, who has died aged 77, was a Pop artist often referred to as a “modern-day Munch”.
Although largely unknown outside Scandinavia, the Norwegian was celebrated at home for his particular brand of graphic noir: brooding cartoon strips, silkscreens, friezes and graffiti that focused on the stifling and farcical elements of modern urban existence.
His signature style was a combination of vertiginous perspectives and repeat motifs: banks of desks, lines of executives in bowler hats, the latticework of office windows. Into this uniform environment he later introduced Cadillacs, jazz pianists and blonde starlets. His influences ranged from Aldous Huxley and Graham Greene to MC Escher and Andy Warhol.
His masterpiece was
Soft City, an epic graphic novel consisting of 269 pen and ink drawings, on which he worked intermittently from 1969 to 1976. Set in a widescreen metropolis whose citizens are anaesthetised by routine work, technology and state-run pharmacology, the story follows the life of one family over the course of a single day. Their infant son, Bingo, provides the critical viewpoint on this claustrophobic world.
Pushwagner battled drug and alcohol addictions, required psychiatric care, spent periods homeless on the streets of Oslo, had two failed marriages and lost the only copy of one of his works in a game of table tennis. He enjoyed a late renaissance, however, and was critically rediscovered. “He is the redeemed outsider,” observed the Danish art historian Lars Bang Larsen, “the unpresentable addict who was saved from the skids, pulled back from the brink and ended up in headlines and talk shows.”
Pushwagner was born Terje Brofos on May 2 1940 in Oslo in the middle of a bombing raid. He was the third child of Fritjof Brofos, an engineer, and Elsa, a biochemist. At the age of four he was injured in a road accident; his father taught him to draw during his convalescence.
He excelled at sport and won a medal in the 1955 Norwegian doubles tennis championship. But art took over: he interned at an advertising agency and studied at the Norwegian National Academy of Craft and Design (1958-61) and the Norwegian National Academy of Fine Arts (1963-66).
During the late 1950s and 1960s he travelled across Europe, North Africa, the Middle East and the US, drawing portraits to fund his trips. He met Cliff Richard at the Kit-kat Club in Beirut and followed Route 66 in America. But his mental health began to fray. He was sectioned after trying to board a flight on his hands and knees.
In Oslo he worked as a set painter for state television and the Norwegian Theatre before moving to London, where he lived in the early 1970s. It was there that he first used the pseudonym Hariton Pushwagner – from a poster for a spaghetti restaurant. The name, suggested his biographer Petter Mejlaender, alluded to a spiritual “shopping trolley” which should be filled with good things.” Pushwagner befriended the Scottish psychiatrist RD Laing and the musician Steve Winwood. He was also introduced to LSD.
Back in Oslo he illustrated science fiction stories by Axel Jensen. “We had three months and half a kilo of hashish; Axel’s flat became like a cave,” he recalled. The pair also lived together for a period on an old schooner moored in Stockholm. Their friendship and collaborations continued until Jensen’s death in 2002.
During the 1980s and 1990s Pushwagner completed the Apocalypse Frieze – a set of hyperdetailed military and industrial scenes – and A Day in the Life of a Family Man, serigraphs that reworked and colourised many of the themes from Soft City. He also painted self-portraits in which he turned his head into a cage of ant-like figures.
But his life continued to spiral out of control. By his sixties he was a pitiful figure, his once-handsome face crumpled, his work floundering in obscurity. For two years in the 1990s he was sleeping rough.
Following the inclusion of Soft City in the 2008 Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art, Pushwagner enjoyed an unlikely revival; The New York Times called it a highlight of the Biennial. In court he recovered the rights to his oeuvre from a former business manager, and the National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design in Oslo bought examples of his work for their collection. This was followed by a touring retrospective, a documentary film about his life and the book Pushwagner (2012).
He had success in Britain with the exhibition, Pushwagner: Soft City (MK Gallery, Milton Keynes, 2012). At the launch, opened by the Norwegian Ambassador, he was as unpredictable as many had predicted, repeatedly vanishing without explanation. It looked like he might be absent for the Ambassador’s speech, only to reappear just in time.
Pushwagner married twice; both marriages ended in divorce. He is survived by a daughter.