Bodil Cappelen

Bodil Cappelen, the Norwegian painter, textile artist, illustrator and children's author who also became one of the principal keepers of poet Olav H. Hauge's literary legacy, died on 14 September 2026 in Tonsberg. She was 96. Samlaget, the Olav H. Hauge Centre in Ulvik and the Facebook page devoted to Hauge announced her death the following day. Avisa Hordaland and later Klassekampen and Dag og Tid remembered her as both an independent artist and an invaluable cultural worker.

Cappelen was born in Stavanger on 26 April 1930, the daughter of judge Johan Munthe Cappelen and Edith Heiberg. She trained in graphics and textile at the Norwegian National Academy of Craft and Art Industry in Oslo from 1948 to 1951. After a long pause she returned to tapestry in the late 1960s, dyeing her own yarn and working at large scale on the upright loom. She debuted at the Autumn Exhibition (Hostutstillingen) in 1969 and through the 1970s and early 1980s showed tapestries at Young Artists Society, Bergen Art Society, Artists House in Oslo, Hardanger Folk Museum and in Torshavn on the Faroe Islands. Colour, she said, mattered more to her than folk-tapestry tradition; she looked to painters such as Emil Nolde and Ludvig Karsten.

Her first marriage was to writer and painter Finn Stromsted; they had two children, Aili and Rune. From 1975 she lived with Olav H. Hauge in Ulvik in Hardanger, marrying him on 27 January 1978. Their five-year courtship letters, published in 1996 as Brev 1970-1975, became a classic of Norwegian literary correspondence. After Hauge's death in 1994 she worked to place his archive in public trust, supported translations into Swedish, German and English, and helped found the Hauge Centre that opened in Ulvik in 2014 with gifts of pictures, letters, notes and books. Staff there called her an invaluable contributor who kept pushing Hauge's poetry into national and international view.

From the early 1980s Cappelen turned increasingly to children's books and illustration, including titles for the Sami publisher Davvi Girji and the primer ABC made with Hauge. In 1991 she mounted her first solo show of oil paintings in Oslo and kept painting for decades. She later settled in Son, where she built a terrace with stone slabs brought from Hardanger. She received the Ambolt Prize in 2012. Delacroix's line that a painting's first merit is to be a feast for the eye was her motto. She is survived by children and grandchildren. She died the day after the poetry festival organized by the Hauge Centre closed in Ulvik.