I once mentioned to a friend that I was on my way to visit Anniken Thue (1944–2026). “She’s like royalty, you know,” she told me. So true—Thue was royalty in the Norwegian art world, and certainly the queen of Frida Hansen research. Personally, my life would be on a different path without her encouragement and the monumental research she compiled on the life and work of Frida Hansen. I marvel regularly at the comprehensiveness of her fact-finding, accomplished in the early 1970s, without digital archives and the speed of email correspondence.
Art historian and author Anniken Thue was born on January 11, 1944, and passed away on March 7, 2026. She was educated at the University of Oslo and was married to Hans-Jakob Brun (1914–2017). She held several prominent museum leadership roles, including director of the Kunstindustrimuseet in Oslo (1987–2001) and later the National Gallery of Norway (2001–2003).
I first met Anniken Thue in 2019, when I was in Norway on a fellowship from the American Scandinavian Foundation to study Hansen’s wool open-warp transparent tapestry technique. I contacted Anniken before my trip and visited her in her beautiful Oslo home. I was nervous, and indeed she seemed a bit skeptical and cool when I first arrived. But by the end of the visit, she was supportive and engaged with my focus, and she gave me a signed copy of the oeuvre catalogue of Frida Hansen’s works. Recently, I was happy to receive a second copy that a friend found for sale online; my copy from Anniken has completely fallen apart through use.
Since 2019, I have been in regular email contact with Anniken. I visited her twice more in Oslo, and also had the pleasure of seeing her in Minneapolis, where her sister TeiTei lives.
Next week I will teach my twelfth weaving workshop on Frida Hansen’s wool open-warp transparent tapestry technique. In September 2025, I taught my first overseas workshop at the Norsk Folkemuseum in Oslo—ten years after I stood in the Frida Hansen retrospective at the Stavanger Art Museum, not yet knowing that Hansen’s luminous work would redirect the course of my own.
None of these workshops, nor my ongoing research into the work of Frida Hansen’s students and followers, would have been possible without the extraordinary research of Anniken Thue—and without her willingness to take my work seriously when it was still taking shape.
Thank you, Anniken!
Robbie LaFleur, March 2026
A post about Anniken’s passing from the Nordic Institute of Art.
A post from the Stavanger Art Museum.