OBITURY

Jean April Aase

April 15, 1935 – April 14, 2017

It was a huge shock to many of us when we were told that Jean Aase had a serious illness in her home in Kragerø, Norway; and the grief was great when the family later reported that she died at the hospital in Skien on Friday 14 April, the day before she had turned 82 years old.

In Kragerø, Jean became famous for her long-standing work as a conservator and general manager at the Berg-Kragerø Museum and for her involvement in local art and building protection. However, as a professional, she also made contributions on a regional, national and international level. For those who had the opportunity to work with her or otherwise become familiar with her, she will always be remembered and missed as an exceptionally good, warm and generous person as it was always nice and interesting to talk to her.

Jean April Aase, born Lindholm, grew up in a Finnish-American family in the small town of Cloquet, Minnesota, near the port city of Duluth, in a community strongly influenced by Finnish and Swedish immigrants. She began studying at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. While continuing with “Scandinavian Studies” there, she met the Norwegian Einar Aase. In 1956, they married in Oslo and settled there together. Jean worked for a while in the library at the Electric Bureau, while also raising her children – Trine (born 1960) and Knut (born 1963). After the family had moved to Skien, she began part-time work in 1976 at Telemark Museum in Brekkeparken. She continued this as a mother with two teenagers after her husband died too early the following year. The children can tell about a close and good team of the little family, and Jean was a worker of the rare.

A few years later, she also started studying while still working in Brekkeparken. After the children became adults, she worked for cultural heritage recordings for a number of different projects in different parts of the country for several years. Between this, she finally completed her cultural history education with a PhD degree in ethnology at the University of Oslo in 1989. The theme of the dissertation was “Goldsmedhushold i Skien 1700-1870”. When the position as a conservator at Berg Museum became available, Jean moved to Kragerø. She joined the position in 1993 and carried out major changes there.

When Jean came to Berg, there was already plans for a significant expansion of the administration and exhibition building from the 1970s, and funding for this stage was about to come into place. In the following years, much of Jean’s time was spent on detailed planning, until the new building could begin in 1997, which was completed in 1998. Then Jean directed the effort to fill this modern museum building with content, move into the beautiful new space and constantly created new changing exhibits in highly expanded exhibition halls.

When Jean resigned as a conservator at Berg at the turn of the year 2002-2003, she left behind a modern museum with better space in the magazines and better order in the collections than at other museums in the county, and local and regional museums in most of the country.

In Jean Aase’s time as a conservator at Berg, she was keen on changing art exhibitions, with partly large amounts of substantial artwork from other museums and private collections that attracted visitors. In this connection, Jean established a permanent exhibition committee of volunteers with considerable artistic competence.

In the extension of this work with the art exhibitions at Berg and Kittelsenhuset in the center of Kragerø, which the museum took over in 1987, Jean also engaged in volunteer work for art in Kragerø through the Kragerø art association. She was a period board member and secretary there. In addition, she contributed with several valuable local historical articles in the yearbooks of Kragerø and Skåtøy historielag and Telemark history law. In particular, an article from 1999 on the farm settlement in Kragerø in the Middle Ages and the plague and the ages of the late Middle Ages will be emphasized as an important local breakthrough work, based on the methods of the great Nordic desert project in the 1970s.

Jean did not at all slow down the pace even though she chose to “retire” from the position at Berg at the end of 2002, at almost 68 years old. It was rather that she now had more time to embark on her significant academic and organizational talents in other arenas.

 

From her younger years, before completing her education, Jean had a lot of work as a professional translator, especially to and from English. With English as a mother tongue and good Norwegian knowledge, she had good prerequisites for this, and with her education background, she received many great translation assignments in the field of cultural history. In this way, she provided important contributions to the dissemination of Norwegian history and cultural history – and cultural history literature – to an international audience.

Jean raised an ancient interest in medieval history and traveled several times to attend long and demanding summer courses in Cambridge. In addition, in recent years, she devoted much time to international museum work through the world-wide organization ICOM – The International Council of Museums.

In 2011, Jean Aase became a member of ICOM’s International Committee for Regional Museums (ICR), and was the secretary of the board from 2013 to 2016. This post involved enormous amount of highly qualified work, especially with posting, writing museum articles and editing Contributions of others to the reports of the Committee’s annual conferences. It also meant a significant travel business to virtually all corners of the world at these conferences and other meetings. Both parts were impressive in themselves, and far more than most people in their eighties would be able to do. We do thank her for her high professional standards and quality sense, and for practically working around the clock for the three years she was acting as a secretary of ICR.

She was a monument in cultural life that is now gone. Jean was a distinguished team player. Jean was admittedly not unnecessarily diplomatic, sometimes harsh and direct, with a rather low tolerance for hesitation and empty talk. However, just for that reason we always knew where we stood with her and that we could trust her in everything. Catching a glimpse of her eye-laughter and knowing a quick reply was never far away made her dear to us all. She was a force to be reckoned with, a stanchworthy ally, and a mentor to many people. Her warmth, humour, advice, and pragmatism were of a rare and admirable quality.

All of this will be missed after Jeans’s passing. She got a long life and managed to accomplish a lot. Still, she died too early while still in full activity, for the benefit of herself and others. We share the sadness and the loss with Jeans two children and their families. At the same time we remember her with joy over everything she gave us as humans and professionals. She will be in our hearts forever!

– Rune Holbek, Carrie-Ann Lunde, and Stefanos Keramidas