Ari Behn

Biography

The first print run of “Sad as Hell” was 1,800 copies, and it sold out in under a week. The author was twenty-six, and in Norway few people knew him yet.

He was born on 30 September 1972 in Aarhus, Denmark, and given the name Ari Mikael Bjørshol. His parents, Norwegians, were both teachers at Waldorf schools. The family lived in England, in Plymouth, where his father trained as a photographer, then in Tennevoll in northern Norway, where his mother worked as a schoolteacher, and from 1978 in Moss in the south of the country. From 1979 the boy attended the Waldorf school in Moss. In 1983 his parents divorced and married friends of the family, Jan Pahle and Tone Bjerke, the daughter of the poet André Bjerke. In 2007 Behn’s parents married each other for the second time. In the family he was called Mikael, and he used that name until his student years.

In the 1990s he studied history and religion at the University of Oslo and took a bachelor’s degree. Alongside his studies he worked as, among other things, a forklift driver, a warehouse hand and a bartender, and as a young man he spent several years travelling in Africa, the United States and Asia. In 1993 he was one of the founders of the anarchist artists’ collective Den Nye Vinen (“The New Wine”), whose members included the photographer Per Heimly. From 1996 he called himself Ari Behn, taking the maiden name of his grandmother.

His first book came out in 1999. Its fifteen stories, about young people in Africa, Las Vegas and Norway, were well reviewed. Later books were received more guardedly: the novels “Bakgård” (2003; literally “Backyard”), “Entusiasme og raseri” (2006; “Enthusiasm and Rage”) and “Vivian Seving etc.” (2009), the story collections “Talent for lykke” (2011; “A Talent for Happiness”) and “Tiger i hagen” (2015; “Tiger in the Garden”), and the play “Treningstimen” (“The Training Hour”), staged in 2011 at the Rogaland Theatre. In 2002 a book about his wedding, written together with his wife, was published.

He tried his hand at other things as well. In 2002 the channel TV2 broadcast his critical documentary about the war in Afghanistan, “Øst for krigen – invitert av Taliban” (“East of the War – Invited by the Taliban”). He appeared in the comedies “Team Antonsen” (2004) and “Long Flat Balls”, wrote for newspapers and magazines, and in 2007 designed a set of wine glasses and tableware called “Peacock” for the firm Magnor Glassverk. In 2011, with Per Heimly, he hosted the programme “Ari og Per” on NRK, which won the Gullruten award as the year’s best entertainment series. Later came “Ari and Per Solve World Problems” on TVNorge.

In the early 2000s the Norwegian press often portrayed him as a poseur. In 2001 he challenged the critic Kjetil Rolness to a duel by throwing down a glove. In 2002 a relative of Behn’s, the singer Ole Paus, called him “Prins Kvaps von und zu Quasi” (roughly, “Prince Fool von und zu Fake”). Behn himself wrote in the novel “Inferno” that to many people he was a fool. The art historian Øivind Lorentz Storm Bjerke objected that Behn was not a cheerful amateur who had suddenly decided to try art: he belonged to a circle of artists without formal training who work in several art forms.

On 24 May 2002 Behn married Princess Märtha Louise, the elder daughter of King Harald V of Norway, and remained a private citizen with no title, while their daughters (Maud Angelica in 2003, Leah Isadora in 2005, Emma Tallulah in 2008) were given rights of succession to the Norwegian crown. In August 2016 the start of divorce proceedings was officially announced, and in 2017 the marriage was dissolved. The family lived in London, in New York, and then in the Lommedalen valley near Oslo.

From 2013 Behn painted. He named Jean-Michel Basquiat as his chief inspiration, and the works belong to a neo-expressionist tradition. Critics at first received them with mixed feelings, and later the assessments grew warmer. From 2017 to 2018 exhibitions took place in more than sixty galleries in various countries, among them the show “Borderless: Scandinavia” in Los Angeles. In 2018 his book “Inferno” appeared, about the time after the divorce.

Behn died on 25 December 2019 at home, in Lommedalen. He was buried on 3 January 2020, with the funeral held at Oslo Cathedral.