The Best of the Bureau/The_Best_of_the_Bureau_Bureau_Development_Inc._1992.iso/dp/0016/00160.txt

Text File | 1992-08-07 | 14KB | 250 lines

$Unique_ID{bob00160}
$Pretitle{}
$Title{Denmark
Danish Art After 1945}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{H. E. Norregard-Nielsen}
$Affiliation{Press and Cultural Relations}
$Subject{art
danish
artists
jorn
work
denmark
war
artist
asger
important}
$Date{1988}
$Log{}
Title:       Denmark
Book:        Fact Sheets on Denmark
Author:      H. E. Norregard-Nielsen
Affiliation: Press and Cultural Relations
Date:        1988

Danish Art After 1945

     The Danish poet, hagiographer and travel writer Johannes Jorgensen was
also an art critic, and he once wrote that Danish painting seems to be
governed by a law that reverts everything to Eckersberg. It was he who with
his own paintings and through his teaching at the Academy of Art had laid the
foundations of a tradition in Danish painting that since his day has
constantly been revivified by the best Danish painters, who have also been
inspired by art from abroad.

     Eckersberg had studied under the great David in Paris, above all he had
learned from him to see and reproduce honestly. In the best of his pupils,
both direct and indirect, this Gallic limpidity was combined with the more
turgid nationalistic bent, which took one direction in Christen Kobke's
sparkling, summer-green, colouristically refined art and another in J. Th.
Lundbye's more emotive and ambiguous works, in which, in the words of the
artist himself, may be heard "the deep organ tones of Nature".

     The art of Eckersberg Kobke and Lundbye grew out of the Danish form of
the Biedermeier style, it was an art backgrounded in the Napoleonic wars and a
fear that the destructive chauvinism might make itself felt again. The
influence of the First World War brought about another alteration in art with
the disappearance of a whole lifestyle. In Denmark the painter Vilhelm
Lundstrom was able to familiarise himself with Picasso and cubism and this
resulted in a group of abstract compositions that caused a great stir and
scandal. A doctor went so far as to demonstrate that the abstract artist were
insane, but it was through them that Danish art received new invigoration.

Asger Jorn

     During the Second World War a group of young artists gathered together in
Copenhagen. Most of them were born about 1910, and some of them had been able
to pay brief visits to France before the frontiers were closed by the war.
This applied in particular to Asger Jorn (1914-1973), who had resolutely
journeyed to Paris in 1937 to study under Kandinsky. When this proved to be
impossible he went instead to L*eger, and it is evident from Jorn's earliest
paintings that Klee and Mir*o influenced him greatly. In Copenhagen Jorn met
painters like Ejler Bille (b. 1910), Carl-Henning Pedersen, (b. 1913), Else
Alfelt (1910-1974) and Egill Jacobsen (b. 1910), who had been working on a
number of parallel artistic forms, but who were also inspired by Danish art
from before the Golden Age.

     The Danish painters, like those everywhere else, believed that abstract
art would open many more people's eyes to art. They felt that art had
distanced itself too far from its common human origins, and allowed themselves
to be inspired by the ornamental art of the Vikings, wall paintings and
children's drawings. They sought for spontaneous expression and cultivated
psychoanalysis in an effort to uncover the hidden layers of the personality.

     The artists expressed their views in a journal they had named HELHESTEN,
after the three-legged horse in a Danish fable; they published articles about
each other and about everything that interested them, producing their
paintings at the same time. Egill Jacobsen, sensing the mounting threat of
war, painted his "Heap" (1937-38), which is considered to be the first
abstract-expressionistic work of art in Denmark. Bille was working at this
time on pictures in which he painted minute forms that, like germinating buds,
spread over the canvas until it was filled. Jorn was influenced by both of
these artists, and it was he who after the war took the initiative in
establishing the association of artists known as COBRA, which in addition to
its Danish nucleus also included Dutch and Belgian members.

Content in expression

     As an association COBRA existed only between 1948 and 1951. Asger Jorn
disbanded it when in company with Dotremont he was admitted to a tuberculosis
sanatorium in Silkeborg. While there he was permitted to paint in the
mortuary, where he produced a series of paintings that are an important part
of his oeuvre. For the first time he painted spontaneously without making
preliminary sketches. As one of his models he took the Norwegian
expressionistic painter Edvard Munch, and with his titles he demonstrated both
his roots in Scandinavian culture and his fervent commitment to the political
movements of his time.

     Jorn did not get the reception he had hoped for in Denmark, and in 1953
he left the country. During the years that followed he worked in various
parts of Europe and in Cuba. In Italy he began to work with ceramics and chose
this medium for a monumental piece of decoration that he gave to Arhus in
1959. This work was one of the first in a long series of public projects
commissioned by the Danish state from young artists since 1965 through the
auspices of the National Endowment for the Arts. Jorn completed this huge
relief in four months; it takes its expression from an apparent battle
between the artist and his material, which is formed and coloured by a
temperament that through its individuality has achieved universality.

     Egill Jacobsen said of Jorn that he looked for the content in the
expression, and this applies to several artists of this period. Henry Heerup
(b. 1907) painted naturalistically, but as a sculptor he sought above all to
release the expressiveness inherent in a block before he began work on it. He
also made a large number of constructions out of rubbish, composed of
discarded objects acquired by the artist, in whose opinion everything
possesses a soul. The refuse takes on expression, it is characterised by the
people who have used it and it is transformed into a monument to anonymous
human beings and a fragment of their existence, when raised to eye level by
the artist. Seven Hauptmann (b. 1911) achieves a similar effect with his
collages and in addition has contributed an artistic sophistication to this
genre.

Mortensen and Jacobsen

     Contemporaneously with abstract-expressionistic art the painter Richard
Mortensen (b. 1910) and the sculptor Robert Jacobsen (b. 1912) were producing
more limpid and stringent works of art. Mortensen, who was closely linked
with the Asger Jorn group for a short period during the war years, and who
executed a few of the most significant pieces of abstract-expressionistic work
then, paints with an equal emphasis on form, colour and line, his pictures are
essentially architectural but express a poetical grace that has ensured them a
position of distinction in contemporary concrete art.

     Robert Jacobsen learned his sculpture under Heerup, but in the course of
long periods spent in France since 1947, including an important stay with
Mortensen, he became absorbed in concrete art. This resulted in a series of
sculptures in iron, in which he laid more stress on the hollow spaces in the
sculpture than on the form that defines it. The only Danish artist to base his
oeuvre on surrealism, Wilhelm Freddie (b. 1909) has achieved an independent
and gifted style of his own within the convention.

     During the period that saw the birth and development of abstract art,
most widespread in Denmark after the war, a great many painters and sculptors
continued the work of the naturalistic tradition to which they made notable
contributions. A number of these artists joined the association CORNER. They
included Karl Bovin (b. 1907) whose superb landscapes mark the course of the
seasons in Denmark, but who has also captured the light and colours of Bahrein
while on long visits to that country. Lauritz Hartz (b. 1903) is one of the
best e