Multimedia Mania/abacus-multimedia-mania.iso/dp/0016/00160.txt

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$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 ever sophisticated Danish colourists, and painters like Erik Raadal
(1905-1941) and Soren Hjorth Nielsen (b. 1901) have brought new regions and
different landscapes for appreciation into the sphere of Danish art.

Nielsen and Christensen

     During the years between the wars the painter and engraver Aksel
Jorgensen began to teach engraving at the Academy of Art. Himself an eminent
draughtsman, his fame, like that of Eckersberg, rests chiefly on the talented
brood he hatched. Among these artists are Palle Nielsen (b. 1920) and Povl
Christensen (1909-1977). Palle Nielsen's art depicts city life in the setting
of war, his pictures show, in his own words, "the human condition, angst,
hope, indignation and emotion". Povl Christensen specialised in book
illustration, including several works of Steen Steensen Blicher, the great
story-teller from Jutland. Both artists would have achieved worldwide
recognition if Danish were a more widely-read language and the rest of Europe
more cognisant with the cultural life of Denmark. The numerous exponents of
black and white engraving were also interested in making moderately priced
reproductions of original pictures available to the general public. The
efforts to bring art to the people also resulted in several Danish newspapers
specialising in the publication of outstanding graphic illustrations,
sometimes occupying the greater part of a page.

     A concrete and more expressionistic idiom has been strongly apparent in
recent Danish art. Since his arrival in Denmark some years ago the German
artist Arthur Kopcke has exerted a powerful influence. Both through his own
work and that of several of his friends from abroad he has made Copenhagen one
of the stations in the development of the Fluxus movement.

     During the 1960s a group of young Danish artists, including Per Kirkeby
(b. 1938), Richard Winther (b. 1926), Paul Gernes (b. 1925) and Bjorn
Norgard (b. 1947), based themselves on The School of Experimental Art, one
of the extremely important private independent art schools instituted through
the years in protest at the teaching methods of the Royal Academy of Art.

Wiig Hansen and the brothers Haugen Sorensen

     A good deal of the art produced by both the Experimental School and other
leading Danish artists is no longer in the museums or in the hands of private
collectors. The National Endowment for the Arts made the means available for
the commissioning of large decorative schemes for public milieux; Asger Jorn
carried out one of the first of these projects, Carl-Henning Pedersen's most
important work is in this genre, and several hundred decorative schemes of
greater or lesser magnitude have already been executed nation-wide.

     The National Endowment has also made it possible to allow young artists
to undertake work in monumental form. One of them is the painter and sculptor
Svend Wiig Hansen (b. 1922), whose style, originating in sculpture of sugary
classicism, has metamorphosed into a fierce expressionism represented in
sculpture, paintings and graphics. The brothers Arne and Jorgen Haugen
Sorensen (b. 1932) (b. 1934), painter and sculptor respectively, have created
some of the most significant works of the younger generation; other artists
include the sculptors Willy Orskov (b. 1920) and Eva Sorensen (b. 1940).

Rooted in tradition

     In company with that of other nations, Danish art in recent decades has
been affected by rapid changes of direction and by some of the current leading
figures in the art world. It is nevertheless clearly apparent that Danish
artists are rooted in their own tradition that is marked especially by the
existential attitude and expressionistic manifestation that is the most
important contribution, not only of Denmark, but of the whole of Scandinavia,
to world art. It is an art that from its beginnings and throughout its
development has been invigorated with the aid of considerable influence from
France, while yet radically distinguishing itself from French art. Content and
expression are of greater significance than form and aesthetic unity.

     In the light of this it is apparent that the breakthrough of abstract art
is a more seeming than actual element of discontinuity in Danish art. There is
more unification than separation between the art of J.Th. Lundbye and that of
Asger Jorn, and both Egill Jacobsen and Lauritz Hartz often use colours,
summer-green or winter-brown, adapted from the crisp and spontaneous tones in
the Danish landscapes of the Eckersberg School.

     Jorn once said: "I and my colleagues are trying to be moderns on Danish
foundations."
H. E. Norregard-Nielsen

Some museums

     Post-war Danish art can be seen in its international context at the
Louisiana Gallery at Humlebaek, Zealand. There are also important collections
at the State Museum of Art in Copenhagen and the museums of art at Arhus,
Alborg and Randers, In recent years a museum has been opened at Herning
especially devoted to the work of Carl-Henning Pedersen and Else Alfelt, where
there is also a gallery exhibiting a number of other important art works of
the period. In 1981 a new art gallery was inaugurated at Holstebro housing
sizeable collections of work by such artists as Heerup, Lauritz Hartz and
Ejler Bille. A new building has just been erected at Silkeborg to accommodate
the large collections of his own and other artists' work presented to the town
by Asger Jorn.

Bibliography

     Modern Danish art has been discussed in a number of monographs on
individual leading artists and more comprehensively by Jens Jorgen Thorsen in
Modernisme (Copenhagen, 1965), and in Dansk Kunsthistorie (History of Danish
Art) (Politiken 1972-75, vols. 1-5). Also available in English, German and
French: Vagn Poulsen and H.E. Norregard-Nielsen: Danish Painting and
Sculpture (Det danske Selskab, Copenhagen, 1976).