About Danish art - and four Danish artists
by Peter Michael Hornung
As in all Western countries, art in Denmark has been formed as an endless polyphony of artistic pronouncements, each of which reflects predominant international tendencies or their combinations. However, there is one specific area where artistic life in Denmark does not resemble that of other countries. Throughout most of the 20th.century, significant portions of the exhibition seasons have been organized in so-called artistic associations. These associations are permanent groups of artists who exhibit together on a regular basis and split expenses on rent, supervision and catalogue production. In 2005 nine such exhibitions took place. Indeed, each year about 350 visual artists have the opportunity to meet their public at these exhibitions.
These artistic groups are of various size and age. The oldest one is Den Frie Udstilling, established in 1891 in protest against the monopoly over exhibitions, as well as the academic censorship imposed throughout its whole history by Charlottenborg (which, not incidentally, housed the schools of the Academy of Fine Arts). In 1991 Den Frie Udstilling celebrated its centenary anniversary. Grønningen is the second oldest and the largest among these associations. It has existed since 1915 and today numbers more than fifty permanent members.
For some time the tendency was that when artists felt constrained for space in an existing group, they formed a new one. Later on, these artistic marriages of convenience were pressed by the commercial galleries, where the concentration is more on individualism, and where an artist’s international ambitions have greater potential for coming true. Unlike galleries and art fairs, the associations have focused more on the local public. But not only have new trends and the swift spread of information created a more pluralistic art market, for they have also lent to the avant-garde’s clean break away from the main stream.
The associations have acted as a bulwark against this tendency. The idea of the associations seems to explain why modern Danish art, despite the country’s small size, has been so complex and pluralistic. They seem to have survived by the very virtue of their vigorous pluralism and tolerance. This has meant that at a single address one could find something that would satisfy every taste, age group and something everyone could afford.
The four artists whose works constitute the present exhibition are all members of such associations. Finn Mickelborg (b.1932), Ole Sporring (b. 1941) and Stig Brøgger (b.1941) are members of Grønningen (Mickelborg is also the association’s president). Hans Christian Rylander (b. 1939) is the president of Decembristerne, an association established in 1928. Thus, the four artists have common links as regards both generation ties and organizational membership.
Despite this, one could hardly imagine more different artists than these four. H.C. Rylander is an existential surrealist, with the human being and their placement in time being the dominant motif of his works. Finn Mickelborg is an abstract neo-concretist whose works deal with light, velocity and space. Ole Sporring is an environmentally aware expressionist, who in his own humorous way follows e.g., Van Gogh’s footsteps. In his analytical search of the language of painting, Stig Brøgger is inspired by minimalism and conceptual art. Nevertheless, he remains sensitive to the signals of an art in constant progress.
The distinct differences in the four artists’ forms of expression are the result of the fact that each of them has a different background.
As a teenager Finn Mickelborg studied drawing at the School of Arts and Crafts. In the 1960s he mixed with Copenhagen jazz circles and played the mellophonium (which resembles a French horn). At that time, concretist painter and jazz enthusiast Bamse Kragh Jacobsen introduced Mickelborg into the world of visual arts and in a way became his teacher. Before Christian Rylander began his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen, he graduated from a teachers’ training college (in 1963), which seems to explain his social and historical involvement. Ole Sporring graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts. Before he joined Grønningen, he was a member of Trykkerbanden, which was an association of graphic artists with a clear social program based on the assumption that art was to be accessible to everybody. The artists put their plan into effect by means of focusing on essential social matters.
The remaining member of the quartet, Stig Brøgger, studied political science for seven years at the University of Copenhagen. At the same time he attended Eks-Skolen, an experimental art school. The school opened in 1961 as a critical alternative to the then authoritarian education at the Academy of Fine Arts. At Eks-Skolen the students learned that one can create art from a completely open concept, which the artist has to define himself on the basis of his own motivation and chosen material. Brøgger himself did not graduate from the Academy of Fine Arts, but he is the one to have worked longest as a professor of the Academy (1981-1997). In other words, his contribution to educating younger generations deserves a separate chapter.
In comparison to Poland, Denmark managed to slip through World War II almost unharmed. The Germans did occupy the country and many Danish citizens were sent to concentration camps, but the capital city was not razed to the ground. Unlike many Central and Eastern European countries, Denmark was not forced from one state of political and cultural isolation to another when the war ended. After 1945 Denmark opened its borders and Danish artists could travel freely around the world. As a consequence of the German occupation, Danes rejected any form of German culture for a long time. The artists followed French and, later on, American trends. Reluctance towards the southern neighbour did not wane until the times of the young wild painters of the 1980s. Cobra, the most significant post-war artistic movement, was created by artists from countries formerly occupied by the Germans, such as Denmark, Belgium and Holland, and the group’s manifesto was signed in the liberated Paris.
Hans Christian Rylander
In the post-war period many artists were deeply concerned about survival in the era of the nuclear arms race. For them art became a moral issue. They were convinced that creative individuals had a certain obligation towards their fellow humans and found it unacceptable to keep oneself away and worship individualism. In the 1950s, a group of the Academy’s graduates decided to arrange a series of exhibitions on the same topic: the human being. The group’s humanistic concerns could be perceived as a reaction to the abstract art of that time. This concerned both the abstract art of Linien 2 as well as Cobra’s more spontaneous and expressionist activities. The works of the Cobra group became a veritable synonym of impulsive, spontaneous and emotionally determined improvisation that did not allow any planning of the picture’s composition in advance. The works were somewhat automatistic and in a way seemed to pay tribute to surrealism, children’s drawings, so-called primitive art and the Nordic folk art which many young artists had studied intensively in the years when the war isolated Denmark from the rest of Europe.
Internationally, the Cobra movement exhibited abstract-expressionist paintings in Northern Europe and especially in Denmark. However, it was not until after Cobra’s natural death, that the Cobra-style became a school. The style’s impulsive wallow in colors, birds and feeling was perceived as pure escapism, though. Whatever one could say about Cobra’s expressive strength, man’s situation in the 20th century was definitely not its central theme.
As far as themes and morals are concerned, Hans Christian Rylander is one of the interpreters of the condition of modern man. He understands his mission as an artist as that of creating altered conditions for and changing man’s self-image and situation. Rylander’s long list of exhibitions, which includes the Biennale in Venice in 1984 and a large number of decorative works, prove Rylander’s huge productive restlessness and emphasize his role as one of the unavoidable portrayers of the sick times he is living in. He is uncompromising and diagnoses culture’s morals by artistic means. The image of contemporary man in Denmark would be virtually non-existent without his contribution as a painter, sculptor and drawer. His works are definitely not to serve the vagaries of the time. Rylander’s errand is of a different kind – more introverted and based on morals. The universe of his paintings remains focused on the vulnerable/exposed fellow human being, whether well-known or completely anonymous.
Rylander does not group his figures so as to form stories – they appear as single, isolated shapes and are often presented from the front. He builds his figures and shapes with dabbing and colorful strokes, so that in the end a structure is created, the destruction of which seems no different from its construction. For the same reason Rylander’s paintings, crowded with people, can be hard to cope with at first sight. So many details seem to be important, even equally important, that it is hard for the eyes to prioritize. If the result of this experience is perplexity, the artist has gained what he aimed to: to tell about the condition of man, right here and right now, without falling into the hierarchies which in older art made it so easy to become a judge.
This perplexity may work mercilessly and frighteningly as a description of the moral decline which, according to Rylander, we are living in. His art settles accounts with civilization, but without raising its voice and his aim is not more ideological than a Middle-aged representation of the Day of Judgement. The art does not revolve about a right truth or right programme, but about existential matters. So far, Rylander’s main work has been the decoration of Provianthuset at Christiansborg (where the Danish parliament has its seat). The decoration is formed as a big and picturesque overflight of a whole gallery of persons from Danish history and culture, many of whom are associated with different historical periods. Gazing on this work one often may point at given figures having the impression that one recognizes or knows them. But despite their similarity, nobody is in doubt of who was the author of this manifold universe. Although Rylander remains untiring in his reproduction of details, he has never lost the broader grasp of his mission: to portray the human community - for better or worse.
Finn Mickelborg
While Rylander’s painting is characterized by today’s figurative naturalism, Finn Mickelborg has become an institution in a complete different artistic section, namely modern abstraction. In 1976 he was one of the founders of the exhibition group Ny Abstraktion (New Abstraction) that utilized a ramified net of inspirations and fascinations: Russian suprematism, geometrical system art, computer graphics, modulation of light, material sense stimuli etc. Organizationally, Ny Abstraktion resembled a pure working group rather than a traditional exhibition community, as the members of the group largely tailored their works to the current exhibition and its locality. Thus, it was not the artists who independently decided upon the form of an exhibition – the spaces had also something to say. Therefore, Ny Abstraktion proceeded with a constructive care typical for an architectural drawing office and calculated in advance the exhibition’s arrangement with the help of models of both spaces and works.
After the group Ny Abstraktion finished their exhibition activity at the end of 80s its active members came into other connections. Most of the group, like Finn Mickelborg, went on to become permanent members of Grønningen.
Mickelborg himself continued and intensified his work in pure painting. Stylistically, the painting is situated within the frame of abstract non-figurative painting, but the artist has a special plan that is not so abstract at all: namely to cultivate the combination of speed and light exclusively by means of colour. In order to indicate or symbolize movement, Mickelborg uses more strategies. Sometimes he uses so-called “shaped canvas” i.e., canvases that break with the traditional formats in order to show that a painting’s theme affects its format. Thus, the canvas’ form reinforces the (idiomatic) language of the painting itself. In those “shaped” or remodeled canvases, the high speeds being the starting point of the work have influenced the painting’s horizontal and vertical edges and changed the rectangular frame into a strange, aerodynamic product. Also here Mickelborg works with thinning or toning of the colour.
But the most important strategy made to give an illusion of speed is the controlled thinning of a colour’s intensity. Mickelborg’s theory on colour modulation is largely the key to understanding his painting - modern painting stretched between great simplicity and complexity, but still maintaining a deep balance.
Basically, each picture is a static object. The same also applies, of course, to the colours and forms that comprise the picture’s contents. In reality, they are also immovable. But if the impression can be made that colour - as a form – is able to depict movement, and so does the picture as a whole, one can create illusions. By spray painting the artist makes those delicately graded thinnings in the colour’s horizontal displacement. By the usage of precise exposures the artist can reinforce the impression that something has moved on the painting, in a particular direction, fast, perhaps at the very speed of light. Thus, the painting becomes a kind of snapshot of light flying as a meteor over the canvas and during its quick trip it leaves only a trace of colour.
With the help of these strategies, Mickelborg many times has generated the illusion that colour is pure light and that his paintings have therefore only borrowed those shining “beams”. The light’s speed seems to be braked and frozen for a short time, but maybe its beams have only paid a momentary visit. This has made his paintings into objects that emanate with a great potential of energy. It seems that at any moment they might exit the frame and fade out in space.
Ole Sporring
Ole Sporring is a child of war and the post-war period, and this can be observed in the subjects he has decided to focus on. He has been called one of the heralds of the young wild art that broke through, however, only in 1982. The reason he is associated with the by far younger De Unge Vilde (The Young Wild) is that Ole Sporring has utilized the picture’s surface as a grateful playground for all kinds of representations, conceptions, expressions and brainwaves – in other words all between heaven and earth that the artist is source of. It is only fantasy that has the right to set borders – and also the artist’s own political sense of reality. At the same time, he is more responsible than The Young Wild, i.e., he is more responsible for the environmental issues that determine his own and all others’ existence. Despite the idealistic care for nature and primitive people – he once pursued a special interest in Indians – he is not pompous. He is as far from being schmaltzy as from being politically correct. Ole Sporring’s works do not reflect a specific attitude. But his is art with an attitude.
In the sensitive political aspect Ole Sporring is closer to the revolt of 1968’s watchwords than to a non-committal postmodernist idea of a new expressionist development. In reality, he is among the most imaginative within the generation of artists that have never been afraid of taking a critical stand on social development. But he has done so with subtlety and humour. Not being exactly escapist, he will tell fairy tales. But they need be fairy tales with a moral. And the moral may be that freedom is not debatable. But even more important is that freedom – even artistic freedom – should be administered with responsibility and never prevail over respect for environmental well-being and continued existence of our planet. Therefore, artistic creativity has always to be followed by an agenda that reaches out of art’s own territory. His paintings and graphic works indicate that Ole Sporring has never foresworn the memory of Hiroshima and Barsebäck, or ceased to fear nuclear holocaust. But he has learnt to relate to the lurking dangers of the Atomic Age and to use them as a bearing within his own time. He knows that an artist can not go far by escaping from chaos and into a postulated idyll that has no point in common with modern civilization. The idyll is only a nostalgic idea, a frail vision, made of yearning for a dissipating harmony. Chaos, on the other hand, is a reality that has come to exist, wherefore the artist has to treat this state as a starting point and use it constructively.
In Sporring’s work nothing is defined beforehand. Nothing is selected. Therefore, everything is possible. The painting is made as a get-together of unpredictable opportunities, stories and accidents. Sporring calls this unconventional traffic across completely different genres for a change in tempo, a change in mood. Actually, it is a post-modern strategy before post-modernism became a movement. The strategy implies that each painting is produced on its own improvised terms. Each painting has to be as a party where all ideas can gate crash, and are justified only by the vitality with which they supply the painting.
Many of the 80s generation artists may envy Sporring his humor. It has not happened before
that one artist can at the same time follow both the expressionist Van Gogh’s and the Danish humorist Storm P.’s footsteps and still be able to leave his own imprint. In his paintings Sporring has balanced humour and seriousness, unrestrained fantasy and obligation towards the forces within technology and science that on the one hand are characteristic for modern civilization, but on the other hand threaten civilization’s existence. In his telltale universe he has gathered all these works, together with an unfailing impression that the world is only something we have been entrusted with.
Stig Brøgger
After World War II it became clear that the relative cultural strength between the US and Europe had moved westward. Paris, the art capital for centuries, was now a spent force as the metropolis the youngest generation of artists was guided by. The dominating new impulses like minimalism and concept art now emanated from New York. Common for the new ideas was an attempt to objectify art, i.e,. to release art work from all the myths and references being the mark of the artist’s personality. Art was to be brought back to a sober pre-state, where one could better and more clearly analyze its reality. For many this art acted “wiser”, i.e., more intellectually than any painting had for a long time. But one may also reverse it and say that now the painting could make anyone wiser of the visual anatomy of the figurative language.
The new art of painting was based on the consideration of what painting should be used for in the second half of the 20th century. Instead of creating subjective and thus perhaps private painting, Stig Brøgger wanted to show by his art that painting is a language just like other languages, and therefore the artist’s work has to take the form of an examination of the particular opportunities of figurative language.
Stig Brøgger made his name as one third of the Institute for Skalakunst in 1974 – the two others were Danish artists Hein Heinesen and Mogens Møller. It was especially those artists who at the beginning of 80s introduced the American phenomenon of Minimal Art to the wider Danish public, but they especially problematized the close relationship of the art work with its modern surroundings.
No artistic expression stands alone. For such work is based on the relationship with the culture it is part of. Art and its temporal setting have always been in a dialectic relationship. The purpose of Brøgger’s painting is never decoration. The artist’s paintings have also to be understood as messages like neon or traffic signs, etc. Therefore, he dissects the painting and splits it up into its components. He examines what it means to paint a picture. But he does not expose his own personal dispute with the work while painting. It is the painting’s possibilities that are examined and “the laboratory” in which the examination takes place is a kind of practical extension of the artist’s theoretical foundation.
The following questions are lurking behind the artistic work: is painting necessarily something sensual? Is it not simply something akin to gesture, steered by conscious movements? Or does the same consideration regard writing and painting? Can a language – or a linguistic statement – be painterly at all? Of course, one can paint a picture. But can one also “speak” in the picture, i.e., write in it? Does an artist necessarily have to have only one style, one mode of expression? And does a picture also have to have it? Or can there be a plurality of ways of painting and acting? And can one confront various stylistic strategies in one painting series and thus make the painting into a catalogue of figurative forms of appearance?
Out of this inquiring attitude it would limit Stig Brøgger if he had a particular stylistic handwriting, as many other artists have. It does not matter whether the style he chooses is classified as non-figurative abstraction, pop-art, minimalism, concept- or scale art, new expressionism or post-modernism. For in Brøgger’s painting there is no either/or, but both/and. All in all the painting becomes a demo-model of the potential and materials that occur in an open working situation. It is the basic opportunities of the figurative language that are being investigated and tested, painting by painting, often in a series, where single pictures have an obligation towards themselves only because of the common idea. The intention is always the same: to examine “a work” on the terms of a particular medium.
The questions may change. The deliberations may change. The methods may change. Therefore, paintings also may change their appearance. What connects them is Stig Brøgger’s way of thinking about art.
New future
Looking at the artists as a whole one may regard the four artists as the exponents of different artistic ideologies that, using a metaphor, graze side by side in the same landscape. With that the quartet characterizes also an exuberant pluralism - or clear individualism, that has become so typical in today’s art. If the intention had only been to give a suitable picture of this pluralism, one could also have chosen another four names. And those four other names would have demonstrated other attitudes – and other solutions. But they would not necessarily have given another picture of the scope and the richness of nuances within Danish modernism. Neither can one say that one artist from the quartet is definitely more avant-gardist than another. But one can say that the difference between the artists is a token of how spacious art has become in the recent years and how natural the spaciousness is in itself.
Globalization has changed the way we experience the art that surrounds us and the speed with which we exchange these experiences with others. On the one hand it has made it easier to tell the difference between the so-called topical/up-to-date and what is not on the very top anymore, i.e.. what is “hot” and what is “not”. It is newspaper reviews, art magazines, biennals, gallery fairs etc., that attend to that. But on the other hand globalization has made it more difficult to see art as a universal whole. Instead of creating conditions for one particular, stylistically or ideologically dominating attitude, the new state of things has legitimated art as the place where an almost infinite number of attitudes can easily function together. Also in one association exhibiting at the same place and in the same time every year.
As for the four artists the exhibition is focused on, the Academy of Fine Arts is not the central point. Only two of them graduated from this institution, and what is significant, they are those two who work most figuratively. One of them, Ole Sporring, has been a professor. But it is Stig Brøgger, the pupil of the alternative and experimental art school, who through his many years of work as a professor has become the most academic.
In Denmark the Academy regained its importance at the beginning of 1980s. This happened, as already mentioned, thanks to The Young Wild, most of whom are in fact graduates of the Academy. Since then the institution has preserved and extended its influence to the extent of an almost monopoly. But the consequence has not been a stylistic unification of the students of painting or sculpture who today are in their late twenties or early thirties. For the Academy has become a guarantor of the stylistic pluralism that can today be found in so many places outside the institution’s walls.
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