museum - Cobra Museum Bronnenbank

Pedersen magazine ENG
29-03-2006
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Pagina 1
museum
vo o r m o d e r n e k u n s t
museum of modern ar t
Carl-Henning
Pedersen
Works on paper
1939-1951
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Pagina 2
Cobra Museum voor Moderne Kunst
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Helten i eventyret
The hero of the fairy-tale
1951
Watercolour
30 x 41 cm
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Foreword
Carl-Henning Pedersen is one of the major Danish artists of the
post-Second World War period. He owes his international fame
partly through his involvement with the CoBrA movement, of which
he was a leading exponent. His artistic career, however, is rooted in
the experimental Danish movements that preceded it. In this sense
he is one of the more ‘mature’ artists of the CoBrA group.
Pedersen’s imagination embraces an exciting world of fairy tales, full
of suns and stars, mountains and castles, birds and human-like creatures. In the late nineteen forties this dream world made an overwhelming impression on Dutch colleagues like Karel Appel, Constant
and Corneille. The four paintings he exhibited as part of the first
CoBrA exhibition at Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum in 1949 were
seen by them as the highlights of the show. For the occasion he also
displayed what they saw as delightful, non-conformist behaviour by
posing as a Charley Chaplin type figure in a tall hat.
Pedersen always had difficulty letting go of his own work. This
explains why most of his earlier masterworks have remained in his
own collection before being ultimately transferred to the splendid
museum in Herning devoted to his work.
On my first visit to this museum I was given access to its depot.
I was very much struck by the wealth of paintings from the CoBrA
period lining the shelves. But I caught my breath when I beheld all
the drawings from the period. I had the sense that I had discovered
a veritable treasure trove.
A few months later, accompanied by Matthijs Erdman, a highly valued
advisor of the museum, I was invited to make a selection of drawings
for this exhibition. This was a sheer delight for both of us.
I warmly thank Carl-Henning Pedersen and his wife Sidsel Ramson
for their enthusiastic cooperation in assisting with the realising of
this exhibition. I’m also extremely indebted to Carl-Henning
Pedersen and the Else Alfelt Museum in Herning, particularly Hanne
Lundgren Nielsen, for an exceptionally enjoyable collaboration.
John Vrieze
Director, Cobra Museum of Modern Art Amstelveen
3
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Cobra Museum voor Moderne Kunst
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Fugle i landskab
Bird in Landscape
1939
Watercolour and oil crayon on paper
41 x 46 cm
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Pagina 5
Carl-Henning Pedersen
a ‘myth-creating’ artist
door Willemijn Stokvis
In the autumn of 1976 a museum opened in Herning, a small town in
the middle of Jutland, dedicated to the work of the Danish painters
Carl-Henning Pedersen and his first wife, Else Alfelt, who died in
1974. The building is a tall, closed circular structure with an entrance
cutting into the façade. Once inside, however, the immediate impression is of an overwhelming stream of light that penetrates through
the roof. In fact Carl-Henning stipulated that daylight should enter
his museum ‘like a radiant white light’. 1 When I visited it in 1982,
my immediate impression was of a sun temple. A similar effect is
achieved in the 1993 extension, also based on Pedersen’s directions.
Rising above an extensive underground terrain is a pyramid, one side
of which is entirely of glass. Pedersen covered the walls with gigantic
ceramic surfaces on which he painted gods and dream birds, mainly
in blue. Some years earlier, in the winding building of the nearby
textile factory – now a museum – he had covered the almost circular courtyard with a huge ceramic wall. These unusual structures,
built in close proximity in a largely open space incorporating a
sculpture park, also circular, have an air of being on holy ground, a
kind of mysterious, prehistoric or non-Western ritual site.
For Pedersen, light is perhaps the single most important source of
inspiration: it forms an intangible, overwhelming, mystical element.
‘Jeg vil fange solens gyldne lys og fastholde det paa laerredet’ (I try
to catch the golden sunlight and encapsulate it on canvas), wrote
Pedersen, a poet as well as a painter, 2 in the catalogue accompanying
his one-man exhibition in Copenhagen in the autumn of 1950. It was
the last show organized by the Høst exhibition association, subsequently disbanded amid internal disagreement. The Dutch and
Belgian artists who had joined with members of Høst in 1948 to
form the international Cobra movement were witness to what was
surely the high-water mark of Pedersen’s artistic development.
As early as 1948, when they first encountered the work of these
Danish artists, it was Pedersen who most impressed the Dutch
painters Appel, Constant and Corneille. Within the Cobra movement, Denmark exercised an irresistible attraction on its nonDanish associates. There, from the late 1930s, art seemed to draw
on an ancient source with which Scandinavia, with its wealth of pre-
historic and medieval art as well as its various forms of traditional
folk art, appeared to have preserved a natural link. Carl-Henning
Pedersen was born in Copenhagen 1913 and must have been a
strong character from a young age. 3 His early ambitions were to be
a composer or an architect. He had a deep interest in politics and
soon mastered the skills of political oratory. A member of the
communist youth movement, Carl-Henning Pedersen travelled the
country delivering passionate speeches until, following a particularly
ferocious address in 1933 in central Copenhagen, he was sentenced
to jail for ten days. It was in the same year at the International
People’s College in Helsingør, while studying other languages in which
to reach new audiences, that he met the painter Else Alfelt. They
married soon after and it was she who introduced him to painting.
Cobra Museum voor Moderne Kunst
Den røde hest
The Red Horse
1941
Watercolour and oil crayon on paper
37 x 45 cm
5
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Cobra Museum voor Moderne Kunst
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Himlens søstre
Heaven’s Sisters
1942
Watercolour and Indian ink on paper
43 x 30 cm
Else was a Social Realist. Carl-Henning focused immediately on
abstract art – in fact he refers to his work then as a ‘cubist’. 4 Else
soon followed. It was around this time that the couple came into
contact with a group of internationally oriented Danish artists,
among them Ejler Bille, Asger Jörgensen, Henry Heerup and Egill
Jacobsen. They quickly assimilated the various interests these artists
had cultivated: surrealism, Bauhaus, Picasso etc. Carl-Henning’s close
association with Egill Jacobsen was especially significant. Through the
work which Jacobsen had begun to produce following his stay in
Paris in 1935, it was in fact he who had stimulated the group of
painters with whom Pedersen now came into contact. Inspired by
the power and originality of Picasso, Jacobsen had struck new – or
rather, ancient – veins which were readily accessible in Scandinavia.
The barbaric masks Jacobsen began painting in 1936 and the art he
inspired in his colleagues ensured that by 1938, for the first time in
its history, Danish painting had made an international mark with an
original contribution to the development of modern art.
Following a period of somewhat stilted abstract art, Carl-Henning
began to paint masks too. What these Danish artists were trying to
achieve was a complete surrender to fantasy. In those prewar years
it was perhaps Pedersen who managed to accomplish this most
brilliantly. From around 1939, his work features an irrational world
of fabulous creatures, earning him the name, the Hans Christian
Andersen of Danish painting. As he says himself, fairytales form a
vital ingredient in his work.’A painting should always have something
happening in it.’ 5 Being self-taught he felt an affinity in his spontaneous method with the art of untutored artists. Not that this was
his main inspiration. For Pedersen, this contained basic forms and
symbols which we all carry within us and which emerge naturally
whenever the artist releases the brakes and allows the natural
creative impulses take over. 6 And indeed, children’s drawings, for
example, or the art of primitive tribes and the prehistoric finds displayed in Copenhagen’s National Museum, are what spring to mind
when confronted by Pedersen’s world of barbaric animal and human
figures. The powerful lines, especially in the painter’s early period,
are reminiscent of the incisions of traditional folk woodcarvings.
As he progressed from these uncompromising strokes he achieved
poignant poetic finesse, especially in his work on paper: the soft
flowing hues of his watercolours, the rigid contours in gouache and
crayon, and the thin, tremulous dots and lines of his ink drawings.
Humans are the inferior creatures among the animals of Pedersen’s
fables, where the gods and birds rule.
Especially significant for Pedersen was his encounter, in Copenhagen
in 1937, with the work of several giants of modern art. 7 In 1939, he
left – on foot – for Paris, where the work of Chagall and that of
Matisse made a deep impression. But it came as a shock when, stopping on his return journey to visit an exhibition in Frankfurt of the
German expressionists he admired, he found them ridiculed as
degenerate art. After all, Pedersen’s work was not far removed from
the sensitive water colours of Emil Nolde and the expressive poetry
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Cobra Museum voor Moderne Kunst
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Blå hest
Blue Horse
1942
Watercolour and Indian ink on paper
38 x 44 cm
of Klee, artists who in Nazi ideology exemplified the malaise of
modern art.
In the first issue of the magazine Helhesten (Hell Horse), published
by the so-called ‘myth- creating’ Danish artists of the Høst group
from 1941 to 1944, Pedersen contributed an opening article on Paul
Klee, who had died in 1940. It is an indication of Klee’s importance
to these ‘conscious creators of degenerate art’ who saw themselves
as resistance artists. Pedersen was to publish numerous articles in
this periodical-initiated by Asger Jörgensen (after the war, Asger
Jorn) – as well as in catalogues for several Høst exhibitions in this
period. For Pedersen, as for most of the other Danish artists whom
Jorn was to count as ‘Cobra members’ after 1948, the Høst period
marked the highpoint of collective cooperation.
In a series of scintillating articles Pedersen presented his artistic and
political ideas as he was rarely to do in later years. The Marxist
painter proposed that art should not only be accessible to all, but
that everyone should make art. An autodidact himself, he believed
that an innate creativity existed in every person: all it needed was
for people to open up without fear of failure. Pedersen’s article
‘Kunsten og den opvoksende ungdom’ (Art and the Rising
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Generation) in the 1944 Høst exhibition catalogue starts with the
now famous passage ‘We must turn everyone into artists! Because
that is what they are. They just don’t know it. (…) They don’t understand that art is something innate to each person which only develops
when that person touches and interacts with stones, colours, words
and tone.’ In 1943, in his article ‘Abstract kunst eller fantasi kunst’
(Abstract Art or Fantasy Art) (Helhesten, vol. 2, no. 4) he presented
his vision of the artist’s place in society: ‘If society were to take
what artists produce and gave in return enough from which to live,
the right balance would be created between society and its artists.
Local libraries should be established throughout the country for
people to be able to borrow art for in their own homes, just as they
do with books. (…) The use of the language of art as a means of
communication would acquire a whole new significance in society.’
Egill Jacobsen, by then an ardent admirer of Pedersen, wrote about
his colleague’s work in Helhesten in 1941. He concluded his article
with the enthusiastic call: ‘Fantasy will break down its prison walls.
Fantasy and reality will become one, as they already are in fairytales,
in poetry, and as they are in the paintings of Carl-Henning Pedersen.’ 8
8
Conflagration engulfed Pedersen’s world of fable in the war years.
Rearing on the horizon is a frightened horse, expelling dragon-like
flames from its neck. 9 Massive heads without bodies, gods rather
than people, seem, with horses and giant birds, to rule over an
increasingly insignificant human world from an immense, deeply
dark-blue firmament. The gods are ill-disposed towards the world of
mortals. In ‘Himmelske vaesener ved havet’ (Heavenly Creatures by
the Sea, 1944) 10 the gods cast death and damnation over the earth,
where houses and ships try desperately to escape. After the war
these elements in his work gradually became calmer. From around
1948 the sea becomes smooth and tranquil. Smiling benignly, the
gods radiate a bright white and yellow light as if draped in thousands
of lights. They watch while ships pass safely, all flags flying. Under the
golden sun humans and animals live in peace again.
On what did Pedersen base his breathtaking mythical world?
Certainly, his colours and the narrative quality of his work have led
some to compare him with Chagall. 11 But his motifs, his gods, his
horses and his giant birds, his tree of life, his golden ships, his circling
suns: these are not Chagall. Nor do children’s drawings, to which his
early work bears such a resemblance, reveal these elements. Were
these the animals and gods of the Scythian steppes, the Celts, the
Vikings, or had Pedersen seen these among the Sino-Siberian
bronzes discussed in an article in Helhesten? Many of these would
have been on display at Copenhagen’s National Museum; for example, the famous Iron Age Trundholm sun chariot – a horse and a
large disc decorated with circles and spirals on a frame with six
wheels. Or perhaps he might have seen the museum’s wellknown
Gundestrup Celtic silver bowl with its figurative scenes of horse-
Markens fugle
The birds of the field
1943
Watercolour and oil crayon on paper
34 x 48 cm
Cobra Museum voor Moderne Kunst
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Cobra Museum voor Moderne Kunst
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Hellig faste
Sacred Fast
1944
Watercolour on paper
30 x 43 cm
men, men with shields, animals and… large human heads (!) also
from the Iron Age. Were Pedersen’s bright dots taken form the
filigree craftsmanship of Celtic jewellery? Who were those gods?
Where did they come from? From Norse myth? The Edda?
As early as 1947 the Dutch artist Constant (Amsterdam 1920-2005)
painted a work containing animals whose form and colour are
immediately reminiscent of Pedersen’s fabulous animals. He certainly
saw some of these when he met Jorn in Paris in 1946 and was able
to view examples of Danish experimental art. In his painting Fantasy
Animals (Aalborg Museum of Art, 1947) he even employed the
division found in Pedersen’s 1939 work Den aedende (The Eater).
Here Pedersen appears to portray a frightened person listening to
what is happening underground as one animal devours another. The
same duality is found on various occasions in Karel Appel’s work
(Amsterdam 1921) during his Cobra years. 12 Pedersen’s early paintings, prior to 1940, with his clear lines and bright fields of colour are
echoed in Appel’s work between 1948 and 1951. But the artist who
most absorbed Pedersen’s influence was Corneille (Luik 1922). The
latter’s work also contains large heads and delicate poetic tints.
Indeed, Klee was also a significant influence on Corneille. Pen and
ink drawings by Corneille from this period, such as those he produced for the 1949 Cobra publications Promenade au pays des
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Siddende fugl
Sitting Bird
1946
Pen and Indian ink
24 x 33 cm
Cobra Museum voor Moderne Kunst
10
Stjernefugl
Star-bird
1946
Pen, Indian ink and watercolour
32 x 43 cm
Cobra Museum voor Moderne Kunst
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Cobra Museum voor Moderne Kunst
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De anråbende
The Challengers
1947
Pen, Indian ink and watercolour
28 x 38 cm
pommes (Amsterdam 1949) and Les jambages au cou, with text by
Christian Dotremont, are remarkably similar to Pedersen’s work.
They contain that same vibrant energy typical of the pen and ink
drawings with which Pedersen illustrated his poetry collection
Drømmedigte (Dream Poems), published in Copenhagen in 1945.
As in Pedersen’s work, the bird, a symbol of freedom and poetry,
remained a significant motif throughout Corneille’s oeuvre. In 1951,
Corneille stayed with Pedersen in Denmark for some time, like his
host, his mentor and senior by ten years, writing poetry every now
and then.
But none of these Dutch painters managed to capture the secretive,
almost mystical atmosphere that Carl-Henning Pedersen’s work
radiates. He explains that he acquired the stipple technique, which
he began using in 1948 to adorn his large heads of gods, horses and
other motifs, from the French post-impressionists. 13 Using the
white and yellow for the large dots on the deep blue background, it
gave his motifs an unusual brilliance. I was struck upon seeing these
works by the thought that when the northern summer days stretch
endlessly into night, for those able to see, the gods would appear in
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Cobra Museum voor Moderne Kunst
12
all their brilliance. Danish art historian Jens Jörgen Thorsen has
described Pedersen’s creatures as a kind of mirage, an apparition of
sea gods, visible to country folk obsessed with the celestial world. 14
Writing in 1993, medievalist Sören Kaspersen noted as a possible
source for Pedersen’s gods the medieval frescoes in Denmark’s village
churches. 15 Primitive depictions of the Virgin and Child, with their
large eyes, straight, narrow noses and gigantic halos based on
Byzantine examples, form a possible source for Pedersen’s heads
without bodies. Encouraged by archaeologist Peter Glob the Danish
experimentalists had delved into the country’s treasure store of
medieval folk art. Pedersen had published an article on the subject
in Helhesten in 1944. 16 While the reader might assume from the
illustrations that the author was discussing the magical fantasy creatures in these frescoes, 17 Pedersen was mainly concerned with the
inspiring twelfth-century Virgin and Child in the Maalov church near
Copenhagen. He enthuses about the unschooled folk artist who
painted the picture. ‘When one sees this painting, one understands
what a work of art can achieve. It would be possible to capture the
effect in a realistic drawing. (…) Here life itself is created from a
spontaneous fantasy’, he comments. Should one conclude from this
that the underlying roots of Pedersen’s inspiration lay in the East,
Tilbederen
The Worshipper
1947
Pen, Indian ink and watercolour
27 x 37 cm
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in Byzantine art? He refers in the article to the enormous influence
of Eastern art, in form and content, on the West. ‘European
Christianity is a product of the East.’ Are Pedersen’s god’s heads
icon-like images of the Virgin Mary as they would have appeared to
the fishermen at sea, or to their mothers as they gazed across the
water, praying that the mother of god would bring their sons back
safely? 18 The large yellow and white stipples with which the artist
covered his gods are reminiscent of the gold of icons, or even of the
mosaic stones with which Byzantine Christians portrayed their
saints on church walls.
Asger Jorn said of Scandinavia, which he called the ‘dream centre of
Europe’, that it is ‘as much Orient as Occident’. 19 But it is not only
through prehistoric finds and Byzantine Christianity that Pedersen’s
work appears to connect with the East. As his work and his career
developed, everything seemed to point in that direction, most of his
travels have been to the East. In 1951 he visited Italy and Greece
with his first wife Else. Venice sacrifices to the Sea is the title of a
painting from this period. Naturally, they took the opportunity to
see the (Byzantine) Early Christian mosaics at Ravenna and elsewhere. ‘We loved coloured glass. The most beautiful colours are in
glass, because the light shines through.‘ 20 In Rome in 1963, intrigued
Cobra Museum voor Moderne Kunst
Jordens skøger
Harlot’s of the Earth
1947
Oil crayon
32 x 43 cm
by the ancient Persian Mithra cult, concurrent with the birth of
Christianity, he decided to search for remains of this lost oriental
13
Rødt hoved med stjerneøjne
Red Head with Star Eyes
1947
Oil crayon
32 x 43 cm
Cobra Museum voor Moderne Kunst
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sun-worshipping religion. In 1959/60 he travelled to Turkey, Ceylon,
India and Nepal. He undertook the sea voyage to India in a search
for inspiration for a commission from Copenhagen University to
create a gigantic mosaic wall. He went to the Venetian island of
Murano himself to select the coloured-glass stones for this wall,
called the Cosmic Sea and completed it in 1964. Pedersen was
reunited with the East, the sea and the gods on Bali. In the lyrical
text ‘Bali Sacrifices to the Sea’, about his stay on the island in 1993,
he describes a procession of women balancing baskets of fruit on
their head, priests in white and bearers holding black and gold parasols moving towards the sea. 21
‘People, when they come to the sea, are all the same. (…) It is
always dangerous to go to sea,‘ Carl-Henning responds when I ask
him about the recurrent sea-god theme. In the delightful garden of
his home in Burgundy where I visited Pedersen and his second wife
Sidsel summer 1996, he replied extensively to all the questions I
wanted to ask now that I was re-examining his work after the long
interval following my dissertation on the Cobra movement. Did he
realize that something special was happening in Denmark in 1948
when the Dutch came? That with their work, the Danish mythcreating artists, especially Pedersen, had tapped a prehistoric undercurrent and a mystic link with the East which Dutch artists had not
14
Nattens heste, Island
Nights Horses, Iceland
1948
Oil crayon
32 x 43 cm
Cobra Museum voor Moderne Kunst
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Universets fugl
Bird of the Universe
1949
Oil crayon
32 x 43 cm
Cobra Museum voor Moderne Kunst
15
Heste i landskab
Horses in Landscape
1949
Oil crayon
32 x 43 cm
Cobra Museum voor Moderne Kunst
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Dobbeltstjerne
Double Stars
1950
Oil crayon
31 x 43 cm
Cobra Museum voor Moderne Kunst
16
Rød fugl
Red Bird
1950
Oil crayon
32 x 43 cm
Cobra Museum voor Moderne Kunst
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Cobra Museum voor Moderne Kunst
17
Den bortdragende
The Departing
1949
Oil crayon
32 x 43 cm
found in their own country? What had he seen? Were his horses
those of the god Mithra, of Apollo, or those of the Sino-Siberian
bronzes? But of course I already knew the answers from the articles
in Helhesten and the Høst catalogues.
‘I’m an autodidact,‘ he commented, ‘I began painting like a child.
What I create is based on folk art. (…) Everything comes from fantasy. There is a substratum of images which is always there, which
has been handed down from the earliest time. (…) The things I paint
are connected with the process of life. I have to use my own imagination to interpret my paintings. (…) ‘You only paint the head,’ an
American once said. But I have nothing to say about the whole person. I have to paint the head large so that the eyes can be dominant.
The eyes are the important part for me. For some reason I have
to paint these subjects as if they were gods, sacred. I try to paint
holiness.’
The walls of his house in Molesmes are covered with paintings.
Massive canvases with soft blues hang in the sitting area. Blue was
already an important colour in his work in the war years. And it
frequently formed the background for his gods after 1948. ‘The
background for the figures in Romanesque painting is blue,‘ he noted
in 1944 in an article in Helhesten on medieval Danish frescoes.
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Cobra Museum voor Moderne Kunst
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Stjernelandskab
Star Landscape
1951
Watercolour
31 x 48 cm
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Although he has painted works largely in red or yellow, or even
white, since the mid-fifties, blue dominates in his oeuvre. It is his
colour of the gods, but now also the gigantic birds. For Pedersen,
the bird and the colour blue are the essence of his art. The bird
continually reoccurs. In India, in the sun temple of Konarak,
Pedersen saw a wonderful blue bird which answered when he whistled. 22 On Bali it was the king of birds, Garuda, from the Hindu
pantheon, which intrigued him. 23
I asked Pedersen about the colours he uses and his obsession with
light.‘ Art is always on the edge of ecstasy,’ he replied. ‘The modern
artist cannot fall in love with a colour without loving the light.’ To
which he added sternly, as if I should have known the basic rule:
‘You only have red, blue, yellow and green. Those are the colours
you have to use. Other colours are needed to give the blue emphasis.
Blue is connected with destiny.’
Cobra Museum voor Moderne Kunst
In 1983 Pedersen was chosen to decorate the cathedral in Ribe in
South Jutland. ’There was considerable opposition. That was because
I stand for life, while Christianity does not.‘ The Church entrusted
the artist with this commission despite the fact that he has never
considered himself religious, although he certainly believes in a
metaphysical dimension to life. It allowed him to decorate a series
of massive mosaic walls, several glass windows and the high vaulted
ceiling in his own way. ‘Above the choir I painted a unicorn, an
ancient symbol of Christ,’ he relates. The circle was complete. In
Ribe he let his fantasy loose on the biblical stories, like the folk
artists who had decorated those medieval Danish churches with
whom he had feels such a bond.
Notes
1 See Mads Muller, ‘Museets-planlaegning’, in: Carl-Henning og Else Alflets Museum
Billedkunsten og arkitekturen forenet (catalogue), Herning 1993, p. 20.
2 Pedersen has published a total of six poetry collections: 1. Drømmedigte (Dream
Poems), Helhestens Forlag, Copenhagen 1945; 2. Solens latter digte (Poems about the
Laughter of the Sun), ed. with Björn Rosengreen, Copenhagen 1968; 3. Romersk Elegi
(Roman Elegy - poems and illustrations), eds. Carl-Henning Pedersen and Henry
Theijls, Copenhagen 1971; 4. Himlens Trompeter (Heavenly Trumpets), Borgen Forlag,
Copenhagen 1982; 5. Vesterhavets Gyldne Aner (The Golden Ancestors of the North
Sea), poems with twelve woodcuts, Borgen Forlag, Copenhagen 1986. He also published
a volume of largely poetic prose texts.
3 Information about Pedersen´s life is taken, unless otherwise stated, from: Virtus
Schade, Carl-Hennig Pedersen, Copenhagen 1966.
4 As he told me in an interview I conducted with Pedersen in Molesmes, France on
July 12, 1996.
5 See note 4.
6 See note 4.
7 See note 4. See also Willemijn Stokvis, Cobra (dissertation), Amsterdam 1974,
(reprinted 1980, 1985 and 1990), p. 16; and the completely revised publication of this
dissertation with the title Cobra the Way to Spontaneity, Blaricum, 2001, p. 125, and
Peter John Shield, Spontaneous Abstraction in Denmark and its Aftermath in Cobra
1931-1951 (unpublished dissertation), Open university, UK 1984, p. 83 (copy available
for consultation at Leiden University Library).
19
Den blå pige
The Blue Girl
1951
Watercolour
35 x 24 cm
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8 Egill Jacobsen, ‘Introduction til Carl-Henning Pedersen Billeder’ (Introduction to
Carl- Henning Pedersen´s Paintings), in: Hellhesten, vol. 1, no. 3, 17 September 1941,
pp. 73-76.
9 See Gul Hest (Yellow Horse) painted in 1942 and reproduced in Erik Andreasen
(intro), Carl-Henning Pedersen (texts), Carl-Henning Pedersen/Universum Fabularum,
Copenhagen 1957, fig. 18.
10 See Willemijn Stokvis, op. cit. (note 7), fig. 10.
11 See note 4.
12 For example, in Dierenwereld (Animal Kingdom), 1948, oil on canvas, 95,7 x 125 cm,
coll. artist; and Mens, Dier,Vogel (Human, Animal, Bird), 1950, oil on canvas, 80 x 100 cm,
owned by the artist in 1974, fig. in Willemijn Stokvis, op. cit. (note 7), p. 186 (photo
Stokvis archive).
13 See note 4.
14 Originally suggested in an article in the Swedish periodical Paletten, quoted by
Cobra Museum voor Moderne Kunst
Virtus Schade, op. cit. (note 3), p. 142.
15 See Sören Kaspersen, ‘Carl-Henning Pedersen and the Fresco Paintings’, in:
Marianne Barbusse and Sidsel Ramson (eds.) Carl-Henning Pedersen and Else Alfelt
Museum, Herning 1993, p. 97-121.
16 Carl-Henning Pedersen, ‘Middelalderens Kalkmalerier’ (Medieval Frescoes), in:
Helhesten, vol. 2, nos. 5-6, 11 November 1944, pp. 102-107.
17 See also R. Broby-Johansen, Den danske Billedbibel i Kalkmalerier, Gyldendalske
boghandel, Nordisk Forlag, Copenhagen 1948.
18 I was reminded of a passage from an old Breton fishermen’s song when I returned
to Pedersen’s work to prepare this article. The verse runs as follows: ‘Santa Maria, oh
maris stella protège làbas nos gas’ (Holy Mary, oh star of the sea, protect our boys
out there). Date and origin of this song, of which similar types undoubtedly existed in
Denmark, has yet to be researched.
19 See Asger Jorn, Held og Hasard/ Dolk og Guitar (Refuge and Coincidence / Dagger
and Guitar), Silkeborg 1952; in German translation: Heil und Zufall / Die Ordnung der
20
Natur, Munich 1966, p. 125.
20 See note 4. Else began making mosaic walls in 1953. See Carl-Henning Pedersen og
Else Alfelts Museum (catalogue), Herning 1976, pp. 40-41.
21 See Carl-Henning Pedersen, ‘Bali sacrifices to the Sea’, in Carl-Henning Pedersen
and Sidsel Ramson, Bali, Copenhagen, 1994.
22 ‘I go back to my room, and to begin somewhere I paint a blue bird and write
Garuda under it.’ See Carl-Henning Pedersen, ‘Bali Sacrifices to the Sea’, in: Carl-Henning
Pedersen and Sidsel Ramson, Bali, Copenhagen 1994, p. 20.
23 See o.c. 21, p. 20.
Fuglen og kloden
The Bird and the Globe
1951
Watercolour
40 x 26 cm
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Cobra Museum voor Moderne Kunst
21
Fuglebesøg
Bird Visit
1951
Watercolour and Indian ink on paper
40 x 26 cm
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Pagina 22
Cobra Museum voor Moderne Kunst
22
Stjernebåden
Starship
1951
Watercolour
24 x 31 cm
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COLOPHON
Pagina 23
Sponsor of this exhibition
This publication accompanies the exhibition
Carl-Henning Pedersen
Works on paper 1939-1951
from 25 March through 5 June 2006
at the Cobra Museum of Modern Art Amstelveen
The Cobra Museum is also grateful to
Coordination exhibition
Katja Weitering
Editor
Lieke Fijen
Text
Willemijn Stokvis
This text was published in Carl-Henning Pedersen, a publication by the Cobra Museum of Modern Art Amstelveen,
1996, accompanying the retrospective exhibition with the
same title.
The BankGiro Loterij supports the Cobra Museum
Translation
Sammy Hermans, Amsterdam
Cintha Harjadi, Amsterdam
Photography
Gunnar Pedersen
Graphic design
Bureau Mart. Warmerdam, Haarlem
Lithography
Gravemaker, Amsterdam
Printing
Grafinoord, Assendelft
2006 Carl-Henning Pedersen, photographers, authors
2006 Cobra Museum voor Moderne Kunst Amstelveen
© c/o Beeldrecht Amsterdam 2006
©
©
Cobra Museum
Sandbergplein 1 Amstelveen NL
Tel. +31(0)20 5475050
www.cobra-museum.nl
Tuesday to Sunday from 11 to 17 hours
Guided tours:
Tel. +31(0) 5475033
Route to the Cobra Museum:
Amsterdam bus 170, 172 tram 5, 51
Schiphol and Haarlem bus 300
A9 both directions, take turn-off Amstelveen,
direction ‘centrum’, follow signs
(Parking Garage)
Lender
Carl-Henning Pedersen og Else Alfelts Museum, Herning
(DK)
The Cobra Museum also expresses her attitude to
Sidsel Ramson
Hanne Lundgren, Carl-Henning Pedersen og Else Alfelts
Museum
Photo front and back cover
Stjernelandskab
1951
Watercolour
31 x 48 cm
23
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Pagina 24