Carl-Henning Pedersen; Independent obit (painter)
Hyfler/Rosner
Chagall-influenced painter who was a key member of CoBrA
The Independent
26 February 2007
Charles Darwent
Among art history's more poignant ironies is that the Danish
painter Carl-Henning Pedersen should have owed his lifelong
love of Marc Chagall to another artist, Adolf Hitler. In
1939, the 25-year-old Pedersen left Copenhagen for the young
painter's mandatory trip to Paris, albeit on foot and with
two loaves of rye bread for sustenance. Stopping in
Frankfurt on his way home, he visited the Nazis' touring
show of so-called "Degenerate Art" ("Entartete Kunst"), in
which Chagall played a starring role. Pedersen's reaction to
the Russian's canvases was immediate and long-lived. Chagall
was to remain a dominant influence on Pedersen's work until
his death.
This is all the more extraordinary because, appearances
apart, Chagall and Pedersen did not really have much in
common. While the Russian mined a rich lode of Jewish folk
art, Pedersen's saturated colours and eldritch figures
sprang from a source more akin to Dubuffet's Art Brut, being
shaped largely by his own emotional history.
Born into a working-class family, Pedersen had won a place
at the pacifist International Folk High School at Elsingore
in 1933. There he met Else Alfelt, a self-taught artist
three years older than himself, and married her the
following year. Alfelt was already sending work to
Copenhagen's annual autumn salon, painting portraits in the
old-fashioned, naturalistic style then prevalent in Denmark.
She and her new husband began to experiment with more
abstract forms from the mid-1930s on, he producing a series
of black-and-white bird motif canvases that still surprise
with their modernity.
It was in this mood of casting about for new ideas that
Pedersen set off for Paris to find Picasso and Matisse and,
courtesy of Nazi policy, returned having found Klee and
Chagall as well. Back in soon-to-be-occupied Denmark, his
work took on a new and violently expressionistic tone. With
Alfelt, he began to show with the Høst (Autumn) Group, the
pair playing an important part in the development of Danish
abstraction. This took a degree of courage, and not just
artistically. Making abstract pictures under German
occupation counted as sedition, siding with the Entartete
Kunst painters whose work Pedersen had seen in Frankfurt.
As with many European artists, the end of the Second World
War left Pedersen and Alfelt with no particular place to go.
The couple filled this void in 1948 by joining a movement
whose name would become forever associated with their own:
CoBrA. An acronym of the first letters of its co-founders'
native cities - Copenhagen, Brussels, Amsterdam - CoBrA was
more an alliance of like-minded artists than a manifesto
movement per se. Its members - among them Pierre Alechinsky,
Karel Appel, Constant and Asger Jorn - believed in a
more-or-less universal unconscious made manifest in the art
of children and the mad.
The aim of CoBrA's followers was to find a way of painting
that captured this spontaneity, circumventing the warlike
conscious mind and promoting something rather like universal
brotherhood in its place. The result was an abreactive folk
art which bore a vague resemblance to American action
painting, all violence spent on bright colours, strident
brushwork and distorted figures.
As might have been expected of a group whose aims tended to
the anarchic, CoBrA folded after just three years. None the
less, it occupies a romantic place in modern art history as
the last genuinely avant-garde movement of the 20th century.
The work of artists like Pedersen and Alfelt was also hugely
influential on the development of European abstract
expressionism, the repercussions of which are still felt
today.
Approaching 40 at CoBrA's end, Pedersen entered that period
of gentle eclipse typical of an artist whose career had been
too closely identified with a single time and group.
Actually, much of his best work was done in the half century
after CoBrA's demise. In 1962, he represented Denmark at the
Venice Biennale; a 1998 show at the ARKEN Modern Art Museum
in Copenhagen paired his work with that of his hero,
Chagall. Late Post- Divisionist pictures like Red Firebird
(1972) and Out in the Wide World (1988) count among
Pedersen's undoubted masterpieces.
That they stayed in his possession had much to do with his
morbid distaste for selling. A 1961 Time magazine profile of
Pedersen noted that he had a thousand canvases stashed away
in a Copenhagen brewery, and turned "frosty as a glass of
Carlsberg" at the suggestion that he might sell any of them.
He once famously turned down a sizeable cheque for 15
paintings, giving them away instead. Such a large injection
of cash would have raised his standard of living, he argued,
and this struck him as a bad idea.
After his beloved Else died in 1974, many of these pictures
were donated to the museum in Herning which bears their
joint name. A fortnight before his death, Pedersen's second
wife donated a further 40 works to the state in a ceremony
at the Danish National Gallery. Pedersen, who had been
ailing for some years, was too ill to attend.
Charles Darwent
Carl-Henning Pedersen, artist: born Copenhagen 23 September
1913; married first 1934 Else Alfelt (died 1974), second
Sidsel Ramson; died Copenhagen 20 February 2007.