Introduction: A Ticket to St. Louis
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Much has been written in regard to the influence of French Art on the work of the outstanding Danish artist Jens Ferdinand Willumsen (1863-1958), but little attention has been paid to his connections with American art and design. This oversight is due to the scant information left behind. But buried in the archives of the Willumsen Museum in Frederikssund, Denmark are many intriguing clues to Willumsen's deep personal and professional attachment to the culture of an emerging world power. This essay outlines the contacts with American art and artists, and probable influences which Willumsen encountered, first in France in 1889 and then in Chicago at the World's Columbian Exposition in July of 1893.
Beginning with the artist's initial trip to Paris in November, 1888, his exposure to so much art that he had never seen before provided a wellspring of inspiration. It is unfortunate, but understandable, that historians tend to condense the nature of such an expansive aesthetic experience. The influences working upon an artist are surely seen in the work itself — the forensic evidence of artistic synthesis which exists regardless of the quantity or quality of any written documentation.
This being said, analysing and piecing together the puzzle left to us by J. F. Willumsen is a task hindered by the very nature of the fragmented clues he so calculatingly selected to preserve or cull from his archive. He forces us to dig into his life — and thus his art — in an almost archaeological manner.
In order to know him, we must get to know a great deal about all kinds of art, from the archaic to the contemporary. This is a clever, even devious, method of revealing the meanings and purposes of the artist's life work. Willumsen not only compels our attention with the vibrancy of his plastic expressions but demands our intellectual commitment to learning the depth of its meanings in the long history of human visual communication. No one has ever claimed that this man was, or is now, easy to understand.
The exhibition Pegasus and Tanagra: The Antique in J. F. Willumsen's Art and Collection, mounted at the Willumsen Museum from November 4-December 30, 1997, traced the specific influences of ancient Egyptian, Assyrian, Islamic, Greek, Etruscan and Chinese art on the wide range of Willumsen's output. During the early years in Paris, the artist took great pains, via the replication of individual ancient works, to gain the knowledge contained therein. When satisfied with an understanding of both the aesthetic and the technical aspects, he applied this learning to his own conceptions.
His exceptional ability as an innovator first evinced itself in the etchings of 1889-91, wherein he coupled his personal vision and restless technical curiosity with the radical Symbolist/Synthetist aesthetic. In his etching "Election Day, January, 1890," for instance, Willumsen invented a wholly original and still unique method of color printing.
But the rapid flowering of Willumsen's visual language cannot be exclusively ascribed to the influence of outside sources. His intrinsic personality is as singular as that of any of the artists of his time who have since become household names. The fact that he has been largely overlooked is not because his art is somehow inferior to that of his peers, but rather a consequence of many mitigating factors during and after his life, not least of which was the hostility he inspired within the upper echelons of Danish society itself.
Because of the brutal rejection by both the public and the Danish intelligencia of his radical Symbolist/Synthetist etching "Frugtbarhed" (Fertility), a masterpiece of both the medium and of the period, which was displayed at the debut exhibition of Den Frie Udstilling (The Free Exhibition) in March 1891, he basically ceased printmaking, except for several stunning color lithographs, until the second decade of the 20th century.
To replace this avenue of expression he turned to concentrating on plastic innovation in the ceramic arts. In this medium he achieved not only critical and financial success but international recognition. He first began experimenting with clay in the Paris studio of a fellow Danish artist, Ann Maria Brodersen (wife of Danish composer Carl Nielsen), in 1891.
The first piece, "An Eye," was inspired by the luminously colored ceramic friezes from the walls of the ancient palace of Susa in Persia housed in the Louvre's vast collection. From this starting point, Willumsen assimilated the iconography of ancient forms parallel with the "new language"1 of contemporary art.
"Family Vase," completed in June, 1891, retains the combined influences of Assyrian art in the delineation of the eyes and the glazing, and of Egyptian sculpture in the monumental posture of the facial features and projecting feet. Despite the common assumption that because Willumsen had opportunity to see Gauguin's ceramic self-portrait jug it provided the germ of the idea for his vase, these works are utterly different in feeling and execution.
Gauguin's earth-brown ceramic self-portrait with its shuttered eyes emanates a morbid aura, as a kind of pre-death mask. But Willumsen, in creating an original re-interpretation of ancient motifs, colors, mass, and forms, modeled a living human unit: mother, father, child.
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J. F. Willumsen
"The Family Vase" (1891)
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The "Family Vase" presents a universal reality. Unlike Gauguin's inward, unknowable vision, the Willumsen sculpture quite literally looks confidently outward at the world. And its resoundingly Danish theme — the primacy of the family — is central to the artist's work in all media; the core subject of many of his finest works.
J. F. Willumsen
"The Family Vase" (1891)
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According to Danish art historian Merete Bodelsen, in Willumsen i Halvfemsernes Paris, "Family Vase" was initially displayed at the Salon des Indépendents in 1892. But in Appendix A of her book, listed in the catalogue for the show Peintres Impressionistes et Symbolistes at Le Barc de Boutteville, December 15, 1891, is this entry for Willumsen: "#85. Un Vase émaillé." Was this then the first public showing? Subsequently, the vase was again seen in Copenhagen in April, 1892, at the second exhibition of Den Frie Udstilling.2
But there is more.
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In early 1994, during my research on Willumsen's graphic art in the archives of the Willumsens Museum, I came across an original ticket marked "Exhibitor" for the 12th Annual Exhibition of the Saint Louis Exposition and Music Hall Association, St. Louis, Missouri, 1895.3 This little scrap of paper proved impossible to ignore, though it wasn't until May of 1995 that I was able to follow up on it.
While in Washington, D.C., to attend my brother's wedding that spring, I spent a day in the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution, hoping to find some record of Willumsen's activities in the United States. Searching the electronic data base produced nothing. A search of the old card catalogue yielded only one very general article from 1958 by Sigurd Schultz, late curator of the Willumsens Museum.4
A search of the records regarding the artists who collectively took over the unfinished commission of Danish-American sculptor Carl Rohl-Smith for the capital's Sherman Monument proved fruitless too. In Denmark it is recorded that Willumsen, a close friend of Rohl-Smith since the 1893 World's Fair, moved to Washington, D.C. in 1901 at the request of the artist's widow because Rohl-Smith had stipulated that it be Willumsen who should finish the commission. The sculptor's widow and Willumsen soon fell out, and he resigned from the project. I've yet to find any mention stateside of Willumsen's involvement in the posthumous completion of this major Federal artwork.
J. F. Willumsen
"The Family Vase" (1891)
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But, as luck would have it, I then picked up the microfilm index of 19th-century exhibition catalogs contained in the library of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Straightaway I found the catalogue for the St. Louis Exposition of 1895. With less than an hour left before closing and racing through the old, scratched microfilm on machines that kept breaking down, I found Willumsen, listed as follows:
"WILLUMSEN, J.F. - Copenhagen, Denmark. Pupil of the Academy of Fine Arts and of Kröyer, Copenhagen. Honorable Mention, Exposition Universelle, Paris, 1889. Associate of the Société Nationale des Beaux Arts, Paris, and Member of the Independent Association of Artists, Copenhagen. (SCULPTURE) 595 Earthenware Vase."5
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Willumsen's journey to Chicago in July, 1893, to attend The World's Columbian Exposition (otherwise known as "The Chicago World's Fair" and "The White City") was transformative. America's fine and applied arts, Chicago's new, monumental architecture and its churning, dynamic urban society suddenly altered and animated the artist's conceptual and artistic mission. He returned to his Parisian studio and, after hanging the "Stars and Stripes" next to his red and white Danish flag, at once embarked on his massive allegorical sculpture "Den Store Relief" (The Great Relief) — an undertaking of 30 years' duration.
During his two-week stay in Chicago Willumsen pursued with ambitious fervor his entrée into the American art establishment. Prior to leaving Paris for this American journey Willumsen designed a special presentation to use in his campaign of professional advancement. He produced a miniature set of color reproductions of his major Synthesist paintings. The images were printed and laid down on dark card stock embossed with a gold ink "passepartout" border to simulate framing. On the back of each was a printed explanation of the picture in the artist's own words. The prints were contained in a tiny faux-leather artist's portfolio. I came across this cleverly conceived promotional device in the Kunstindustrii Museet archives in Copenhagen.
Willumsen's networking paid off. Denmark's fine-art presentation at the World's Fair was by far one of the most popular of all the European art surveys on display. Although Willumsen's artwork had not been included, he was invited by the Fair's American Art curator, Charles M. Kurtz, to participate in a special exhibition of Danish Art that Kurtz was already organizing in St. Louis to take place in 1895. Kurtz would become one of the most influencial curators in the United States.6
Willumsen subsequently decided to send a solitary work to the American heartlands — his ceramic Synthesist/Symbolist masterpiece, "Family Vase" — to speak on his behalf to his new audience — perhaps the first glimpse of this radical artistic movement to be seen in the U.S.
What prompted Willumsen to go to Chicago and what happened to him there? What did he see and who did he meet who may have influenced and informed his development? To answer this, first we must look at his connections to American art and artists while he was still in France.
Next: Willumsen's Exposure to American Art in France, 1889-1893.
1 Excerpt from the inscription on JFW's etching Frugtbarhed, 1891, collection of the Willumsens Museum, Frederikssund, Denmark.
2 Willumsen I Halvfemsernes Paris, Merete Bodelsen, G.E.C. Gads Forlags, Copenhagen, 1957, p. 72.
3 Willumsens Museum Archives, Chicago Exhibition File-1893.
4 Danish Foreign Office Journal, Number 27, August, 1958, "A Master of Mind," Sigurd Schultz, pages 13-16.
5 Catalogue of the Art Department, 12th Annual Exhibition, 1895, Saint Louis Exposition and Music Hall Association, copyright Charles M. Kurtz, p. 127.
6 Revisiting the White City; American Art at the 1893 World's Fair, National Museum of American Art and National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington,D.C., 1993.
Picture Credits:
"Mother, Father and their Newborn Baby" (The Family Vase),
by Jens Ferdinand Willumsen, 1891
Glazed ceramic sculpture executed in Paris -
exhibited in St. Louis, Missouri, USA, 1895
Collection of the Museum of Decorative Art, Copenhagen, Denmark
Reproduced from the monograph, "J. F. Willumsen" by Hjalmar Öhman
Plates 19 & 20, H. Aschehoug & Co., 1921, Copenhagen, Denmark
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