The Great Relief, 1893-1928.
Museum of the Month, Denmark
An artist in his own image The Danish artist Jens Ferdinand Willumsen lived a long and prolific life. His career spanned more than 70 years, and he himself made it to the age of 94, having seen the world through from the 1860s to 1958. He tirelessly documented its people and the great themes of life that define humanity: painting, sculpting and photographing the world in his unique, colourful way. And yet, it would appear, he never quite felt at home in it. “People think I’ve painted to cause strife,” he said towards the end. “On the contrary, I’ve always sought to be understood.” By Louise Older Steffensen
Despite his fame, it took the aging J. F. Willumsen a decade to convince the Danish authorities to turn the donation of his art into a museum in his honour. When it finally happened, he was unhappy with its location in his father’s Frederikssund, roughly 40 minutes from the capital: he’d wanted a grandiose 120 | Issue 125 | June 2019
museum in the heart of Copenhagen. Nowadays, the J. F. Willumsen Museum is a mecca for Danish and international artists and J. F. Willumsen has finally received the recognition he sought as one of Denmark’s most influential artists of the 20th century. The long, evolving and sometimes contradictory jour-
ney of Willumsen’s art and person is on full display at the modern museum he was granted.
Circular progression “Willumsen is quite difficult to pin down,” says museum curator Anne Gregersen. “He was certainly an individualist; he had a unique way of approaching art, and he carefully stage-managed his own image as an artist.” He criticised and distanced himself from his contemporaries, but he also wanted broad recognition. He sought collaboration early on when he denounced the Royal Academy and became the architect behind Copenhagen’s Den Frie Udstilling, the first artists’ association in Denmark, but he