Harald Giersing's artistic project had change and beauty as its objectives. New things of beauty were the ideal, and the under-taking was consequently without a specifically defined final goal. At the same time the project was not supported by any comprehensive frame story other than that of change and art. Giersing's faith in art was at the outset related to an existential search one aspect of which related to the inability of religion to provide him with a firm basis. Thus, behind the abstract project called change and beauty lay the essential project of modernism: that after the death of God art should fill the void that had been left in every individual deprived of faith.
In his modern project, Giersing differed in essential respects from those of his Danish contemporaries who have attracted most interest in recent years - apart from Vilhelm Lundstrøm - people like Niels Larsen Stevns, Sigurd Swane and Edvard Weie. In Giersing's version of the fundamental modernist project, the intangible was to be sought in a form that was spiritually unpretentious and concrete. In motif, his interest was concentrated on the directly visible, just as it was seen immediately in front of his eyes, and on what he had already seen in the shape of photographs and, in painting, on the monumental gesture and the precise stroke.
The monograph on the artist is one of the fundamentals of art history. The present study, though itself a monograph, seeks to question concepts fundamental to art history and the monograph: the artist, his personality as such and as a personality in art history, and his oeuvre as an entity.
The question is what and who created an artist and critic such as Giersing and the art and criticism that bear his name, and what determined his standing in his day and in succeeding years. Through the study it will be demonstrated:
a) that neither the totality of his work nor the man himself can be treated as though it were or could be an indissoluble whole.
The painter, the critic and the man Giersing and his work do not comprise an entity without contradiction and can only on the basis of ideological and taste-determined interference be construed as such on the basis of modernist ideals of originality, autonomy and personality
b) that Giersing's artistic genesis, his artistic "development" and actions and his system-immanent confrontation with discredited artistic notions and institutions cannot be explained as a line of development and confrontation setting in on the basis of an unambiguous modernist art-historical logic concerning the innovative artist's breaches with the past and new departures into the future, but first and foremost must on the one hand be partially substantiated in narrative fashion and as an imitative story, and partly be viewed in the context of a social (i.e. family, art institution) and financial (in a quite banal and narrow sense) perspective.
Giersing's early genesis as an artist up to about 1907 is treated in a narrative, family-historical and psychological perspective and builds to a great extent on Giersing's letters, diaries and note-books, which are particularly extensive in the period prior to the summer of 1907.
The traditional distinction between the sacred, unsullied work of art and the profane and sullied career is not maintained here. As the study progresses, links between artistic and the career-based predispositions are suggested and demonstrated, and particular attention is given to the situations, power relationships and conflicts of the art institution.
Since Giersing's work and career have - not least by himself - been viewed as a progression and this supposed progression is to be examined, and because his work has only previously been interpreted to a relatively limited extent, the exposition moves forward, if not in an unbroken sequence, at least chronologically in principle.
With regard to groups of works and individual works various essentialist and comparativist explanations and interpretations are questioned. The points of view and the investigation methods employed here vary somewhat from one group of works to another dependent on what is being examined and at what level. The object has not been only to examine what it was Giersing produced, what significance or lack of significance can be ascribed to his work, but also to some extent the framework within which significance can be ascribed and the way in which it is constituted. Without there being a question of any hard-and-fast method, the points of view on the different groups and individual works are especially inspired by modern semiotic and deconstructive theories, which also characterise my views on the world and the subject. This also applies to my analysis of Giersing's artistic life as a story for which the theoretical basis and other aspects of the approach to the artist's life as a story are illuminated in the Afterword to this study, where also the canonisation of Giersing by his immediate posterity and certain aspects of Danish art history and the literature about Giersing are discussed.