10. Giersing brings it off

In May 1911 Giersing painted a picture with a motif radically different from what he had previously created: a scene from a football match. He was very interested in football, but the choice of this modern motif was doubtless also related to the fact that he felt the need to prove - to himself and to the world at large - what it really was he represented, i.e. the new. For in that very spring of 1911 he decided on account of his poor finances to submit work to the hated Royal Academy Exhibition, where he had a portrait accepted.

Like the later football pictures from 1917-29, this one, done in a kind of expressive late-impressionist style, has been seen in relation to Italian futurism, but there is no basis for this, from the point of view of either motif, style or ideology.

Like the modern, well-trained and creative urban creature he was, Giersing's interests were wide ranging. He was for instance keenly interested in aeroplanes and the fights that were being undertaken near Copenhagen in 1910-11. But he had no particular intention of paying homage to the dynamism of modern life in his pictures.

In 1912 he visited the futurist exhibition in Berlin, and the comment he wrote in his exhibition catalogue reveals that he did not like their pictures. The futurists' dreams of revolutions and upheavals were hardly anything for him, and in the realm of art theory and art politics he was not an avant-gardist in the sense of the futurists who, at least in theory, wished to remove the distinction between art and life and to demolish all institutions. Giersing wanted to change the system from within.

His painting football now was due to his having surrendered his ideals on becoming an exhibitor at the Academy. He was dangerously off track, and he had to get back on the main track as quickly as possible if the story he believed in and sought to live out as an artist were not to come to an abrupt conclusion.

To be continued.....
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