The distance and the sense of reserve which both indirectly and directly are part and parcel of so many of Giersing's portraits were not only the result of a formal and artistic decision, but they stemmed at the same time from a personally determined interpretation of the world which again was linked to the alienation and isolation he himself felt, and which he considered one of the general conditions of life: "Man is not only isolated; his life, his thought, everything is in vain, for Hecuba", he noted in 1910. This melancholy, nihilistic perspective is important for an understanding of much of Giersing's art.
Giersing was very critical of his portraits and figures around 1909-t4, so critical that it can be seen as expressing a palpable uncertainty. But it was an uncertainty linked to the recognition that irresolution and openness were inevitable towards the uncontrolled and that he could not beforehand make himself the absolute master of the painting and the result. It was in the actual act of painting that the picture and the work of art came into being.
Giersing's many painted self-portraits - about 40 of them in all - clearly did not derive from a particular interest in his own some-what special physiognomy or from a conviction of the importance of putting either his outer or inner self on public display. The self-portrait was first and foremost a usable motif because it signalled art, and because the model was always available and free of charge.
The three half-length self-portraits which he exhibited between 1910 and 1916 show Giersing with an imperious posture and that certain superiority of expression which is regularly found in his self-portraits. If we compare them with photographs of him, we can see something that did not appear in the painted portraits: the melancholy eyes and rather sorrowful expression.
The self-portraits show Giersing wearing a mask which mean-while cannot be separated from his personality. In 1913 he very significantly painted a self-portrait he called Carnival, and in 1915 one which not merely formally, but also compositionally was strongly inspired by Cézanne. In his self-portraits, Giersing is quite consciously playing to the looking glass and the public. It was the posture - of the painting, the figure and himself- that interested him artistically, not his sorrowful eyes, which fascinated everyone who knew him.
Giersing's portraits and figures from the period 1909-14 can be viewed in relation to two different approaches to the representation of the motif, exemplified by Manet and Renoir. On the one hand coolness and distance (Manet) and on the other gentleness, lightness and love of life (Renoir). In some portraits and figures he seeks to unite the distant, superior artistic mastery of Manet and the charm of Renoir.
Giersing's females invite you to look at them, but they do not challenge you. The seductive element might well be there, as when for instance he equips a little girl with roses, but it is in all innocence, with not a trace of sexuality. In an unpublished manuscript on Renoir (1910) the key words are poetry and mood. At that time Giersing obviously needed - personally and financially - to cultivate this happy side of life and the ideal of Woman as innocent.
In works from 1910-11 the picture of Woman emerges as a kind of everyday vision that has evolved on the more or less uncovered ground. In principle it is non-corporeal seductiveness that is symbolised. But it is the corporeal reality and the lack that are fundan1entally at play, for instance in a smile, a rose or a mirror symbolising both what is desired and its absence, but also in the traces it contains of the painter and his physical treatment of the material and the empty ground. There is both decoration and depth in the same picture.
The portrait's likeness as such did not concern him, or at least only insofar as the effort to achieve it could spoil a picture. A series of actual portraits of family members from that time nevertheless suggests that for financial reasons he had the ambition to win commissions to do portraits.
In Giersing's mastery of the line rhythm of his figures people have tried to see him as the portrayer of the "universally human". Quite apart from this being a somewhat problematic concept, it is typical that even if Giersing is not bothered about portraying individuals, he nevertheless makes the different models recognisable as individuals by means of individual characteristics and features and by presenting them fairly consistently in different situations according to who was sitting for him. But it is possible to talk of the portraits as representing Man's universal conditions of existence as Giersing saw them, expressed via distance and emptiness in the relationship between on the one hand the person portrayed and on the other the person painting and the viewer.
Between 1911 and 1914 Giersing undertook what from a modernist point of view was a regressive plunge back into the naturalistic genre and to Manet. The picture entitled The Student is from 1911 - somewhat in the style of Manet's portrait of Mallarmé. Giersing's student does not relate to nature and feeling. His objects and emblem are the books, to which he does not relate physically, but meditatively. The student does not feel, he is thinking.
The student's melancholy distance from his surroundings and the subdued colouring are perhaps reminiscent of Vilhelm Hammershři, whom Giersing reviewed in 1912. But it was not Hammershři's "tender, delicate pictures, pictures as though created under anaesthesia", of which he himself was thinking. A Soldier from 1914 has a still more obvious connection with Manet's portrait and with The Execution of Emperor Maximilian. The reflecting soldier caught at a timeless moment is Giersing's version of the soldier of 1914. He is no agent of brutality. Nor is he seen as passive. He is what he ought to be, that is to say a painterly object who like so many others of Giersing's figures does not form part of any essential context other than that of being painted.