18. In black

When, in 1927, after the death of Giersing a memorial exhibition was arranged, the organiser, Leo Swane, made a point of ignoring pictures from the period 1918-20, " the blue and red period" as he called it, "when in the course of experiments with strong, clear colours the artist seems to have strayed somewhat off course". If Giersing had not continued along his "course", it was, then, the task of posterity to reconstruct that course by a process of exclusion. The "red and blue" pictures broke in inconveniently between the restrained portraits from 1912-15 and the later sombre pictures from the 20s and destroyed the continuity in his production which was being sought in order to demonstrate that Giersing had represented the undivided artist and the undivided person in a world that was in the process of disintegration. Quite apart from the fact that between 1917 and 1920 along with red and blue he had made use of every other colour imaginable, and that in his landscapes he in no way allowed himself the same colouristic liberties as in the figures based on photographs, he demonstrated with his exhibitions in the 20s that this was not how he himself looked at things. It was only in a period around 1922-23 that he painted pictures mainly of a sombre character.

At the 1922 Grønningen exhibition in Copenhagen, Giersing exhibited almost exclusively black and grey pictures. All the reviewers remarked that he was now renouncing colour completely, and there was general agreement that he had never been better. The consistent selection of purely dark pictures made it easy for the reviewers to take in this artist whom they had previously criticised for being too incoherent.

A proper explanation of why for a time Giersing concentrated on the dark range of colour must be sought directly in artistic principles. It may be that he felt he could progress no further with the geometrically inclined, almost gaudy picture based on photographs, and that he took seriously the comn1ent he wrote down in 1919: "As long as form changes, there is no decadence". The decadence of stagnation was what he feared most. Change showed you were alive - and justified it. In more concrete terms it can be noted that by maintaining a very tight scale and by working at a fearsome rate with strongly diluted colours, all wet in wet, so as to be able to go over the outlines with a rag or a broad brush and get the silhouette effect he desired, he could maintain the spontaneous and light effect as opposed to the monumental form and ponderous colour. But it does not explain why, soon afterwards, he shifted from the almost monochrome to the polychrome.

Giersing's change to a more grandiose and simpler drawing of the figure corresponded with his eager concentration on drawing from life from January to March 1922. There is no direct connection with the paintings, but the nude drawings must nevertheless be seen as consciously practising the great Schwung, training the light touch necessary if he was to paint quickly and in large, unbroken forms.

There are no obvious stories told in the dark, monumental pictures, and the play between figure and objects is limited to characteristic and quite simple relationships: book and reader, curved instrumel1t and woman. Giersing's ornamental monumentality is first and foremost a monumentalisation of painting itself without the classicising or heroising intent which so many at that time who were aiming at monumental public commissions shared.

Vilhelm Wanscher had published his book "Italien og den store Stil" (Italy and the Grand Style) in 1921 and in it he defined the grand style as "seriousness in art". So, in Wanscher's view, Giersing with his dark, serious qualities ranked high. And consequently he could in a review express the wish that Giersing "for instance by means of grand landscapes or in some other way could have some architectural and spatial motifs to work with". But Giersing had no aspirations in the direction of "grand" landscapes or architectural and spatial motifs in Wanscher's sense. He had a profound dislike of the pretentious and the too obviously planned.

Vilhelm Wanscher and Leo Swane believed that Giersing was at the pinnacle of art with the "black" pictures, and could not accept that immediately afterwards he turned away from the minor key colours and the heavy enclosed form.

Around 1922-23 Giersing painted a small number of still lifes. This was otherwise not a genre in which he was particularly interested. He was neither a colourist nor a constructor in the same way as the modern Danish masters in this genre. Around 1909-l0 he had painted a few still lifes which are striking for the often strange juxtapositions contained in them. Apart from the painter's equipment in the still lifes from the 20s there are no objects for which he shows a particular preference, and there are no repetitions or new attempts with the same composition as for instance are known from Giersing's contemporaries Danish Edvard Weie and Vilhelm Lundstrøm or the Swede Karl Isakson. He took what came to hand and arranged it more or less accidentally, or perhaps deliberately so to give it the aspect of chance. The approach is fundamentally naturalistic and distant - a suggestion of fortuitiveness in which the fortuitive element is dressed up in a certain tentative painterly order. In the dark still lifes from the 20s it is possible as in the dark portraits to read gloom, melancholy, perhaps even a touch of unpleasantness into them, but that is entirely up to one's personal interpretation. There is painterly presence and sensitivity, but certainly no nature at all, only culture. This applies in a dual sense, as it is a question of painting equipment.

To be continued.....
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