In order to define the mechanisms leading to the establishment of Giersing as a historical figure, a closer look is taken at the art historian Leo Swane's canonisation of him and at the conflict between this art historian who was Giersing's closest friend in his last years, and his brother, the painter Sigurd Swane, who was closest to Giersing in his early years.
Giersing dies on the 15th January 1927. At his funeral Sigurd Swane had made the mistake of portraying Giersing too one-sidedly as the giver and himself as the receiver. He was soon to regret this. Leo Swane regretted nothing. On the contrary. He put himself at the forefront in organising Giersing's memorial exhibition and working for his canonisation in his periodical "Kunstbladet 1927", where key concepts were "leader", i.e. the person who drove the others forward, and "modern French art", which in Swane's interpretation meant the superior force that moved art and art history forward.
Sigurd Swane had paid homage to his friend in articles both in 1917 and 1921, but it was his brother who, in the year in which he became the Director of Statens Museum for Kunst, cemented Giersing's position by writing the first monograph on him. With symbolical power it was published as the first volume in a long series of artists' monographs entitled "Vor Tids Kunst" (The Art of Today). Giersing was now number one, and it was this repeated acknowledgement that irritated Sigurd Swane. Admittedly, he agreed with the method of calculation, but he simply believed that although he might have made a slightly later start than Giersing with regard to French art, he had nevertheless understood quite a lot and had a start on him for some years.
Sigurd Swane attempted a minor revision in a profile of Giersing in 1940, but Leo Swane was soon to throw a veil over that again in an article in 1946 in which he maintained that it was Giersing who first and best had understood the significance of modern French art.
At the end of the 1940s Sigurd Swane wrote his unpublished memoirs of his life as an artist. And in those we find his final revision of his relationship with Giersing, to whom he was prepared to give much, but certainly not everything.
However, by that time he had been sidelined in art history by Leo Swane. It was Giersing who had first understood French art and therefore he who commanded attention. That was the logic. In traditional art history the fact that an artist is an important actor in the game of which art and the story of artists is always a part, is always equated with his or her also being a better and more relevant artist than the one who does not suit the game. It was simply necessary to believe in this, for other-wise history came to an end or lost all significance.
This study of Giersing is based on the view that facts actually exist, but that ascribing meaning to these facts and combining and registering facts and meaning in a story cannot be related to an ontology, but rather to narratology. This study is an approach to Giersing's story as a narrative like other fictitious stories. The modernist ideology of development and change promoted definite views on art and the artist, the loner, the indomitable creator, in constant opposition to everything and everyone. It promoted a narrative manner of thinking of the artist with a repertoire of definite behaviour patterns and privileged events.
In crucial respects, this book's story of Giersing resembles the accepted and canonised story of the young artist at the beginning of this century, of the struggling and suffering person having to go through such a terrible amount in order to become and remain a genuine modernist. It describes its variant of the standard "natural development" and run of events in an artist who will become something of note later in life. But this is not merely so because it has been constructed here in this way. Giersing himself and his contemporaries also constructed it, in certain respects obviously quite consciously, in others more or less unconsciously.
What has here been proposed should be able to substantiate the thesis of the modernist artist's life as art history's life of the artist par excellence, that the classic modernist artist's life is structured as a narrative even while being lived, and if it is not, then it is not a modernist we are dealing with.
The analyses of Giersing's artist's life as a story, and my conception of what a story is, are related to the so-called diegesis model for analysing the course taken by stories, developed by the Danish scholar Per Aage Brandt and his pupils. In its theoretical foundation, this model is relatively complicated and is built up around Jacques Lacan's so-called schema R. Modern manifestos and manifesto-like statements can also be analysed on the basis of this model, as is shown by an examination of Giersing's review of Kunstnernes Efterårsudstilling in 1909.
The writers of art history who distilled the essence of a line of development called the history of Danish art in the first three decades of this century, concentrated on determining the personality of the artist and the totality of his work, and on loosely based references to "isms" and "inspiration" purporting to be a comparative "method". The problem of influence, which more often than not paradoxically aims at legitimising an artist and establishing the reason for his progressive nature, must at the same time legitimise the history of art (and the common jubilation at art), and in the final instance the writer himself and his activity by means of references to the stabilising heroes who gave significance and narrative meaning to the story and the lesser artistic hero.
For those who have written monographs on Giersing - Leo Swane, Svend Rindholdt and Haavard Rostrup - modern French art, the artist's personality and nature denote the great points of reference. None of these authors was like Giersing concerned with the problem of representation and the picture. His "semiotic thinking" - in a minor way - was something they either did not take seriously or did not understand. For Giersing, in contradistinction to what applies to all so-called modernists, what the picture refers to is not something original. It is not Nature, written with a capital letter, that he is painting. He produces it as a picture, as a simulacrum, a piece of artificiality. With, among other things, our knowledge of his use of photographic sources and his repeated use of the same picture ideas, we can sense that he worked on the basis of a realisation that the painting's presence is not the Presence of real Reality. In this sense, too, distance is a central concept in an understanding of Giersing - an understanding of what the painter's and the viewer's desire is directed towards, which is not so very far from modern psychosemiotic's concept of the real (Jacques Lacan) as the impossible.
Giersing's at times ironical attitude towards motifs as he plays to the looking glass in his self-portraits suggests a more or less conscious vacillation in his interpretation of the self and personality or at least of the artist's personality as a stable entity - a vacillation from which none of the above-mentioned authors or any other Danish art historians have suffered until recent years. They maintained the classical bourgeois conception of the whole, free subject in their descriptions of the artist's personality. While on the one hand they praised the loner's artistic confrontation, rebellion and originality, they maintained on the other a project aimed at serenity and reconciliation with a form of existence found to be more or less unnatural, inhuman and conventional. According to this view, the modern artist with his special sensitivity is supposed to communicate his experience of cohesion and depth far beyond everyday emotional chaos and superficiality. The artist's tasks were to create unease and enterprise in art history and - in the words of Matisse - ease in the mind of "the intellectual and businessman".
In a sensitive text recounting his experiences of Giersing's country road pictures at in the 1927 men1orial exhibition, the author Cai M. Woel produced in 1929 an interesting example of the reconciling, jubilant approach to art, the artist and the history of art, in which he concluded by singing the praises of Gier-sing, whose art could "bring us closer to Nature than any other painter in Denmark before him".
50 years later, Haavard Rostrup maintained both Nature and Feeling as the great points of reference, being of the opinion that Giersing with his art wanted to "give reality a new and more noble reality", for which the basis was "a powerful feeling for nature". Rostrup's argument suffers a logical collapse on closer examination, as is usual when a writer postulates nature or feeling as a first prerogative beyond the picture and the word.
The panegyrical, artist-fixated writing of art history is perhaps no longer entirely in fashion, but it is not dead, and the way in which the Danish version treats the artist's personality and biography has in recent years been attacked by younger art historians. If we do not wish to bother ourselves with biography, however, we must eschew the examination of fundamental problems from a period like that in which Giersing lived, in which art history was so closely linked to the artistic and art-historical conceptions. Although there may be no directly causal relationship between a specific artist's life in general and an individual work, this does not mean that it should not be of scholarly interest to examine what relationship there was - not least when faced with an artist like Giersing, who in his early years could say: "He who discovers himself, also discovers his form".
To be interested in a biographical element such as an artist's career and to see it in relation to his artistic constitution in a broader perspective, is not necessarily fetishistic or overly biographical. It can, as is the case here, be done partly to show how Giersing becomes an artist in accordance with the basic story of the modern artist in agreement with which he more or less consciously lives.
We cannot disregard the artist as a human being in the world and the concept of progression in examining an artist's work from a time when the artist's personality, his role as an antagonist and his consciousness of change are fundamental to all opinion and establish a framework around the artist's activities. And it is even more difficult to disregard the question of the personality behind the work when the creation of this person as an art-historical entity in his own creation and that of others is one of the subjects under consideration. (Translated by Glyn Jones)