From 1906 Giersing changed his attitude to portrait painting. Although it is almost always possible to identify the model via some specific feature, for instance the way the hair is done or the roughly suggested shape of a hand, the person portrayed - and with few exceptions this means Giersing's closest relatives, friends and the painter himself - becomes essentially what at that time he would call a decorative stimulus.
Giersing had entered into a period of seeking and uncertainty and was apparently not entirely aware of what he wanted to do with his painting. The ideals and the background to his painting experiments and his interest in the thoughts of Gauguin, were meanwhile not the result of chance whims: they were based on a particularly carefully thought out and radical view of art.
From the end of spring 1905, Giersing launched into some of the most advanced art-historical and art-theoretical major works of the time, for now his object was unambiguously to establish his own view of art. Around the spring of 1906 he had reached the point where he summed it up in a manifesto-like repudiation of the naturalistic and realistic view of art of the time "Om Billedværdi" (On the Value of the Picture - printed here as an appendix). Misled particularly by Julius Lange's definition of the value of art from 1873, which in 1906 could still summarise that time's most widespread views on art and the experience of art, artistic values were sought everywhere except where in his opinion they were to be found. Giersing was tempted, he writes, to proclaim the paradox that: "Art has nothing whatever to do with life". For the life content and spiritual content of works of art cannot be the primary elements in the evaluation of art. The real content of the picture and its value as a work of art was related to the means: "Just as the content of music is melody, rhythm and harmony, so that of pictorial art is surfaces, colours, lines and space". Therefore "so-called decorative art" was "closer to the essence of the matter than imitative art".
These were the ideas to which he sought to adhere in his own painting in 1906, when he experimented with the intrinsic value of colour as colour in his figure compositions stressing the effect of surface and line. The object was to make the picture "sing", as he wrote to a friend. But although he noted in August 1906 that "Synthesis is everything!", it would be misleading to call him a synthesist or symbolist in the normal sense. That lines and colours should express or communicate some superior truth or being in a symbolist sense does not appear to have been his view.
It was not the modern French painters who suddenly gave him a new view of the nature of art. Of particular significance was presumably the formalistic Danish art historian Vilhelm Wanscher, and certainly Heinrich Wölfflin's "Die klassische Kunst" (1899) and Adolf Hildebrandt's "Das Problem der Form in der bildenden Kunst" (1893), which he read in 1905. For Giersing there was no incongruity between idolising Gauguin and being inspired by thoughts that evolved from the study of classical, Renaissance and baroque art. Gauguin was simply the heir to the Greeks, and modern French art was the real and immortal art of modern times, just as Classical Greek art had been that of an earlier era.
Giersing's new view of art was formulated as a breach with the native Danish art establishment. This prepared him for the real confrontation as the painting outlaw who spurns all generally accepted rules. He now saw the artist as a necessarily isolated person who ideally speaking had to create for himself, with no thought for anything but art.
In August 1906 he was painting in Funen, where he was preoccupied with introducing "disturbance" into the picture. He was apparently afraid of painting too beautifully. One of the results was a mildly expressive forest track with stylised clouds, a yellow foreground and pink paths - a kind of Gauguin or van Gogh-inspired fauvist result painted two months before he had his first opportunity to get to know pictures by Matisse and his friends in Paris.
That same month he received a promise from his father that he would finance a visit to Paris. Now that the goal was within reach, his delight could nevertheless still not crystallise. Diary entries, poems and notes from the time confirm that he must have suffered from a genuine minor depression, the central element in which was the unresolved relationship to his late mother. After her death he had freed himself a little from her inheritance, but now at his life's most crucial artistic turning point, he stood alone.
Giersing's personal crisis in August-September 1906 cannot be isolated so as only to be about personal psychological problems. Perhaps, unconsciously, he staged it as a crisis in his own version of the story of the modern artist; but at all events it is about personal psychological problems and their connection with those of artistic creation. Beauty, he felt, could not simply be in-stalled as the way to personal serenity in order to conquer existential angst. The knowledge he was to acquire in Paris was an insight into the Language proper that was to make his pictures "sing" and stabilise his vacillating self, behind which lurked death. But suppose that he failed to find anything in Paris and "sank beneath it all", as he had written to his father? It was a terrifying question, and when finally he arrived in Paris, he was as receptive as any artist has ever been on the first meeting.