8. Nudes

After the experiments with colour and painting technique Giersing sought in a sequence of large and small nude compositions from winter 1907-08 and the following year to fuse his Paris experiences: the artistically fluent linear characterisation of the female body which he had acquired with his drawings from life and the dissolution of form in dots of colour to which he had been inspired in the paintings of the neo-impressionists and Fauvists.

That Giersing launched himself into something so academic as nude compositions can be understood on the background of a manuscript from about 1908 in which he tried to explain why painting had not become non-figurative and why "the greatest painters paint people". The answer was that "real subjects" offered "far richer decorative material than colours and arabesques alone". Alongside what must be assumed to have been a quite conscious desire to relate to and attack the academic approach on its own territory it was presumably also an incentive that his idols Titian, Manet and Cézanne had all been remarkable as original interpreters of the female nude.

Generally speaking it is possible to sense in Giersing's nudes a distance and coolness emphasising the pure sense of figure as opposed to femininity. It is in the disinterested, factual relation-ship to the motif that he differs fundamentally from for instance, Degas, and also from Bonnard. Giersing's models pose purely and simply as models posing.

In contrast to certain contemporary Danish colleagues' "vitalistic" cultivation of the naked body and the free articulation of the body, we are here, when faced with Giersing's demonstratively posing models, confronted with an interpretation of the body as artificiality deprived of all symbolical qualities.

Giersing was one of the first Danish artists fully to draw the consequences of the fundamental modernist idea that the most important subject of art is itself. Part of his work is thus art on art, and his pictures are pictures on pictures. With more or less clear historical references to Titian among others, they become an ambiguous commentary on the story, i.e. the history of art, in which Giersing wanted them to be inscribed as works of art.

Whereas by introducing a sense of distance from his motifs, Giersing creates an image of himself as a renewer of the tradition, his formal intention is solely to be modern. After working with larger or smaller "dots" and sparingly applied colour until the early months of 1908, be moved away from the dotted and the former lightness towards heavier, flat colours mixed with white and a more pastose method of painting with a palette knife. This time it was not French art that was the inspiration, but pictures by Ernst Ludvig Kirchner, who exhibited with Die Brücke in spring 1908 at the Valdemar Kleis gallery.

From 1906 and until Paris' Judgement from the beginning of 1909, Giersing's surface painting was carried out with ever bigger brushes and gestures. In August 1908 he defined his efforts: "I have had a model for about a week and painted a picture with three figures, rough outlines, rough colours, 'matériaux grossiers' as Cézanne says, but with a certain power in the structure, I hope".

The three female figures in The Judgement of Paris are roughly modelled and surrounded by broad, blue-black outlines. The positions of the figures are those of classic calm, but their proportions in relation to each other are confusing, and the linear and spatial relationships are disturbed by the man in the armchair.

Giersing's friend and first biographer, Leo Swane, thought it "presumably somewhat influenced by Matisse". But the relationship is rather due to Giersing's working partly on the same lines as Matisse - against a background of closely related problems and sources of inspiration: Gauguin, Signac and Cézanne. The Judgement of Paris is a modernist picture in a quite exemplary sense which is audacious in a totally different way in the juxtaposition of the great mythological story and the intimate modernist story from, for instance, Matisse's programmatic, consciously classicistic Bonheur de vivre from 1905-06 or the equally exuberant The Dance from l 909.

The Judgement of Paris is a meta-picture in the form of a presentation of the painter on shaky ground between tradition and modernity - the painter, who has to express his thoughts in concentrated conversation with the painted motif itself, with his back to the viewer. This is certainly not some potential armchair for the tired businessman (Matisse).

To be continued.....
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