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Henry Heerup
b. Copenhagen 1907, d. 1993
"Livsfrise" (Life Frieze). Signed Heerup 41. Oil on canvas.
198 x 230 cm.
Exhibited: “Heerup 1940-45”, Heerup Museum, Rødovre, February
– May 2005.
Provenance: Purchased in person from the artist by the current owner’s
father in the early 1950s. Not previously offered for sale. The
current owner’s father was a friend of Johan Møller-Nielsen, a folk
high school teacher and later arts critic at the Danish daily newspapers
Socialdemokraten and Aktuelt. The two friends often visited
Heerup in his allotment garden in Rødovre. During one of
these visits, the current owner’s father saw the painting hanging
outdoors under an overhang, which he thought was a shame. Despite
clear instructions from his wife not to buy paintings, since
their means were limited, the canvas was rolled up and taken home
by the two men travelling by train. The price was DKK 300, which
was the equivalent of one month’s wage for the purchaser, who was
a newly graduated officer with the Civil Defence.
“Livsfrise” [‘Life Frieze’] (1941), which until now has been in private
possession and, as far as can be established, has only been on
public display once, can with good reason be considered an
‘unknown’ principal work by Henry Heerup.
The monumental painting, which features a central female/womb
symbol, is an effervescent orchestration of almost all of Heerup’s later
so celebrated motifs, symbols and themes: the heart, the cross, the
wheel of life and the foetus, which are symbols of fertility, life and
death, good and evil, love and war, edification and destruction.
As so often with Heerup’s art, life-embracing, humane values are
given prominence and weight. The highly ornamental composition
reflects Heerup’s declared admiration of the Jelling Stone and the
artisitc heritage of the Viking Age and medieval times, which also
preoccupied Asger Jorn all through the wartime years and onwards.
Jorn saw Nordic artistic tradition as being in opposition to
the dominant classical European style. In an article in the periodical
“Helhesten” from 1944, Heerup voiced the same opinion: “Den
Folkelige Kunst har i Al sin Enkelhed Ornamentet som Grundform”
[“Folk art has in all its simplicity the ornament as its basic
form.”]. “Livsfrise” is a uniquely splendid example of Heerup’s seminal
and deeply original contribution to the development of abstract
art in Denmark and Europe of the 1940s.
1941, the year the painting was conceived, was the exact same year
Heerup became a member of the artist’s association “Corner- Og
Høstudstillingen”, which was the forerunner of the European
CoBrA movement. It was also the year in which the periodical
“Helhesten”, the principal voice of early abstract-expressionism in
Denmark, was issued with a cover drawing by Heerup.
The major Heerup exhibition in 2003 at the ARKEN Museum of
Art, Denmark, highlighted the vitalism and life-affirming allegories
of fertility that characterised Heerup’s oeuvre. “Livsfrise”
(1941) is in size, ambition, complexity and execution comparable
to the principal work of the exhibition featured on the cover of the
catalogue “Figurkomposition (Sindbillede)” [‘Figure Composition
(Emblem)’] (1942), which at Bruun Rasmussen fetched a record
price for a Heerup painting in 1996.
DKK 800.000-1.000.000 / € 107.000-134.000
110 BRUUN RASMUSSEN TRÉSOR