Nella Larsen
and Early
20th C. Danish Portraits of Blacks
***
Bent Sørensen, Aalborg University
Inspired by the well-known
Copenhagen interlude in Nella Larsen's novel Quicksand, this
paper sets out to contextualize the descriptions therein of the painter
Axel
Olsen and the portrait of Helga Crane he proceeds to paint. While Olsen
at
first sight seems to be a caricature of a Bohemian artist with Romantic
desires
of dramatization of self at the top of his agenda, he still manages to
earn a
living off the bourgeois class and its desire of self-promotion and
jockeying
for influence and social respect. In my paper I will present the case
of a
Danish painter, Erik Stæhr-Nielsen (1890-1921) who in some ways
is an example
of an artist who fails to become an Axel Olsen, but who had similar
ambivalent
feelings towards money and the arts, and most pertinently towards
blacks, or as
he termed them “Negre”, “Urfolk”, or “Skovens Børn”.
Olsen’s portrait of
Helga appears to
be naturalistic in its style, construing its subject with recognizable
features, yet dressing her up with gaudy colours and jewellery
reminiscent of slave
paraphernalia. This is a clear throw-back to exoticism/primitivism and
a
romancing of the colonial subaltern. Stæhr-Nielsen in contrast
quickly
abandoned naturalistic ideals in connection with the depiction of faces
and
bodies, significantly rendering black bodies as faceless and
contourless
bundles of muscles, usually in motion, dancing, playing music or
throwing
spears. This modernist style which draws on cubist tendencies is
tempered by an
incipient attraction to a colourist credo, leading him to use massive
black and
green shapes in his art. Stæhr-Nielsen is, however, ultimately in
his way every
bit as primitivist and neo-romantic in his mythologizing ideas of the
exotic
other as Axel Olsen.
Stæhr-Nielsen began
his career as a
skilled marine painter, producing seascapes which could have earned him
a
living decorating the salons of the well-to-do bourgeoisie, but after a
number
of sea journeys, leading him to Spain, the USA (he might virtually have
been a
cabin boy on one of Nella Larsen’s Atlantic crossings), Sierra Leone
and
Senegal he abandoned the sea as a subject and increasingly turned to
mythologised renditions of primeval forests with exotic figures of
animals and
humans, either black or inspired by Greek mythological characters. It
is a
paradox that he never actually saw the primeval African forests he
almost
exclusively started painting in the years after his return to Denmark in 1914
until his suicide in 1921, since the boats he worked on never
penetrated that
far inland. While several early post-1914 paintings are specific
portraits of
individual humans or groups of workers Stæhr-Nielsen encountered
or observed in Senegal (f. ex.
“Negre i Havnen
ved Foundiougne”, Nordjyllands Kunstmuseum, executed from sketches made
in Senegal),
Stæhr-Nielsen soon abandoned all attempts at realism in his
Africanist work. Works
such as “Hraller, Fitter, Hrætsch (Bue, Pil, Spyd)”, the “Skovens
Børn”-series,
the “Negermusikanter
i Urskoven”-sequence,
and “Dansende Negre – Spydkastere”
all feature black figures reduced to muscular outlines in motion with
little or
no individuality, sometimes even melting together in a strange organic
monstrosity, partly covered by masks. The background for all these
pictures
consists of a stereotypical primordial forest landscape, which
Stæhr-Nielsen
obsessively reproduced in the last years of his life (which was spent
in a
cottage on the outskirts of Grib Skov, an actual Danish woods), even
when
producing paintings of subjects from Greek mythology, or even his “Den
Nordiske
Skov” series. The
Africanism inherent in these canvasses seems to
have come to
Stæhr-Nielsen partly from his reading about Africa (Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness seems
a likely intertexts), partly from an elaboration of his own imagination
and
fantasies about the Ur-forest and its inhabitants – certainly there are
no
sketches from live observations as basis for these late works.
Stæhr-Nielsen thus became a
neo-romantic despite his choice of modernist stylistics and techniques
and when
he failed to complete what should have been his first chef-d’ouevre
(“Venus
finder Adonis’ Lig”), he despaired and shot himself, thus adding a
further
layer of romanticism to his career as a struggling, starving, searching
artist.
His Bohemianism thus never became Salon-fähig in the Axel Olsen
vein, but his
contribution to the Danish Black Atlantic discourse is considerable and
he
deserves a place in our research into this field along with his
contemporaries
Jais Nielsen, Jens Adolf Jerichau and several other Danish modernist
artists
fascinated with exotic and/or black bodies. Another candidate for
Larsen's portrait of Axel Olsen is Emil Nolde, as suggested by George
Hutchinson in his new biography of Larsen. Here is Nolde's portrait Die Mulattin.
[Read
paper...]