Interview

By : Hemming Hartmann-Petersen

If you examine your own life there is so much which you owe to other people, and all of life – and namely the artistic side of life – I regard as a fellowship.
   Also what it is to make art. It isn’t something you do just for yourself. There’s a message to other people. I don’t mean that an authorship necessarily has to be preaching or propagandizing – I know very well that mine is – but I mean that whatever else there has to be a message for others. And if we didn’t resemble each other a whole lot books wouldn’t be read and nobody would come to exhibitions. We have to have something collectively, and that is what makes us able to communicate with each other in art.
   – Who influenced you?
   I can’t say anything about when I was a small child. But I remember an experience from my schooldays – when I was a pupil in the gymnasium. I happened to hear Otto Gelsted in the school association, he spoke about modern art. That was when expressionism had made its breakthrough, and Gelsted had just written an excellent book about it. As young people we were naturally very enthusiastic about the new art forms and the new ways of looking at life. He gave an extremely inspiring lecture – and after the lecture I read his poems. It was his first volumes and "The Advertising Ship" was one of the poems in them, and it made a tremendous impression on me.
...

– You were just saying something about authorship and painting. In my experience the word has much greater ability to influence people than the painted picture, and that has probably also been determining for what many critics have figured out should be a contradiction in my work. They say I’m an artist with a split personality. That as a painter I’m idyllic and lovable and with an amiable view of life – but that as a writer I am cruel, crankish and faultfinding.
       But actually it’s two sides of the same matter. I haven’t thought that painting is so well suited for influencing my fellowman as the word is. And so it is with a good conscience that I have been able to paint what I gave me pleasure. When I write I’m more burdened by responsibility, because what is written – or what is read – has such a powerful influence. I myself think – or I would wish – that my work in both areas should express an optimistic view of life, a love of the Earth we live on and of my fellowman. And that it is both expressed in pictures which show the Earth’s luxuriance and life’s beauty – and in words which simultaneously are critical of the forces which curtail this abundance and beauty, and which make it to something which is reserved for a minority. At this moment over half of humanity is living below the starvation level – while at the same time our planet is bursting with abundance and wealth. Therefore I think that these two sides of the matter can supplement each other.


From Conversation in Fredensborg with the author and painter Hans Scherfig.

Translated by Kenneth Tindall