C.F. Hill.Robert Rosenblum In 1988, an enterprising Danish publisher, Torsten Blondal, launched an innovative series of books, "Art in the Nordic Countries." Each of these modest but elegant little paperbacks is devoted to a Scandinavian artist of the last two centuries. Some may be obscure to us (Svavar Gudnason, Lars Hertevig), but others may be as famous to foreigners as Edvard Munch or the recently much exhibited and talked about Christian Kobke, the silver poet of Denmark's "Golden Age of Painting." As for the authors, they range from professional art historians, critics, and poets to such contemporary artists as Per Kirkeby (with monographs by Lawrence Weiner, Donald Judd, and John Ashbery coming up soon). The latest in this series links the oddest of couples. The clinically insane Swedish artist Carl Fredrik Hill Carl Fredrik Hill (31 May 1849 - 22 February 1911) was a Swedish painter. He painted mostly landscapes. He spent some years in a mental hospital. Despair and darkness is seen in his paintings, such as the painting with the graveyard or "stegrande häst i soluppgång". (1849-1911) has now been resurrected by none other than Georg Baselitz, long known to be, like many other Northern neo-Expressionists, a devotee of Hill's heartbreakingly demented drawings. The product of a frenetic graphomania, these largely undatable pages extend from 1877, the year of the artist's first institutionalization Institutionalization The gradual domination of financial markets by institutional investors, as opposed to individual investors. This process has occurred throughout the industrialized world. in Paris, where he learned to be a belated if already haunted disciple of the Barbizon School, to his final, isolated decades in Lund, under the protective roof of his mother and sister. Baselitz's anthology offers a hallucinatory hal·lu·ci·na·to·ry adj. 1. Of or characterized by hallucination. 2. Inducing or causing hallucination. smorgasbord of what look like the unleashed demons Demons See also devil; evil; ghosts; hell; spirits and spiritualism. ademonist one who denies the existence of the devil or demons. bogyism, bogeyism recognition of the existence of demons and goblins. of a Nordic id--a bleak landscape rained upon not by water but by windswept streaks of letters that spell out the artist's name, HILL; crude images of a wild horse, a reindeer, or a giant serpent appearing in a nature primitive enough to provide the sets for a lunatic dramatization dram·a·ti·za·tion n. 1. The act or art of dramatizing: the dramatization of a novel. 2. A work adapted for dramatic presentation: of the Edda; eruptions of rocks and trees that metamorphose before our eyes into breasts and phalluses. The power of these volcanic eruptions volcanic eruptions discharging of fumes, dust and lava from volcanoes. They have damaging potential in addition to those of being physically overpowering by the lava flow or the ash or dust fallout. of authentic fictions dearly sparked Baselitz's own imagination, not only in visually demonstrable ways (a series of paintings from 1992-93, with their at first illegible filaments of paint that are suddenly transformed into free-floating nudes, look like sophisticated branches off Hill's desperate tree) but also in terms of his virtuoso introductory text. This, amazingly, is a whole-cloth invention by Baselitz of a correspondence that might have taken place, but never did, between Hill and August Strindberg, his compatriot com·pa·tri·ot n. 1. A person from one's own country. 2. A colleague. [French compatriote, from Late Latin compatri and exact contemporary. Himself an unforgettably audacious amateur artist who would also wallow wallow mud bath frequented by pigs, elephants, red deer, hippopotami as a cooling aid. in organic chaos and explore the alchemic potentials hidden in the vast Scandinavian waters and forests, Strindberg had known Hill's work early on, in Paris. But knowing all too well about the brink of madness, he avoided contact with the schizophrenic Hill; and it was left to Baselitz to dream up a series of letters they might have written to each other. This poignant literary deception pits the stammeringly truthful and disjointed verbal outbursts of "C.F.H." against the no less delirious de·lir·i·ous adj. Of, suffering from, or characteristic of delirium. but suavely written fantasies of "August," which in fact echo the feverish language and bizarre imagery of an actual essay that Strindberg published in French on the importance of accident for artistic creation (La Revue des revues, November 15, 1894). In this little book, Baselitz's total immersion in Hill's obsessive art, tormented spirit, and imaginary companion produces a marriage made in heaven, or is it hell? Robert Rosenblum is an art historian and professor of fine arts at New York University New York University, mainly in New York City; coeducational; chartered 1831, opened 1832 as the Univ. of the City of New York, renamed 1896. It comprises 13 schools and colleges, maintaining 4 main centers (including the Medical Center) in the city, as well as the . He is most recently the author of Andy Warhol Portraits (Thames and Hudson, 1993) and Paintings in the Musee d'Orsay (Stewart, Tabori & Chang, 1989). |
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