WAR HORSES: Helhesten and the Danish Avant-Garde During World War II

War Horses: Helhesten and the Danish Avant-Garde During World War II This exhibition is the first to explore the history and significance of the accomplishments of Danish artists working during the Nazi occupation of their country (1940-45), who called themselves Helhesten, such as Ejler Bille (1910-2004), Egill Jacobsen (1910-1998), Asger Jorn (1914-1973), and Carl-Henning Pedersen (1913-2007), among others. It explores their invention of an art of resistance filled with colorful, expressive, abstract forms, which was remarkably similar to and concurrent with that of the American Abstract Expressionists, about which Helhesten artists had no knowledge. They also daringly exhibited their subversive work and published it and their controversial, communal ideas in the journal they produced Helhesten. As a result, they fueled the emergence of the international avant-garde art movement Cobra (1948-1951), which they became part of. Cobra greatly influenced the development of European modern art after World War II. The exhibition includes over 100 works and reconstructs for the first time the most important exhibition these artists staged in Denmark during the war, 13 Artists in a Tent (1941). It draws heavily from NSU Art Museum s exceptional collection of Helhesten and Cobra art, the largest in America, given to the Museum in 1988 by Meyer and Golda Marks. It was organized by NSU Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale and the Carl-Henning Pedersen & Else Alfelts Museum, Herning, where it will travel, and by guest curator, Kerry Greaves, Novo Nordisk Foundation Mads Øvlisen Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen. Its bi-lingual catalogue (English and Danish), includes color reproductions of many works in the exhibition and issues of Helhesten, as well as 3 insightful essays: Greaves discusses the history of Helhesten and its artists, noted art historian, Michael Leja, writes about American Abstract Expressionism, and art historian, Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen addresses the issue of Danish Art from Helhesten to Scandinavian Situationism. Moreover, the catalogue reproduces four controversial essays written by Helhesten artists and published in their journal Helhesten, as well as The New Realism, that they wrote and published in the catalogue of their 1945 exhibition, Host.