Art: Canvas Fairy Tales

Carl-Henning Pedersen is the best painter in Denmark—and for art dealers the most frustrating. He has about 1,000 canvases stashed away in the storerooms of a Copenhagen brewery, and he turns as frosty as a glass of Carlsberg when anyone suggests that he might sell one. He recently refused a substantial check for 15 paintings because he said it would raise his standard of living, so he simply gave the paintings away. He is indifferent to what the critics say, and dealers, who try to see him at his lonely house on the west coast of Jutland seldom get inside the door.

Currently, Pedersen is having his first one-man U.S. exhibition at the Pittsburgh International Exhibition of Contemporary Painting and Sculpture—a show that to most other men would bring visions of new fame and soaring prices. Pedersen’s visions are of quite another sort.

On Moon-Smeared Seas. The world he paints is as private as the life he leads. Ghostly boats sail his moon-smeared seas, and kindergarten monsters roam his curious landscapes (see color). These, says Pedersen, are “fairytale pictures,” and like all fairy tales, they have a touch of sorcery. Pedersen has never broken faith with childhood; basically he is an unspoiled innocent whose paintings sometimes have the quality of folk art, and almost always have the atmosphere of the nursery. The most ordinary everyday experience catapults him into fantasy. “To make a painting,” he explains, “is a process by which you stand somewhere and make a jump out into the air and then fall back again. And when you make the next jump, you attempt to make it even better and farther out. And thus it continues always, over and over again.”

The son of a Copenhagen construction worker, Pedersen did not decide to become a painter until, at the age of 20, he fell in love with a girl named Else, who was a painter herself. The next year, in 1934, the two got married. Pedersen never saw any point in art schools: “They tie you. What you must learn is to master your own technique.” He was strongly influenced by the childlike fantasies of Paul Klee and the emotion-soaked colors of Emile Nolde. Like Picasso, he went through “periods” keyed by colors. There were rose-colored paintings, followed by a long series of grey birds. Then his palette burst open, spilling out colors that glowed like stained glass. During the Nazi occupation, his colors faded, as if to reflect the blacked-out cities; but once the Germans surrendered, his paintings began to sparkle again.

A Fear of Luxury. In 1958, Pedersen won a $1,000 prize, and with the money he bought himself and his wife his isolated house in Jutland. But he has never forgotten the poverty of his early days. For privacy’s sake, he has no phone and no radio. But he is also compulsive about not becoming accustomed to even the most modest luxury. He refuses to subscribe to a newspaper, instead reads the copy in the public library.

He is as at home in watercolor, chalk or mosaic as in oil. When he feels in the mood, his brushes work so fast that a complete painting may take less than a day. Pedersen paints for about 15 minutes, then reads from a book (borrowed, of course), then paints again for another 15 minutes. These quarters of an hour do not always bring results, but on some days they are inspired. Painter Pedersen makes his “jump out into the air,” and then falls back to produce a fairy tale of genuine enchantment.