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A Triptych of Danish Modernism: Cobra and Degenerate Art in Denmark
In the last of our trio of Amsterdam articles, we take a look at Cobra 75: Danish Modern Art, showing now at Cobra Museum of Modern Art...
February 28, 2023
Cobra – Copenhagen, Brussels, and Amsterdam – was a pan-European, Abstract-Surrealist art movement, born out of World War II. Working across diverse media, its artists were united by their social and political engagement, and objectives to express common humanity, work together in collaboration, and make art more accessible to all.
That final city, Amsterdam, hosts a similar trio of exhibitions, celebrating the movement’s 75th anniversary (1948-1951). This ‘triptych’ at the Cobra Museum focuses on the work of the (older) Danish modern artists, who influenced the younger generation. (More Dutch artists can be found in the collection downstairs.)
Its core, We Kiss the Earth, goes before Cobra, subtly curating the history of this international movement through individual stories – particularly women. Franciska Clausen, the ‘trail blazer of Danish art,’ encountered European avant-garde movements through travel and education in Berlin and Paris. Sonja Ferlov Mancoba, long influenced from afar by Alberto Giacometti, was disappointed to find he’d ‘moved on’ from surrealism when she moved into the studio next door in 1936.
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Here, Kernn-Larsen’s vaginal trees challenge both binaries of womanhood (as chaste or sexual) and the distinction of human/nature. Binary breaking runs throughout all three exhibitions; we read about the Danish tradition of using humour to challenge the divide of high/low culture, whilst Henry Heerup’s ‘The Peace Bell’ (1944) highlights the catastrophic outcomes when war and peace collide.
Dividing the space are the leading cultural journals Linien (The Line) and Helhesten (Hell Horse), great cover art projected onto curtains and screens. Certainly, the Cobra Museum is lighter, larger than the tent in which these artists famously exhibited together in 1941. With low displays to lean on, and opportunities for viewers to actively participate, We Kiss the Earth is even more accessible than its artists could have hoped.
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During the Nazi occupation of Denmark (1940-1945), many artists returned from their travels to contribute to the resistance at home. Their resulting works were spontaneous, abstract, and highly socio-politically engaged, until the Nazis imposed tighter cultural restrictions from 1943. ‘All good art in Denmark is Entartete,’ claimed Carl-Henning Pederson, one of Hell Horse’s cover art contributors, in reference to the Degenerate classification.
The Hell Horse embodies the works of this period: ‘a terrifying portent of calamity’ in Scandinavian myth, transformed by artists into a ‘clumsy and sweet’ plaything, mocking the values of strength, dignity, and Aryan culture paraded by the occupying forces. These cartoons draw as much on the Danish tradition of absurd satire and sarcasm in social coping, as international icons of surrealism. We can’t help but think of Picasso’s ‘Guernica’ (1937) – exhibited the year after in Copenhagen – nor the British surrealist Eileen Agar’s ‘Quadriga’ (1935) – when we see these works, situating them within transnational networks of surrealism.
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Questions of influence flow into the second exhibition, Je est un autre: Ernest Mancoba and Sonja Ferlov, which lavishes equal attention upon their individual artistic journeys, and their relationship together. Born in British-colonial South Africa, Autre suggests that Mancoba never ‘came into contact’ with African sculpture (as art) in the country of his birth – only in the European museums of Paris and London.
Masks and sculptures from Africa, ‘Middle America’, and Oceania all greatly influenced the Cobra artists. This interest is charitably interpreted by its curators; ‘further than a fascination for the exotic,’ these artists sought to find ‘similar expressions of human imagination between cultures…viewed and researched with the same open mind as Dutch and ancient art.’
A more critical voice can be found at the Stedelijk, which suggests greater continuity between these artists, and the orientalism and othering which permeated their forebears in cubism, expressionism, surrealism, and abstract art.
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Indeed, all three exhibitions are implicitly exhibitions about museums – what gets exhibited, and where. Nowhere is this case more so than Becoming Overtaci, the jarring finale to two thoughtfully curated exhibitions.
Overtaci seems a strange selection in the context of the other show. Connected only by the interest of Cobra artist Asger Jorn, their works are wholly singular, and defy any neat categorisation. Double-sided paintings which ‘see both sides’ of a story. Surrealistic cat-people and aliens from Ancient Egypt appear, all licked with the magical realism of Latin America and Leonora Carrington – influences never mentioned.
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As with We Kiss the Earth and Je est un autre, the influence of African artworks on Western practices is well-acknowledged, but Asian influences are scarcely mentioned – remarkable, given that Japanese characters and scripts cover almost every work.
Instead, biography is the focus of Becoming. Born Louis Marcussen in 1894, Overtaci changed their name and gender identity many times during their life, before returning to identify as a man in 1972. These changes are first presented as a form of gender performativity, visible in the various signatures which pepper their paintings.
Until we learn, graphically, how Overtaci castrated themselves in a carpentry workshop, frustrated by the slow progress of their gender reassignment. ‘The whole caboodle in one stroke!,’ the artist proclaims, in a documentary film – here displayed, almost celebrated, as evidence of a Dadaist lifestyle, when it’s a screaming sign of poor mental health.
After returning to Aarhus from their travels in Argentina in the 1920s, Overtaci suffered a mental health breakdown, leading to their permanent, involuntary hospitalisation in Denmark. Their name – meaning ‘Head Lunatic’ or ‘Chief Patient’ in Danish – suggests they lent upon performativity in their life and practise for social coping. Art has long served as a therapeutic alternative to drugs and medication; yet moments of genuine freedom, from bicycle rides, to their bid to build a functional, wooden helicopter, are all trivialised.
It’s important to distinguish between Overtaci and, for instance, Yayoi Kusama; the former’s forced intuitionalism raises difficult questions around consent. ‘Dull people have no flame, you know, they lack enthusiasm,’ we read, from Overtaci. ‘They don’t have things that we admire – when a person blazes, and his speech bursts out like flames…it’s a pure delight for the heart, when you gaze at these flame people, isn’t it?’. This remark refers to one of their infinity works; a remark made not for the purpose of an exhibition caption, but in private, in an interview with their doctor. What right have we to read that?
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Overtaci’s works are thrilling, regardless of biography. But by curating so close to the artist’s biography, Becoming only worsens the problems it faces. Institutions must curate ambiguity responsibly, not (even unintentionally) perpetuate the stereotype that gender transitioning is exclusively a manifestation of poor mental health.
Becoming only underscores how difficult it is to separate the artistic process from the artist; we assume chronology in curation from the captions, which follow the artist’s biography, but nothing is dated or titled, which only reinforces the sense that the artist never intended their works for public display.
Worst, the exhibition is framed around rising commercial interest, as Overtaci’s works show at the Venice Biennale (2022), in private collections and, perhaps most shockingly, other mental health institutions. The more time you spend in Becoming, the more it seems like mere voyeurism – the curation and perpetuation of the myth of a tortured artist, for economic benefit after their death, and by their estate.
In this respect, Overtaci shares more in common with Vincent van Gogh than the modern Cobra movement on display here.
We Kiss the Earth: Danish Modern Art (1934-1948), Je est un autre: Ernest Mancoba and Sonja Ferlov, and Becoming Ovartaci are on show as part of Cobra 75: Danish Modern Art at Cobra Museum of Modern Art in Amsterdam until 14 May 2023.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
For more, listen to this episode of the EMPIRE LINES podcast, with curators Pim Arts and Winnie Sze
Cobra – Copenhagen, Brussels, and Amsterdam – was a pan-European, Abstract-Surrealist art movement, born out of World War II. Working across diverse media, its artists were united by their social and political engagement, and objectives to express common humanity, work together in collaboration, and make art more accessible to all.
That final city, Amsterdam, hosts a similar trio of exhibitions, celebrating the movement’s 75th anniversary (1948-1951). This ‘triptych’ at the Cobra Museum focuses on the work of the (older) Danish modern artists, who influenced the younger generation. (More Dutch artists can be found in the collection downstairs.)
Its core, We Kiss the Earth, goes before Cobra, subtly curating the history of this international movement through individual stories – particularly women. Franciska Clausen, the ‘trail blazer of Danish art,’ encountered European avant-garde movements through travel and education in Berlin and Paris. Sonja Ferlov Mancoba, long influenced from afar by Alberto Giacometti, was disappointed to find he’d ‘moved on’ from surrealism when she moved into the studio next door in 1936.
Here, Kernn-Larsen’s vaginal trees challenge both binaries of womanhood (as chaste or sexual) and the distinction of human/nature. Binary breaking runs throughout all three exhibitions; we read about the Danish tradition of using humour to challenge the divide of high/low culture, whilst Henry Heerup’s ‘The Peace Bell’ (1944) highlights the catastrophic outcomes when war and peace collide.
Dividing the space are the leading cultural journals Linien (The Line) and Helhesten (Hell Horse), great cover art projected onto curtains and screens. Certainly, the Cobra Museum is lighter, larger than the tent in which these artists famously exhibited together in 1941. With low displays to lean on, and opportunities for viewers to actively participate, We Kiss the Earth is even more accessible than its artists could have hoped.
During the Nazi occupation of Denmark (1940-1945), many artists returned from their travels to contribute to the resistance at home. Their resulting works were spontaneous, abstract, and highly socio-politically engaged, until the Nazis imposed tighter cultural restrictions from 1943. ‘All good art in Denmark is Entartete,’ claimed Carl-Henning Pederson, one of Hell Horse’s cover art contributors, in reference to the Degenerate classification.
The Hell Horse embodies the works of this period: ‘a terrifying portent of calamity’ in Scandinavian myth, transformed by artists into a ‘clumsy and sweet’ plaything, mocking the values of strength, dignity, and Aryan culture paraded by the occupying forces. These cartoons draw as much on the Danish tradition of absurd satire and sarcasm in social coping, as international icons of surrealism. We can’t help but think of Picasso’s ‘Guernica’ (1937) – exhibited the year after in Copenhagen – nor the British surrealist Eileen Agar’s ‘Quadriga’ (1935) – when we see these works, situating them within transnational networks of surrealism.
Questions of influence flow into the second exhibition, Je est un autre: Ernest Mancoba and Sonja Ferlov, which lavishes equal attention upon their individual artistic journeys, and their relationship together. Born in British-colonial South Africa, Autre suggests that Mancoba never ‘came into contact’ with African sculpture (as art) in the country of his birth – only in the European museums of Paris and London.
Masks and sculptures from Africa, ‘Middle America’, and Oceania all greatly influenced the Cobra artists. This interest is charitably interpreted by its curators; ‘further than a fascination for the exotic,’ these artists sought to find ‘similar expressions of human imagination between cultures…viewed and researched with the same open mind as Dutch and ancient art.’
A more critical voice can be found at the Stedelijk, which suggests greater continuity between these artists, and the orientalism and othering which permeated their forebears in cubism, expressionism, surrealism, and abstract art.
Indeed, all three exhibitions are implicitly exhibitions about museums – what gets exhibited, and where. Nowhere is this case more so than Becoming Overtaci, the jarring finale to two thoughtfully curated exhibitions.
Overtaci seems a strange selection in the context of the other show. Connected only by the interest of Cobra artist Asger Jorn, their works are wholly singular, and defy any neat categorisation. Double-sided paintings which ‘see both sides’ of a story. Surrealistic cat-people and aliens from Ancient Egypt appear, all licked with the magical realism of Latin America and Leonora Carrington – influences never mentioned.
As with We Kiss the Earth and Je est un autre, the influence of African artworks on Western practices is well-acknowledged, but Asian influences are scarcely mentioned – remarkable, given that Japanese characters and scripts cover almost every work.
Instead, biography is the focus of Becoming. Born Louis Marcussen in 1894, Overtaci changed their name and gender identity many times during their life, before returning to identify as a man in 1972. These changes are first presented as a form of gender performativity, visible in the various signatures which pepper their paintings.
Until we learn, graphically, how Overtaci castrated themselves in a carpentry workshop, frustrated by the slow progress of their gender reassignment. ‘The whole caboodle in one stroke!,’ the artist proclaims, in a documentary film – here displayed, almost celebrated, as evidence of a Dadaist lifestyle, when it’s a screaming sign of poor mental health.
After returning to Aarhus from their travels in Argentina in the 1920s, Overtaci suffered a mental health breakdown, leading to their permanent, involuntary hospitalisation in Denmark. Their name – meaning ‘Head Lunatic’ or ‘Chief Patient’ in Danish – suggests they lent upon performativity in their life and practise for social coping. Art has long served as a therapeutic alternative to drugs and medication; yet moments of genuine freedom, from bicycle rides, to their bid to build a functional, wooden helicopter, are all trivialised.
It’s important to distinguish between Overtaci and, for instance, Yayoi Kusama; the former’s forced intuitionalism raises difficult questions around consent. ‘Dull people have no flame, you know, they lack enthusiasm,’ we read, from Overtaci. ‘They don’t have things that we admire – when a person blazes, and his speech bursts out like flames…it’s a pure delight for the heart, when you gaze at these flame people, isn’t it?’. This remark refers to one of their infinity works; a remark made not for the purpose of an exhibition caption, but in private, in an interview with their doctor. What right have we to read that?
Overtaci’s works are thrilling, regardless of biography. But by curating so close to the artist’s biography, Becoming only worsens the problems it faces. Institutions must curate ambiguity responsibly, not (even unintentionally) perpetuate the stereotype that gender transitioning is exclusively a manifestation of poor mental health.
Becoming only underscores how difficult it is to separate the artistic process from the artist; we assume chronology in curation from the captions, which follow the artist’s biography, but nothing is dated or titled, which only reinforces the sense that the artist never intended their works for public display.
Worst, the exhibition is framed around rising commercial interest, as Overtaci’s works show at the Venice Biennale (2022), in private collections and, perhaps most shockingly, other mental health institutions. The more time you spend in Becoming, the more it seems like mere voyeurism – the curation and perpetuation of the myth of a tortured artist, for economic benefit after their death, and by their estate.
In this respect, Overtaci shares more in common with Vincent van Gogh than the modern Cobra movement on display here.
We Kiss the Earth: Danish Modern Art (1934-1948), Je est un autre: Ernest Mancoba and Sonja Ferlov, and Becoming Ovartaci are on show as part of Cobra 75: Danish Modern Art at Cobra Museum of Modern Art in Amsterdam until 14 May 2023.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
For more, listen to this episode of the EMPIRE LINES podcast, with curators Pim Arts and Winnie Sze
Cobra – Copenhagen, Brussels, and Amsterdam – was a pan-European, Abstract-Surrealist art movement, born out of World War II. Working across diverse media, its artists were united by their social and political engagement, and objectives to express common humanity, work together in collaboration, and make art more accessible to all.
That final city, Amsterdam, hosts a similar trio of exhibitions, celebrating the movement’s 75th anniversary (1948-1951). This ‘triptych’ at the Cobra Museum focuses on the work of the (older) Danish modern artists, who influenced the younger generation. (More Dutch artists can be found in the collection downstairs.)
Its core, We Kiss the Earth, goes before Cobra, subtly curating the history of this international movement through individual stories – particularly women. Franciska Clausen, the ‘trail blazer of Danish art,’ encountered European avant-garde movements through travel and education in Berlin and Paris. Sonja Ferlov Mancoba, long influenced from afar by Alberto Giacometti, was disappointed to find he’d ‘moved on’ from surrealism when she moved into the studio next door in 1936.
Here, Kernn-Larsen’s vaginal trees challenge both binaries of womanhood (as chaste or sexual) and the distinction of human/nature. Binary breaking runs throughout all three exhibitions; we read about the Danish tradition of using humour to challenge the divide of high/low culture, whilst Henry Heerup’s ‘The Peace Bell’ (1944) highlights the catastrophic outcomes when war and peace collide.
Dividing the space are the leading cultural journals Linien (The Line) and Helhesten (Hell Horse), great cover art projected onto curtains and screens. Certainly, the Cobra Museum is lighter, larger than the tent in which these artists famously exhibited together in 1941. With low displays to lean on, and opportunities for viewers to actively participate, We Kiss the Earth is even more accessible than its artists could have hoped.
During the Nazi occupation of Denmark (1940-1945), many artists returned from their travels to contribute to the resistance at home. Their resulting works were spontaneous, abstract, and highly socio-politically engaged, until the Nazis imposed tighter cultural restrictions from 1943. ‘All good art in Denmark is Entartete,’ claimed Carl-Henning Pederson, one of Hell Horse’s cover art contributors, in reference to the Degenerate classification.
The Hell Horse embodies the works of this period: ‘a terrifying portent of calamity’ in Scandinavian myth, transformed by artists into a ‘clumsy and sweet’ plaything, mocking the values of strength, dignity, and Aryan culture paraded by the occupying forces. These cartoons draw as much on the Danish tradition of absurd satire and sarcasm in social coping, as international icons of surrealism. We can’t help but think of Picasso’s ‘Guernica’ (1937) – exhibited the year after in Copenhagen – nor the British surrealist Eileen Agar’s ‘Quadriga’ (1935) – when we see these works, situating them within transnational networks of surrealism.
Questions of influence flow into the second exhibition, Je est un autre: Ernest Mancoba and Sonja Ferlov, which lavishes equal attention upon their individual artistic journeys, and their relationship together. Born in British-colonial South Africa, Autre suggests that Mancoba never ‘came into contact’ with African sculpture (as art) in the country of his birth – only in the European museums of Paris and London.
Masks and sculptures from Africa, ‘Middle America’, and Oceania all greatly influenced the Cobra artists. This interest is charitably interpreted by its curators; ‘further than a fascination for the exotic,’ these artists sought to find ‘similar expressions of human imagination between cultures…viewed and researched with the same open mind as Dutch and ancient art.’
A more critical voice can be found at the Stedelijk, which suggests greater continuity between these artists, and the orientalism and othering which permeated their forebears in cubism, expressionism, surrealism, and abstract art.
Indeed, all three exhibitions are implicitly exhibitions about museums – what gets exhibited, and where. Nowhere is this case more so than Becoming Overtaci, the jarring finale to two thoughtfully curated exhibitions.
Overtaci seems a strange selection in the context of the other show. Connected only by the interest of Cobra artist Asger Jorn, their works are wholly singular, and defy any neat categorisation. Double-sided paintings which ‘see both sides’ of a story. Surrealistic cat-people and aliens from Ancient Egypt appear, all licked with the magical realism of Latin America and Leonora Carrington – influences never mentioned.
As with We Kiss the Earth and Je est un autre, the influence of African artworks on Western practices is well-acknowledged, but Asian influences are scarcely mentioned – remarkable, given that Japanese characters and scripts cover almost every work.
Instead, biography is the focus of Becoming. Born Louis Marcussen in 1894, Overtaci changed their name and gender identity many times during their life, before returning to identify as a man in 1972. These changes are first presented as a form of gender performativity, visible in the various signatures which pepper their paintings.
Until we learn, graphically, how Overtaci castrated themselves in a carpentry workshop, frustrated by the slow progress of their gender reassignment. ‘The whole caboodle in one stroke!,’ the artist proclaims, in a documentary film – here displayed, almost celebrated, as evidence of a Dadaist lifestyle, when it’s a screaming sign of poor mental health.
After returning to Aarhus from their travels in Argentina in the 1920s, Overtaci suffered a mental health breakdown, leading to their permanent, involuntary hospitalisation in Denmark. Their name – meaning ‘Head Lunatic’ or ‘Chief Patient’ in Danish – suggests they lent upon performativity in their life and practise for social coping. Art has long served as a therapeutic alternative to drugs and medication; yet moments of genuine freedom, from bicycle rides, to their bid to build a functional, wooden helicopter, are all trivialised.
It’s important to distinguish between Overtaci and, for instance, Yayoi Kusama; the former’s forced intuitionalism raises difficult questions around consent. ‘Dull people have no flame, you know, they lack enthusiasm,’ we read, from Overtaci. ‘They don’t have things that we admire – when a person blazes, and his speech bursts out like flames…it’s a pure delight for the heart, when you gaze at these flame people, isn’t it?’. This remark refers to one of their infinity works; a remark made not for the purpose of an exhibition caption, but in private, in an interview with their doctor. What right have we to read that?
Overtaci’s works are thrilling, regardless of biography. But by curating so close to the artist’s biography, Becoming only worsens the problems it faces. Institutions must curate ambiguity responsibly, not (even unintentionally) perpetuate the stereotype that gender transitioning is exclusively a manifestation of poor mental health.
Becoming only underscores how difficult it is to separate the artistic process from the artist; we assume chronology in curation from the captions, which follow the artist’s biography, but nothing is dated or titled, which only reinforces the sense that the artist never intended their works for public display.
Worst, the exhibition is framed around rising commercial interest, as Overtaci’s works show at the Venice Biennale (2022), in private collections and, perhaps most shockingly, other mental health institutions. The more time you spend in Becoming, the more it seems like mere voyeurism – the curation and perpetuation of the myth of a tortured artist, for economic benefit after their death, and by their estate.
In this respect, Overtaci shares more in common with Vincent van Gogh than the modern Cobra movement on display here.
We Kiss the Earth: Danish Modern Art (1934-1948), Je est un autre: Ernest Mancoba and Sonja Ferlov, and Becoming Ovartaci are on show as part of Cobra 75: Danish Modern Art at Cobra Museum of Modern Art in Amsterdam until 14 May 2023.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
For more, listen to this episode of the EMPIRE LINES podcast, with curators Pim Arts and Winnie Sze
Cobra – Copenhagen, Brussels, and Amsterdam – was a pan-European, Abstract-Surrealist art movement, born out of World War II. Working across diverse media, its artists were united by their social and political engagement, and objectives to express common humanity, work together in collaboration, and make art more accessible to all.
That final city, Amsterdam, hosts a similar trio of exhibitions, celebrating the movement’s 75th anniversary (1948-1951). This ‘triptych’ at the Cobra Museum focuses on the work of the (older) Danish modern artists, who influenced the younger generation. (More Dutch artists can be found in the collection downstairs.)
Its core, We Kiss the Earth, goes before Cobra, subtly curating the history of this international movement through individual stories – particularly women. Franciska Clausen, the ‘trail blazer of Danish art,’ encountered European avant-garde movements through travel and education in Berlin and Paris. Sonja Ferlov Mancoba, long influenced from afar by Alberto Giacometti, was disappointed to find he’d ‘moved on’ from surrealism when she moved into the studio next door in 1936.
Here, Kernn-Larsen’s vaginal trees challenge both binaries of womanhood (as chaste or sexual) and the distinction of human/nature. Binary breaking runs throughout all three exhibitions; we read about the Danish tradition of using humour to challenge the divide of high/low culture, whilst Henry Heerup’s ‘The Peace Bell’ (1944) highlights the catastrophic outcomes when war and peace collide.
Dividing the space are the leading cultural journals Linien (The Line) and Helhesten (Hell Horse), great cover art projected onto curtains and screens. Certainly, the Cobra Museum is lighter, larger than the tent in which these artists famously exhibited together in 1941. With low displays to lean on, and opportunities for viewers to actively participate, We Kiss the Earth is even more accessible than its artists could have hoped.
During the Nazi occupation of Denmark (1940-1945), many artists returned from their travels to contribute to the resistance at home. Their resulting works were spontaneous, abstract, and highly socio-politically engaged, until the Nazis imposed tighter cultural restrictions from 1943. ‘All good art in Denmark is Entartete,’ claimed Carl-Henning Pederson, one of Hell Horse’s cover art contributors, in reference to the Degenerate classification.
The Hell Horse embodies the works of this period: ‘a terrifying portent of calamity’ in Scandinavian myth, transformed by artists into a ‘clumsy and sweet’ plaything, mocking the values of strength, dignity, and Aryan culture paraded by the occupying forces. These cartoons draw as much on the Danish tradition of absurd satire and sarcasm in social coping, as international icons of surrealism. We can’t help but think of Picasso’s ‘Guernica’ (1937) – exhibited the year after in Copenhagen – nor the British surrealist Eileen Agar’s ‘Quadriga’ (1935) – when we see these works, situating them within transnational networks of surrealism.
Questions of influence flow into the second exhibition, Je est un autre: Ernest Mancoba and Sonja Ferlov, which lavishes equal attention upon their individual artistic journeys, and their relationship together. Born in British-colonial South Africa, Autre suggests that Mancoba never ‘came into contact’ with African sculpture (as art) in the country of his birth – only in the European museums of Paris and London.
Masks and sculptures from Africa, ‘Middle America’, and Oceania all greatly influenced the Cobra artists. This interest is charitably interpreted by its curators; ‘further than a fascination for the exotic,’ these artists sought to find ‘similar expressions of human imagination between cultures…viewed and researched with the same open mind as Dutch and ancient art.’
A more critical voice can be found at the Stedelijk, which suggests greater continuity between these artists, and the orientalism and othering which permeated their forebears in cubism, expressionism, surrealism, and abstract art.
Indeed, all three exhibitions are implicitly exhibitions about museums – what gets exhibited, and where. Nowhere is this case more so than Becoming Overtaci, the jarring finale to two thoughtfully curated exhibitions.
Overtaci seems a strange selection in the context of the other show. Connected only by the interest of Cobra artist Asger Jorn, their works are wholly singular, and defy any neat categorisation. Double-sided paintings which ‘see both sides’ of a story. Surrealistic cat-people and aliens from Ancient Egypt appear, all licked with the magical realism of Latin America and Leonora Carrington – influences never mentioned.
As with We Kiss the Earth and Je est un autre, the influence of African artworks on Western practices is well-acknowledged, but Asian influences are scarcely mentioned – remarkable, given that Japanese characters and scripts cover almost every work.
Instead, biography is the focus of Becoming. Born Louis Marcussen in 1894, Overtaci changed their name and gender identity many times during their life, before returning to identify as a man in 1972. These changes are first presented as a form of gender performativity, visible in the various signatures which pepper their paintings.
Until we learn, graphically, how Overtaci castrated themselves in a carpentry workshop, frustrated by the slow progress of their gender reassignment. ‘The whole caboodle in one stroke!,’ the artist proclaims, in a documentary film – here displayed, almost celebrated, as evidence of a Dadaist lifestyle, when it’s a screaming sign of poor mental health.
After returning to Aarhus from their travels in Argentina in the 1920s, Overtaci suffered a mental health breakdown, leading to their permanent, involuntary hospitalisation in Denmark. Their name – meaning ‘Head Lunatic’ or ‘Chief Patient’ in Danish – suggests they lent upon performativity in their life and practise for social coping. Art has long served as a therapeutic alternative to drugs and medication; yet moments of genuine freedom, from bicycle rides, to their bid to build a functional, wooden helicopter, are all trivialised.
It’s important to distinguish between Overtaci and, for instance, Yayoi Kusama; the former’s forced intuitionalism raises difficult questions around consent. ‘Dull people have no flame, you know, they lack enthusiasm,’ we read, from Overtaci. ‘They don’t have things that we admire – when a person blazes, and his speech bursts out like flames…it’s a pure delight for the heart, when you gaze at these flame people, isn’t it?’. This remark refers to one of their infinity works; a remark made not for the purpose of an exhibition caption, but in private, in an interview with their doctor. What right have we to read that?
Overtaci’s works are thrilling, regardless of biography. But by curating so close to the artist’s biography, Becoming only worsens the problems it faces. Institutions must curate ambiguity responsibly, not (even unintentionally) perpetuate the stereotype that gender transitioning is exclusively a manifestation of poor mental health.
Becoming only underscores how difficult it is to separate the artistic process from the artist; we assume chronology in curation from the captions, which follow the artist’s biography, but nothing is dated or titled, which only reinforces the sense that the artist never intended their works for public display.
Worst, the exhibition is framed around rising commercial interest, as Overtaci’s works show at the Venice Biennale (2022), in private collections and, perhaps most shockingly, other mental health institutions. The more time you spend in Becoming, the more it seems like mere voyeurism – the curation and perpetuation of the myth of a tortured artist, for economic benefit after their death, and by their estate.
In this respect, Overtaci shares more in common with Vincent van Gogh than the modern Cobra movement on display here.
We Kiss the Earth: Danish Modern Art (1934-1948), Je est un autre: Ernest Mancoba and Sonja Ferlov, and Becoming Ovartaci are on show as part of Cobra 75: Danish Modern Art at Cobra Museum of Modern Art in Amsterdam until 14 May 2023.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
For more, listen to this episode of the EMPIRE LINES podcast, with curators Pim Arts and Winnie Sze
Cobra – Copenhagen, Brussels, and Amsterdam – was a pan-European, Abstract-Surrealist art movement, born out of World War II. Working across diverse media, its artists were united by their social and political engagement, and objectives to express common humanity, work together in collaboration, and make art more accessible to all.
That final city, Amsterdam, hosts a similar trio of exhibitions, celebrating the movement’s 75th anniversary (1948-1951). This ‘triptych’ at the Cobra Museum focuses on the work of the (older) Danish modern artists, who influenced the younger generation. (More Dutch artists can be found in the collection downstairs.)
Its core, We Kiss the Earth, goes before Cobra, subtly curating the history of this international movement through individual stories – particularly women. Franciska Clausen, the ‘trail blazer of Danish art,’ encountered European avant-garde movements through travel and education in Berlin and Paris. Sonja Ferlov Mancoba, long influenced from afar by Alberto Giacometti, was disappointed to find he’d ‘moved on’ from surrealism when she moved into the studio next door in 1936.
Here, Kernn-Larsen’s vaginal trees challenge both binaries of womanhood (as chaste or sexual) and the distinction of human/nature. Binary breaking runs throughout all three exhibitions; we read about the Danish tradition of using humour to challenge the divide of high/low culture, whilst Henry Heerup’s ‘The Peace Bell’ (1944) highlights the catastrophic outcomes when war and peace collide.
Dividing the space are the leading cultural journals Linien (The Line) and Helhesten (Hell Horse), great cover art projected onto curtains and screens. Certainly, the Cobra Museum is lighter, larger than the tent in which these artists famously exhibited together in 1941. With low displays to lean on, and opportunities for viewers to actively participate, We Kiss the Earth is even more accessible than its artists could have hoped.
During the Nazi occupation of Denmark (1940-1945), many artists returned from their travels to contribute to the resistance at home. Their resulting works were spontaneous, abstract, and highly socio-politically engaged, until the Nazis imposed tighter cultural restrictions from 1943. ‘All good art in Denmark is Entartete,’ claimed Carl-Henning Pederson, one of Hell Horse’s cover art contributors, in reference to the Degenerate classification.
The Hell Horse embodies the works of this period: ‘a terrifying portent of calamity’ in Scandinavian myth, transformed by artists into a ‘clumsy and sweet’ plaything, mocking the values of strength, dignity, and Aryan culture paraded by the occupying forces. These cartoons draw as much on the Danish tradition of absurd satire and sarcasm in social coping, as international icons of surrealism. We can’t help but think of Picasso’s ‘Guernica’ (1937) – exhibited the year after in Copenhagen – nor the British surrealist Eileen Agar’s ‘Quadriga’ (1935) – when we see these works, situating them within transnational networks of surrealism.
Questions of influence flow into the second exhibition, Je est un autre: Ernest Mancoba and Sonja Ferlov, which lavishes equal attention upon their individual artistic journeys, and their relationship together. Born in British-colonial South Africa, Autre suggests that Mancoba never ‘came into contact’ with African sculpture (as art) in the country of his birth – only in the European museums of Paris and London.
Masks and sculptures from Africa, ‘Middle America’, and Oceania all greatly influenced the Cobra artists. This interest is charitably interpreted by its curators; ‘further than a fascination for the exotic,’ these artists sought to find ‘similar expressions of human imagination between cultures…viewed and researched with the same open mind as Dutch and ancient art.’
A more critical voice can be found at the Stedelijk, which suggests greater continuity between these artists, and the orientalism and othering which permeated their forebears in cubism, expressionism, surrealism, and abstract art.
Indeed, all three exhibitions are implicitly exhibitions about museums – what gets exhibited, and where. Nowhere is this case more so than Becoming Overtaci, the jarring finale to two thoughtfully curated exhibitions.
Overtaci seems a strange selection in the context of the other show. Connected only by the interest of Cobra artist Asger Jorn, their works are wholly singular, and defy any neat categorisation. Double-sided paintings which ‘see both sides’ of a story. Surrealistic cat-people and aliens from Ancient Egypt appear, all licked with the magical realism of Latin America and Leonora Carrington – influences never mentioned.
As with We Kiss the Earth and Je est un autre, the influence of African artworks on Western practices is well-acknowledged, but Asian influences are scarcely mentioned – remarkable, given that Japanese characters and scripts cover almost every work.
Instead, biography is the focus of Becoming. Born Louis Marcussen in 1894, Overtaci changed their name and gender identity many times during their life, before returning to identify as a man in 1972. These changes are first presented as a form of gender performativity, visible in the various signatures which pepper their paintings.
Until we learn, graphically, how Overtaci castrated themselves in a carpentry workshop, frustrated by the slow progress of their gender reassignment. ‘The whole caboodle in one stroke!,’ the artist proclaims, in a documentary film – here displayed, almost celebrated, as evidence of a Dadaist lifestyle, when it’s a screaming sign of poor mental health.
After returning to Aarhus from their travels in Argentina in the 1920s, Overtaci suffered a mental health breakdown, leading to their permanent, involuntary hospitalisation in Denmark. Their name – meaning ‘Head Lunatic’ or ‘Chief Patient’ in Danish – suggests they lent upon performativity in their life and practise for social coping. Art has long served as a therapeutic alternative to drugs and medication; yet moments of genuine freedom, from bicycle rides, to their bid to build a functional, wooden helicopter, are all trivialised.
It’s important to distinguish between Overtaci and, for instance, Yayoi Kusama; the former’s forced intuitionalism raises difficult questions around consent. ‘Dull people have no flame, you know, they lack enthusiasm,’ we read, from Overtaci. ‘They don’t have things that we admire – when a person blazes, and his speech bursts out like flames…it’s a pure delight for the heart, when you gaze at these flame people, isn’t it?’. This remark refers to one of their infinity works; a remark made not for the purpose of an exhibition caption, but in private, in an interview with their doctor. What right have we to read that?
Overtaci’s works are thrilling, regardless of biography. But by curating so close to the artist’s biography, Becoming only worsens the problems it faces. Institutions must curate ambiguity responsibly, not (even unintentionally) perpetuate the stereotype that gender transitioning is exclusively a manifestation of poor mental health.
Becoming only underscores how difficult it is to separate the artistic process from the artist; we assume chronology in curation from the captions, which follow the artist’s biography, but nothing is dated or titled, which only reinforces the sense that the artist never intended their works for public display.
Worst, the exhibition is framed around rising commercial interest, as Overtaci’s works show at the Venice Biennale (2022), in private collections and, perhaps most shockingly, other mental health institutions. The more time you spend in Becoming, the more it seems like mere voyeurism – the curation and perpetuation of the myth of a tortured artist, for economic benefit after their death, and by their estate.
In this respect, Overtaci shares more in common with Vincent van Gogh than the modern Cobra movement on display here.
We Kiss the Earth: Danish Modern Art (1934-1948), Je est un autre: Ernest Mancoba and Sonja Ferlov, and Becoming Ovartaci are on show as part of Cobra 75: Danish Modern Art at Cobra Museum of Modern Art in Amsterdam until 14 May 2023.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
For more, listen to this episode of the EMPIRE LINES podcast, with curators Pim Arts and Winnie Sze
Cobra – Copenhagen, Brussels, and Amsterdam – was a pan-European, Abstract-Surrealist art movement, born out of World War II. Working across diverse media, its artists were united by their social and political engagement, and objectives to express common humanity, work together in collaboration, and make art more accessible to all.
That final city, Amsterdam, hosts a similar trio of exhibitions, celebrating the movement’s 75th anniversary (1948-1951). This ‘triptych’ at the Cobra Museum focuses on the work of the (older) Danish modern artists, who influenced the younger generation. (More Dutch artists can be found in the collection downstairs.)
Its core, We Kiss the Earth, goes before Cobra, subtly curating the history of this international movement through individual stories – particularly women. Franciska Clausen, the ‘trail blazer of Danish art,’ encountered European avant-garde movements through travel and education in Berlin and Paris. Sonja Ferlov Mancoba, long influenced from afar by Alberto Giacometti, was disappointed to find he’d ‘moved on’ from surrealism when she moved into the studio next door in 1936.
Here, Kernn-Larsen’s vaginal trees challenge both binaries of womanhood (as chaste or sexual) and the distinction of human/nature. Binary breaking runs throughout all three exhibitions; we read about the Danish tradition of using humour to challenge the divide of high/low culture, whilst Henry Heerup’s ‘The Peace Bell’ (1944) highlights the catastrophic outcomes when war and peace collide.
Dividing the space are the leading cultural journals Linien (The Line) and Helhesten (Hell Horse), great cover art projected onto curtains and screens. Certainly, the Cobra Museum is lighter, larger than the tent in which these artists famously exhibited together in 1941. With low displays to lean on, and opportunities for viewers to actively participate, We Kiss the Earth is even more accessible than its artists could have hoped.
During the Nazi occupation of Denmark (1940-1945), many artists returned from their travels to contribute to the resistance at home. Their resulting works were spontaneous, abstract, and highly socio-politically engaged, until the Nazis imposed tighter cultural restrictions from 1943. ‘All good art in Denmark is Entartete,’ claimed Carl-Henning Pederson, one of Hell Horse’s cover art contributors, in reference to the Degenerate classification.
The Hell Horse embodies the works of this period: ‘a terrifying portent of calamity’ in Scandinavian myth, transformed by artists into a ‘clumsy and sweet’ plaything, mocking the values of strength, dignity, and Aryan culture paraded by the occupying forces. These cartoons draw as much on the Danish tradition of absurd satire and sarcasm in social coping, as international icons of surrealism. We can’t help but think of Picasso’s ‘Guernica’ (1937) – exhibited the year after in Copenhagen – nor the British surrealist Eileen Agar’s ‘Quadriga’ (1935) – when we see these works, situating them within transnational networks of surrealism.
Questions of influence flow into the second exhibition, Je est un autre: Ernest Mancoba and Sonja Ferlov, which lavishes equal attention upon their individual artistic journeys, and their relationship together. Born in British-colonial South Africa, Autre suggests that Mancoba never ‘came into contact’ with African sculpture (as art) in the country of his birth – only in the European museums of Paris and London.
Masks and sculptures from Africa, ‘Middle America’, and Oceania all greatly influenced the Cobra artists. This interest is charitably interpreted by its curators; ‘further than a fascination for the exotic,’ these artists sought to find ‘similar expressions of human imagination between cultures…viewed and researched with the same open mind as Dutch and ancient art.’
A more critical voice can be found at the Stedelijk, which suggests greater continuity between these artists, and the orientalism and othering which permeated their forebears in cubism, expressionism, surrealism, and abstract art.
Indeed, all three exhibitions are implicitly exhibitions about museums – what gets exhibited, and where. Nowhere is this case more so than Becoming Overtaci, the jarring finale to two thoughtfully curated exhibitions.
Overtaci seems a strange selection in the context of the other show. Connected only by the interest of Cobra artist Asger Jorn, their works are wholly singular, and defy any neat categorisation. Double-sided paintings which ‘see both sides’ of a story. Surrealistic cat-people and aliens from Ancient Egypt appear, all licked with the magical realism of Latin America and Leonora Carrington – influences never mentioned.
As with We Kiss the Earth and Je est un autre, the influence of African artworks on Western practices is well-acknowledged, but Asian influences are scarcely mentioned – remarkable, given that Japanese characters and scripts cover almost every work.
Instead, biography is the focus of Becoming. Born Louis Marcussen in 1894, Overtaci changed their name and gender identity many times during their life, before returning to identify as a man in 1972. These changes are first presented as a form of gender performativity, visible in the various signatures which pepper their paintings.
Until we learn, graphically, how Overtaci castrated themselves in a carpentry workshop, frustrated by the slow progress of their gender reassignment. ‘The whole caboodle in one stroke!,’ the artist proclaims, in a documentary film – here displayed, almost celebrated, as evidence of a Dadaist lifestyle, when it’s a screaming sign of poor mental health.
After returning to Aarhus from their travels in Argentina in the 1920s, Overtaci suffered a mental health breakdown, leading to their permanent, involuntary hospitalisation in Denmark. Their name – meaning ‘Head Lunatic’ or ‘Chief Patient’ in Danish – suggests they lent upon performativity in their life and practise for social coping. Art has long served as a therapeutic alternative to drugs and medication; yet moments of genuine freedom, from bicycle rides, to their bid to build a functional, wooden helicopter, are all trivialised.
It’s important to distinguish between Overtaci and, for instance, Yayoi Kusama; the former’s forced intuitionalism raises difficult questions around consent. ‘Dull people have no flame, you know, they lack enthusiasm,’ we read, from Overtaci. ‘They don’t have things that we admire – when a person blazes, and his speech bursts out like flames…it’s a pure delight for the heart, when you gaze at these flame people, isn’t it?’. This remark refers to one of their infinity works; a remark made not for the purpose of an exhibition caption, but in private, in an interview with their doctor. What right have we to read that?
Overtaci’s works are thrilling, regardless of biography. But by curating so close to the artist’s biography, Becoming only worsens the problems it faces. Institutions must curate ambiguity responsibly, not (even unintentionally) perpetuate the stereotype that gender transitioning is exclusively a manifestation of poor mental health.
Becoming only underscores how difficult it is to separate the artistic process from the artist; we assume chronology in curation from the captions, which follow the artist’s biography, but nothing is dated or titled, which only reinforces the sense that the artist never intended their works for public display.
Worst, the exhibition is framed around rising commercial interest, as Overtaci’s works show at the Venice Biennale (2022), in private collections and, perhaps most shockingly, other mental health institutions. The more time you spend in Becoming, the more it seems like mere voyeurism – the curation and perpetuation of the myth of a tortured artist, for economic benefit after their death, and by their estate.
In this respect, Overtaci shares more in common with Vincent van Gogh than the modern Cobra movement on display here.
We Kiss the Earth: Danish Modern Art (1934-1948), Je est un autre: Ernest Mancoba and Sonja Ferlov, and Becoming Ovartaci are on show as part of Cobra 75: Danish Modern Art at Cobra Museum of Modern Art in Amsterdam until 14 May 2023.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
For more, listen to this episode of the EMPIRE LINES podcast, with curators Pim Arts and Winnie Sze
Cobra – Copenhagen, Brussels, and Amsterdam – was a pan-European, Abstract-Surrealist art movement, born out of World War II. Working across diverse media, its artists were united by their social and political engagement, and objectives to express common humanity, work together in collaboration, and make art more accessible to all.
That final city, Amsterdam, hosts a similar trio of exhibitions, celebrating the movement’s 75th anniversary (1948-1951). This ‘triptych’ at the Cobra Museum focuses on the work of the (older) Danish modern artists, who influenced the younger generation. (More Dutch artists can be found in the collection downstairs.)
Its core, We Kiss the Earth, goes before Cobra, subtly curating the history of this international movement through individual stories – particularly women. Franciska Clausen, the ‘trail blazer of Danish art,’ encountered European avant-garde movements through travel and education in Berlin and Paris. Sonja Ferlov Mancoba, long influenced from afar by Alberto Giacometti, was disappointed to find he’d ‘moved on’ from surrealism when she moved into the studio next door in 1936.
Here, Kernn-Larsen’s vaginal trees challenge both binaries of womanhood (as chaste or sexual) and the distinction of human/nature. Binary breaking runs throughout all three exhibitions; we read about the Danish tradition of using humour to challenge the divide of high/low culture, whilst Henry Heerup’s ‘The Peace Bell’ (1944) highlights the catastrophic outcomes when war and peace collide.
Dividing the space are the leading cultural journals Linien (The Line) and Helhesten (Hell Horse), great cover art projected onto curtains and screens. Certainly, the Cobra Museum is lighter, larger than the tent in which these artists famously exhibited together in 1941. With low displays to lean on, and opportunities for viewers to actively participate, We Kiss the Earth is even more accessible than its artists could have hoped.
During the Nazi occupation of Denmark (1940-1945), many artists returned from their travels to contribute to the resistance at home. Their resulting works were spontaneous, abstract, and highly socio-politically engaged, until the Nazis imposed tighter cultural restrictions from 1943. ‘All good art in Denmark is Entartete,’ claimed Carl-Henning Pederson, one of Hell Horse’s cover art contributors, in reference to the Degenerate classification.
The Hell Horse embodies the works of this period: ‘a terrifying portent of calamity’ in Scandinavian myth, transformed by artists into a ‘clumsy and sweet’ plaything, mocking the values of strength, dignity, and Aryan culture paraded by the occupying forces. These cartoons draw as much on the Danish tradition of absurd satire and sarcasm in social coping, as international icons of surrealism. We can’t help but think of Picasso’s ‘Guernica’ (1937) – exhibited the year after in Copenhagen – nor the British surrealist Eileen Agar’s ‘Quadriga’ (1935) – when we see these works, situating them within transnational networks of surrealism.
Questions of influence flow into the second exhibition, Je est un autre: Ernest Mancoba and Sonja Ferlov, which lavishes equal attention upon their individual artistic journeys, and their relationship together. Born in British-colonial South Africa, Autre suggests that Mancoba never ‘came into contact’ with African sculpture (as art) in the country of his birth – only in the European museums of Paris and London.
Masks and sculptures from Africa, ‘Middle America’, and Oceania all greatly influenced the Cobra artists. This interest is charitably interpreted by its curators; ‘further than a fascination for the exotic,’ these artists sought to find ‘similar expressions of human imagination between cultures…viewed and researched with the same open mind as Dutch and ancient art.’
A more critical voice can be found at the Stedelijk, which suggests greater continuity between these artists, and the orientalism and othering which permeated their forebears in cubism, expressionism, surrealism, and abstract art.
Indeed, all three exhibitions are implicitly exhibitions about museums – what gets exhibited, and where. Nowhere is this case more so than Becoming Overtaci, the jarring finale to two thoughtfully curated exhibitions.
Overtaci seems a strange selection in the context of the other show. Connected only by the interest of Cobra artist Asger Jorn, their works are wholly singular, and defy any neat categorisation. Double-sided paintings which ‘see both sides’ of a story. Surrealistic cat-people and aliens from Ancient Egypt appear, all licked with the magical realism of Latin America and Leonora Carrington – influences never mentioned.
As with We Kiss the Earth and Je est un autre, the influence of African artworks on Western practices is well-acknowledged, but Asian influences are scarcely mentioned – remarkable, given that Japanese characters and scripts cover almost every work.
Instead, biography is the focus of Becoming. Born Louis Marcussen in 1894, Overtaci changed their name and gender identity many times during their life, before returning to identify as a man in 1972. These changes are first presented as a form of gender performativity, visible in the various signatures which pepper their paintings.
Until we learn, graphically, how Overtaci castrated themselves in a carpentry workshop, frustrated by the slow progress of their gender reassignment. ‘The whole caboodle in one stroke!,’ the artist proclaims, in a documentary film – here displayed, almost celebrated, as evidence of a Dadaist lifestyle, when it’s a screaming sign of poor mental health.
After returning to Aarhus from their travels in Argentina in the 1920s, Overtaci suffered a mental health breakdown, leading to their permanent, involuntary hospitalisation in Denmark. Their name – meaning ‘Head Lunatic’ or ‘Chief Patient’ in Danish – suggests they lent upon performativity in their life and practise for social coping. Art has long served as a therapeutic alternative to drugs and medication; yet moments of genuine freedom, from bicycle rides, to their bid to build a functional, wooden helicopter, are all trivialised.
It’s important to distinguish between Overtaci and, for instance, Yayoi Kusama; the former’s forced intuitionalism raises difficult questions around consent. ‘Dull people have no flame, you know, they lack enthusiasm,’ we read, from Overtaci. ‘They don’t have things that we admire – when a person blazes, and his speech bursts out like flames…it’s a pure delight for the heart, when you gaze at these flame people, isn’t it?’. This remark refers to one of their infinity works; a remark made not for the purpose of an exhibition caption, but in private, in an interview with their doctor. What right have we to read that?
Overtaci’s works are thrilling, regardless of biography. But by curating so close to the artist’s biography, Becoming only worsens the problems it faces. Institutions must curate ambiguity responsibly, not (even unintentionally) perpetuate the stereotype that gender transitioning is exclusively a manifestation of poor mental health.
Becoming only underscores how difficult it is to separate the artistic process from the artist; we assume chronology in curation from the captions, which follow the artist’s biography, but nothing is dated or titled, which only reinforces the sense that the artist never intended their works for public display.
Worst, the exhibition is framed around rising commercial interest, as Overtaci’s works show at the Venice Biennale (2022), in private collections and, perhaps most shockingly, other mental health institutions. The more time you spend in Becoming, the more it seems like mere voyeurism – the curation and perpetuation of the myth of a tortured artist, for economic benefit after their death, and by their estate.
In this respect, Overtaci shares more in common with Vincent van Gogh than the modern Cobra movement on display here.
We Kiss the Earth: Danish Modern Art (1934-1948), Je est un autre: Ernest Mancoba and Sonja Ferlov, and Becoming Ovartaci are on show as part of Cobra 75: Danish Modern Art at Cobra Museum of Modern Art in Amsterdam until 14 May 2023.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
For more, listen to this episode of the EMPIRE LINES podcast, with curators Pim Arts and Winnie Sze
Cobra – Copenhagen, Brussels, and Amsterdam – was a pan-European, Abstract-Surrealist art movement, born out of World War II. Working across diverse media, its artists were united by their social and political engagement, and objectives to express common humanity, work together in collaboration, and make art more accessible to all.
That final city, Amsterdam, hosts a similar trio of exhibitions, celebrating the movement’s 75th anniversary (1948-1951). This ‘triptych’ at the Cobra Museum focuses on the work of the (older) Danish modern artists, who influenced the younger generation. (More Dutch artists can be found in the collection downstairs.)
Its core, We Kiss the Earth, goes before Cobra, subtly curating the history of this international movement through individual stories – particularly women. Franciska Clausen, the ‘trail blazer of Danish art,’ encountered European avant-garde movements through travel and education in Berlin and Paris. Sonja Ferlov Mancoba, long influenced from afar by Alberto Giacometti, was disappointed to find he’d ‘moved on’ from surrealism when she moved into the studio next door in 1936.
Here, Kernn-Larsen’s vaginal trees challenge both binaries of womanhood (as chaste or sexual) and the distinction of human/nature. Binary breaking runs throughout all three exhibitions; we read about the Danish tradition of using humour to challenge the divide of high/low culture, whilst Henry Heerup’s ‘The Peace Bell’ (1944) highlights the catastrophic outcomes when war and peace collide.
Dividing the space are the leading cultural journals Linien (The Line) and Helhesten (Hell Horse), great cover art projected onto curtains and screens. Certainly, the Cobra Museum is lighter, larger than the tent in which these artists famously exhibited together in 1941. With low displays to lean on, and opportunities for viewers to actively participate, We Kiss the Earth is even more accessible than its artists could have hoped.
During the Nazi occupation of Denmark (1940-1945), many artists returned from their travels to contribute to the resistance at home. Their resulting works were spontaneous, abstract, and highly socio-politically engaged, until the Nazis imposed tighter cultural restrictions from 1943. ‘All good art in Denmark is Entartete,’ claimed Carl-Henning Pederson, one of Hell Horse’s cover art contributors, in reference to the Degenerate classification.
The Hell Horse embodies the works of this period: ‘a terrifying portent of calamity’ in Scandinavian myth, transformed by artists into a ‘clumsy and sweet’ plaything, mocking the values of strength, dignity, and Aryan culture paraded by the occupying forces. These cartoons draw as much on the Danish tradition of absurd satire and sarcasm in social coping, as international icons of surrealism. We can’t help but think of Picasso’s ‘Guernica’ (1937) – exhibited the year after in Copenhagen – nor the British surrealist Eileen Agar’s ‘Quadriga’ (1935) – when we see these works, situating them within transnational networks of surrealism.
Questions of influence flow into the second exhibition, Je est un autre: Ernest Mancoba and Sonja Ferlov, which lavishes equal attention upon their individual artistic journeys, and their relationship together. Born in British-colonial South Africa, Autre suggests that Mancoba never ‘came into contact’ with African sculpture (as art) in the country of his birth – only in the European museums of Paris and London.
Masks and sculptures from Africa, ‘Middle America’, and Oceania all greatly influenced the Cobra artists. This interest is charitably interpreted by its curators; ‘further than a fascination for the exotic,’ these artists sought to find ‘similar expressions of human imagination between cultures…viewed and researched with the same open mind as Dutch and ancient art.’
A more critical voice can be found at the Stedelijk, which suggests greater continuity between these artists, and the orientalism and othering which permeated their forebears in cubism, expressionism, surrealism, and abstract art.
Indeed, all three exhibitions are implicitly exhibitions about museums – what gets exhibited, and where. Nowhere is this case more so than Becoming Overtaci, the jarring finale to two thoughtfully curated exhibitions.
Overtaci seems a strange selection in the context of the other show. Connected only by the interest of Cobra artist Asger Jorn, their works are wholly singular, and defy any neat categorisation. Double-sided paintings which ‘see both sides’ of a story. Surrealistic cat-people and aliens from Ancient Egypt appear, all licked with the magical realism of Latin America and Leonora Carrington – influences never mentioned.
As with We Kiss the Earth and Je est un autre, the influence of African artworks on Western practices is well-acknowledged, but Asian influences are scarcely mentioned – remarkable, given that Japanese characters and scripts cover almost every work.
Instead, biography is the focus of Becoming. Born Louis Marcussen in 1894, Overtaci changed their name and gender identity many times during their life, before returning to identify as a man in 1972. These changes are first presented as a form of gender performativity, visible in the various signatures which pepper their paintings.
Until we learn, graphically, how Overtaci castrated themselves in a carpentry workshop, frustrated by the slow progress of their gender reassignment. ‘The whole caboodle in one stroke!,’ the artist proclaims, in a documentary film – here displayed, almost celebrated, as evidence of a Dadaist lifestyle, when it’s a screaming sign of poor mental health.
After returning to Aarhus from their travels in Argentina in the 1920s, Overtaci suffered a mental health breakdown, leading to their permanent, involuntary hospitalisation in Denmark. Their name – meaning ‘Head Lunatic’ or ‘Chief Patient’ in Danish – suggests they lent upon performativity in their life and practise for social coping. Art has long served as a therapeutic alternative to drugs and medication; yet moments of genuine freedom, from bicycle rides, to their bid to build a functional, wooden helicopter, are all trivialised.
It’s important to distinguish between Overtaci and, for instance, Yayoi Kusama; the former’s forced intuitionalism raises difficult questions around consent. ‘Dull people have no flame, you know, they lack enthusiasm,’ we read, from Overtaci. ‘They don’t have things that we admire – when a person blazes, and his speech bursts out like flames…it’s a pure delight for the heart, when you gaze at these flame people, isn’t it?’. This remark refers to one of their infinity works; a remark made not for the purpose of an exhibition caption, but in private, in an interview with their doctor. What right have we to read that?
Overtaci’s works are thrilling, regardless of biography. But by curating so close to the artist’s biography, Becoming only worsens the problems it faces. Institutions must curate ambiguity responsibly, not (even unintentionally) perpetuate the stereotype that gender transitioning is exclusively a manifestation of poor mental health.
Becoming only underscores how difficult it is to separate the artistic process from the artist; we assume chronology in curation from the captions, which follow the artist’s biography, but nothing is dated or titled, which only reinforces the sense that the artist never intended their works for public display.
Worst, the exhibition is framed around rising commercial interest, as Overtaci’s works show at the Venice Biennale (2022), in private collections and, perhaps most shockingly, other mental health institutions. The more time you spend in Becoming, the more it seems like mere voyeurism – the curation and perpetuation of the myth of a tortured artist, for economic benefit after their death, and by their estate.
In this respect, Overtaci shares more in common with Vincent van Gogh than the modern Cobra movement on display here.
We Kiss the Earth: Danish Modern Art (1934-1948), Je est un autre: Ernest Mancoba and Sonja Ferlov, and Becoming Ovartaci are on show as part of Cobra 75: Danish Modern Art at Cobra Museum of Modern Art in Amsterdam until 14 May 2023.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
For more, listen to this episode of the EMPIRE LINES podcast, with curators Pim Arts and Winnie Sze
Cobra – Copenhagen, Brussels, and Amsterdam – was a pan-European, Abstract-Surrealist art movement, born out of World War II. Working across diverse media, its artists were united by their social and political engagement, and objectives to express common humanity, work together in collaboration, and make art more accessible to all.
That final city, Amsterdam, hosts a similar trio of exhibitions, celebrating the movement’s 75th anniversary (1948-1951). This ‘triptych’ at the Cobra Museum focuses on the work of the (older) Danish modern artists, who influenced the younger generation. (More Dutch artists can be found in the collection downstairs.)
Its core, We Kiss the Earth, goes before Cobra, subtly curating the history of this international movement through individual stories – particularly women. Franciska Clausen, the ‘trail blazer of Danish art,’ encountered European avant-garde movements through travel and education in Berlin and Paris. Sonja Ferlov Mancoba, long influenced from afar by Alberto Giacometti, was disappointed to find he’d ‘moved on’ from surrealism when she moved into the studio next door in 1936.
Here, Kernn-Larsen’s vaginal trees challenge both binaries of womanhood (as chaste or sexual) and the distinction of human/nature. Binary breaking runs throughout all three exhibitions; we read about the Danish tradition of using humour to challenge the divide of high/low culture, whilst Henry Heerup’s ‘The Peace Bell’ (1944) highlights the catastrophic outcomes when war and peace collide.
Dividing the space are the leading cultural journals Linien (The Line) and Helhesten (Hell Horse), great cover art projected onto curtains and screens. Certainly, the Cobra Museum is lighter, larger than the tent in which these artists famously exhibited together in 1941. With low displays to lean on, and opportunities for viewers to actively participate, We Kiss the Earth is even more accessible than its artists could have hoped.
During the Nazi occupation of Denmark (1940-1945), many artists returned from their travels to contribute to the resistance at home. Their resulting works were spontaneous, abstract, and highly socio-politically engaged, until the Nazis imposed tighter cultural restrictions from 1943. ‘All good art in Denmark is Entartete,’ claimed Carl-Henning Pederson, one of Hell Horse’s cover art contributors, in reference to the Degenerate classification.
The Hell Horse embodies the works of this period: ‘a terrifying portent of calamity’ in Scandinavian myth, transformed by artists into a ‘clumsy and sweet’ plaything, mocking the values of strength, dignity, and Aryan culture paraded by the occupying forces. These cartoons draw as much on the Danish tradition of absurd satire and sarcasm in social coping, as international icons of surrealism. We can’t help but think of Picasso’s ‘Guernica’ (1937) – exhibited the year after in Copenhagen – nor the British surrealist Eileen Agar’s ‘Quadriga’ (1935) – when we see these works, situating them within transnational networks of surrealism.
Questions of influence flow into the second exhibition, Je est un autre: Ernest Mancoba and Sonja Ferlov, which lavishes equal attention upon their individual artistic journeys, and their relationship together. Born in British-colonial South Africa, Autre suggests that Mancoba never ‘came into contact’ with African sculpture (as art) in the country of his birth – only in the European museums of Paris and London.
Masks and sculptures from Africa, ‘Middle America’, and Oceania all greatly influenced the Cobra artists. This interest is charitably interpreted by its curators; ‘further than a fascination for the exotic,’ these artists sought to find ‘similar expressions of human imagination between cultures…viewed and researched with the same open mind as Dutch and ancient art.’
A more critical voice can be found at the Stedelijk, which suggests greater continuity between these artists, and the orientalism and othering which permeated their forebears in cubism, expressionism, surrealism, and abstract art.
Indeed, all three exhibitions are implicitly exhibitions about museums – what gets exhibited, and where. Nowhere is this case more so than Becoming Overtaci, the jarring finale to two thoughtfully curated exhibitions.
Overtaci seems a strange selection in the context of the other show. Connected only by the interest of Cobra artist Asger Jorn, their works are wholly singular, and defy any neat categorisation. Double-sided paintings which ‘see both sides’ of a story. Surrealistic cat-people and aliens from Ancient Egypt appear, all licked with the magical realism of Latin America and Leonora Carrington – influences never mentioned.
As with We Kiss the Earth and Je est un autre, the influence of African artworks on Western practices is well-acknowledged, but Asian influences are scarcely mentioned – remarkable, given that Japanese characters and scripts cover almost every work.
Instead, biography is the focus of Becoming. Born Louis Marcussen in 1894, Overtaci changed their name and gender identity many times during their life, before returning to identify as a man in 1972. These changes are first presented as a form of gender performativity, visible in the various signatures which pepper their paintings.
Until we learn, graphically, how Overtaci castrated themselves in a carpentry workshop, frustrated by the slow progress of their gender reassignment. ‘The whole caboodle in one stroke!,’ the artist proclaims, in a documentary film – here displayed, almost celebrated, as evidence of a Dadaist lifestyle, when it’s a screaming sign of poor mental health.
After returning to Aarhus from their travels in Argentina in the 1920s, Overtaci suffered a mental health breakdown, leading to their permanent, involuntary hospitalisation in Denmark. Their name – meaning ‘Head Lunatic’ or ‘Chief Patient’ in Danish – suggests they lent upon performativity in their life and practise for social coping. Art has long served as a therapeutic alternative to drugs and medication; yet moments of genuine freedom, from bicycle rides, to their bid to build a functional, wooden helicopter, are all trivialised.
It’s important to distinguish between Overtaci and, for instance, Yayoi Kusama; the former’s forced intuitionalism raises difficult questions around consent. ‘Dull people have no flame, you know, they lack enthusiasm,’ we read, from Overtaci. ‘They don’t have things that we admire – when a person blazes, and his speech bursts out like flames…it’s a pure delight for the heart, when you gaze at these flame people, isn’t it?’. This remark refers to one of their infinity works; a remark made not for the purpose of an exhibition caption, but in private, in an interview with their doctor. What right have we to read that?
Overtaci’s works are thrilling, regardless of biography. But by curating so close to the artist’s biography, Becoming only worsens the problems it faces. Institutions must curate ambiguity responsibly, not (even unintentionally) perpetuate the stereotype that gender transitioning is exclusively a manifestation of poor mental health.
Becoming only underscores how difficult it is to separate the artistic process from the artist; we assume chronology in curation from the captions, which follow the artist’s biography, but nothing is dated or titled, which only reinforces the sense that the artist never intended their works for public display.
Worst, the exhibition is framed around rising commercial interest, as Overtaci’s works show at the Venice Biennale (2022), in private collections and, perhaps most shockingly, other mental health institutions. The more time you spend in Becoming, the more it seems like mere voyeurism – the curation and perpetuation of the myth of a tortured artist, for economic benefit after their death, and by their estate.
In this respect, Overtaci shares more in common with Vincent van Gogh than the modern Cobra movement on display here.
We Kiss the Earth: Danish Modern Art (1934-1948), Je est un autre: Ernest Mancoba and Sonja Ferlov, and Becoming Ovartaci are on show as part of Cobra 75: Danish Modern Art at Cobra Museum of Modern Art in Amsterdam until 14 May 2023.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
For more, listen to this episode of the EMPIRE LINES podcast, with curators Pim Arts and Winnie Sze
Cobra – Copenhagen, Brussels, and Amsterdam – was a pan-European, Abstract-Surrealist art movement, born out of World War II. Working across diverse media, its artists were united by their social and political engagement, and objectives to express common humanity, work together in collaboration, and make art more accessible to all.
That final city, Amsterdam, hosts a similar trio of exhibitions, celebrating the movement’s 75th anniversary (1948-1951). This ‘triptych’ at the Cobra Museum focuses on the work of the (older) Danish modern artists, who influenced the younger generation. (More Dutch artists can be found in the collection downstairs.)
Its core, We Kiss the Earth, goes before Cobra, subtly curating the history of this international movement through individual stories – particularly women. Franciska Clausen, the ‘trail blazer of Danish art,’ encountered European avant-garde movements through travel and education in Berlin and Paris. Sonja Ferlov Mancoba, long influenced from afar by Alberto Giacometti, was disappointed to find he’d ‘moved on’ from surrealism when she moved into the studio next door in 1936.
Here, Kernn-Larsen’s vaginal trees challenge both binaries of womanhood (as chaste or sexual) and the distinction of human/nature. Binary breaking runs throughout all three exhibitions; we read about the Danish tradition of using humour to challenge the divide of high/low culture, whilst Henry Heerup’s ‘The Peace Bell’ (1944) highlights the catastrophic outcomes when war and peace collide.
Dividing the space are the leading cultural journals Linien (The Line) and Helhesten (Hell Horse), great cover art projected onto curtains and screens. Certainly, the Cobra Museum is lighter, larger than the tent in which these artists famously exhibited together in 1941. With low displays to lean on, and opportunities for viewers to actively participate, We Kiss the Earth is even more accessible than its artists could have hoped.
During the Nazi occupation of Denmark (1940-1945), many artists returned from their travels to contribute to the resistance at home. Their resulting works were spontaneous, abstract, and highly socio-politically engaged, until the Nazis imposed tighter cultural restrictions from 1943. ‘All good art in Denmark is Entartete,’ claimed Carl-Henning Pederson, one of Hell Horse’s cover art contributors, in reference to the Degenerate classification.
The Hell Horse embodies the works of this period: ‘a terrifying portent of calamity’ in Scandinavian myth, transformed by artists into a ‘clumsy and sweet’ plaything, mocking the values of strength, dignity, and Aryan culture paraded by the occupying forces. These cartoons draw as much on the Danish tradition of absurd satire and sarcasm in social coping, as international icons of surrealism. We can’t help but think of Picasso’s ‘Guernica’ (1937) – exhibited the year after in Copenhagen – nor the British surrealist Eileen Agar’s ‘Quadriga’ (1935) – when we see these works, situating them within transnational networks of surrealism.
Questions of influence flow into the second exhibition, Je est un autre: Ernest Mancoba and Sonja Ferlov, which lavishes equal attention upon their individual artistic journeys, and their relationship together. Born in British-colonial South Africa, Autre suggests that Mancoba never ‘came into contact’ with African sculpture (as art) in the country of his birth – only in the European museums of Paris and London.
Masks and sculptures from Africa, ‘Middle America’, and Oceania all greatly influenced the Cobra artists. This interest is charitably interpreted by its curators; ‘further than a fascination for the exotic,’ these artists sought to find ‘similar expressions of human imagination between cultures…viewed and researched with the same open mind as Dutch and ancient art.’
A more critical voice can be found at the Stedelijk, which suggests greater continuity between these artists, and the orientalism and othering which permeated their forebears in cubism, expressionism, surrealism, and abstract art.
Indeed, all three exhibitions are implicitly exhibitions about museums – what gets exhibited, and where. Nowhere is this case more so than Becoming Overtaci, the jarring finale to two thoughtfully curated exhibitions.
Overtaci seems a strange selection in the context of the other show. Connected only by the interest of Cobra artist Asger Jorn, their works are wholly singular, and defy any neat categorisation. Double-sided paintings which ‘see both sides’ of a story. Surrealistic cat-people and aliens from Ancient Egypt appear, all licked with the magical realism of Latin America and Leonora Carrington – influences never mentioned.
As with We Kiss the Earth and Je est un autre, the influence of African artworks on Western practices is well-acknowledged, but Asian influences are scarcely mentioned – remarkable, given that Japanese characters and scripts cover almost every work.
Instead, biography is the focus of Becoming. Born Louis Marcussen in 1894, Overtaci changed their name and gender identity many times during their life, before returning to identify as a man in 1972. These changes are first presented as a form of gender performativity, visible in the various signatures which pepper their paintings.
Until we learn, graphically, how Overtaci castrated themselves in a carpentry workshop, frustrated by the slow progress of their gender reassignment. ‘The whole caboodle in one stroke!,’ the artist proclaims, in a documentary film – here displayed, almost celebrated, as evidence of a Dadaist lifestyle, when it’s a screaming sign of poor mental health.
After returning to Aarhus from their travels in Argentina in the 1920s, Overtaci suffered a mental health breakdown, leading to their permanent, involuntary hospitalisation in Denmark. Their name – meaning ‘Head Lunatic’ or ‘Chief Patient’ in Danish – suggests they lent upon performativity in their life and practise for social coping. Art has long served as a therapeutic alternative to drugs and medication; yet moments of genuine freedom, from bicycle rides, to their bid to build a functional, wooden helicopter, are all trivialised.
It’s important to distinguish between Overtaci and, for instance, Yayoi Kusama; the former’s forced intuitionalism raises difficult questions around consent. ‘Dull people have no flame, you know, they lack enthusiasm,’ we read, from Overtaci. ‘They don’t have things that we admire – when a person blazes, and his speech bursts out like flames…it’s a pure delight for the heart, when you gaze at these flame people, isn’t it?’. This remark refers to one of their infinity works; a remark made not for the purpose of an exhibition caption, but in private, in an interview with their doctor. What right have we to read that?
Overtaci’s works are thrilling, regardless of biography. But by curating so close to the artist’s biography, Becoming only worsens the problems it faces. Institutions must curate ambiguity responsibly, not (even unintentionally) perpetuate the stereotype that gender transitioning is exclusively a manifestation of poor mental health.
Becoming only underscores how difficult it is to separate the artistic process from the artist; we assume chronology in curation from the captions, which follow the artist’s biography, but nothing is dated or titled, which only reinforces the sense that the artist never intended their works for public display.
Worst, the exhibition is framed around rising commercial interest, as Overtaci’s works show at the Venice Biennale (2022), in private collections and, perhaps most shockingly, other mental health institutions. The more time you spend in Becoming, the more it seems like mere voyeurism – the curation and perpetuation of the myth of a tortured artist, for economic benefit after their death, and by their estate.
In this respect, Overtaci shares more in common with Vincent van Gogh than the modern Cobra movement on display here.
We Kiss the Earth: Danish Modern Art (1934-1948), Je est un autre: Ernest Mancoba and Sonja Ferlov, and Becoming Ovartaci are on show as part of Cobra 75: Danish Modern Art at Cobra Museum of Modern Art in Amsterdam until 14 May 2023.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
For more, listen to this episode of the EMPIRE LINES podcast, with curators Pim Arts and Winnie Sze
Cobra – Copenhagen, Brussels, and Amsterdam – was a pan-European, Abstract-Surrealist art movement, born out of World War II. Working across diverse media, its artists were united by their social and political engagement, and objectives to express common humanity, work together in collaboration, and make art more accessible to all.
That final city, Amsterdam, hosts a similar trio of exhibitions, celebrating the movement’s 75th anniversary (1948-1951). This ‘triptych’ at the Cobra Museum focuses on the work of the (older) Danish modern artists, who influenced the younger generation. (More Dutch artists can be found in the collection downstairs.)
Its core, We Kiss the Earth, goes before Cobra, subtly curating the history of this international movement through individual stories – particularly women. Franciska Clausen, the ‘trail blazer of Danish art,’ encountered European avant-garde movements through travel and education in Berlin and Paris. Sonja Ferlov Mancoba, long influenced from afar by Alberto Giacometti, was disappointed to find he’d ‘moved on’ from surrealism when she moved into the studio next door in 1936.
Here, Kernn-Larsen’s vaginal trees challenge both binaries of womanhood (as chaste or sexual) and the distinction of human/nature. Binary breaking runs throughout all three exhibitions; we read about the Danish tradition of using humour to challenge the divide of high/low culture, whilst Henry Heerup’s ‘The Peace Bell’ (1944) highlights the catastrophic outcomes when war and peace collide.
Dividing the space are the leading cultural journals Linien (The Line) and Helhesten (Hell Horse), great cover art projected onto curtains and screens. Certainly, the Cobra Museum is lighter, larger than the tent in which these artists famously exhibited together in 1941. With low displays to lean on, and opportunities for viewers to actively participate, We Kiss the Earth is even more accessible than its artists could have hoped.
During the Nazi occupation of Denmark (1940-1945), many artists returned from their travels to contribute to the resistance at home. Their resulting works were spontaneous, abstract, and highly socio-politically engaged, until the Nazis imposed tighter cultural restrictions from 1943. ‘All good art in Denmark is Entartete,’ claimed Carl-Henning Pederson, one of Hell Horse’s cover art contributors, in reference to the Degenerate classification.
The Hell Horse embodies the works of this period: ‘a terrifying portent of calamity’ in Scandinavian myth, transformed by artists into a ‘clumsy and sweet’ plaything, mocking the values of strength, dignity, and Aryan culture paraded by the occupying forces. These cartoons draw as much on the Danish tradition of absurd satire and sarcasm in social coping, as international icons of surrealism. We can’t help but think of Picasso’s ‘Guernica’ (1937) – exhibited the year after in Copenhagen – nor the British surrealist Eileen Agar’s ‘Quadriga’ (1935) – when we see these works, situating them within transnational networks of surrealism.
Questions of influence flow into the second exhibition, Je est un autre: Ernest Mancoba and Sonja Ferlov, which lavishes equal attention upon their individual artistic journeys, and their relationship together. Born in British-colonial South Africa, Autre suggests that Mancoba never ‘came into contact’ with African sculpture (as art) in the country of his birth – only in the European museums of Paris and London.
Masks and sculptures from Africa, ‘Middle America’, and Oceania all greatly influenced the Cobra artists. This interest is charitably interpreted by its curators; ‘further than a fascination for the exotic,’ these artists sought to find ‘similar expressions of human imagination between cultures…viewed and researched with the same open mind as Dutch and ancient art.’
A more critical voice can be found at the Stedelijk, which suggests greater continuity between these artists, and the orientalism and othering which permeated their forebears in cubism, expressionism, surrealism, and abstract art.
Indeed, all three exhibitions are implicitly exhibitions about museums – what gets exhibited, and where. Nowhere is this case more so than Becoming Overtaci, the jarring finale to two thoughtfully curated exhibitions.
Overtaci seems a strange selection in the context of the other show. Connected only by the interest of Cobra artist Asger Jorn, their works are wholly singular, and defy any neat categorisation. Double-sided paintings which ‘see both sides’ of a story. Surrealistic cat-people and aliens from Ancient Egypt appear, all licked with the magical realism of Latin America and Leonora Carrington – influences never mentioned.
As with We Kiss the Earth and Je est un autre, the influence of African artworks on Western practices is well-acknowledged, but Asian influences are scarcely mentioned – remarkable, given that Japanese characters and scripts cover almost every work.
Instead, biography is the focus of Becoming. Born Louis Marcussen in 1894, Overtaci changed their name and gender identity many times during their life, before returning to identify as a man in 1972. These changes are first presented as a form of gender performativity, visible in the various signatures which pepper their paintings.
Until we learn, graphically, how Overtaci castrated themselves in a carpentry workshop, frustrated by the slow progress of their gender reassignment. ‘The whole caboodle in one stroke!,’ the artist proclaims, in a documentary film – here displayed, almost celebrated, as evidence of a Dadaist lifestyle, when it’s a screaming sign of poor mental health.
After returning to Aarhus from their travels in Argentina in the 1920s, Overtaci suffered a mental health breakdown, leading to their permanent, involuntary hospitalisation in Denmark. Their name – meaning ‘Head Lunatic’ or ‘Chief Patient’ in Danish – suggests they lent upon performativity in their life and practise for social coping. Art has long served as a therapeutic alternative to drugs and medication; yet moments of genuine freedom, from bicycle rides, to their bid to build a functional, wooden helicopter, are all trivialised.
It’s important to distinguish between Overtaci and, for instance, Yayoi Kusama; the former’s forced intuitionalism raises difficult questions around consent. ‘Dull people have no flame, you know, they lack enthusiasm,’ we read, from Overtaci. ‘They don’t have things that we admire – when a person blazes, and his speech bursts out like flames…it’s a pure delight for the heart, when you gaze at these flame people, isn’t it?’. This remark refers to one of their infinity works; a remark made not for the purpose of an exhibition caption, but in private, in an interview with their doctor. What right have we to read that?
Overtaci’s works are thrilling, regardless of biography. But by curating so close to the artist’s biography, Becoming only worsens the problems it faces. Institutions must curate ambiguity responsibly, not (even unintentionally) perpetuate the stereotype that gender transitioning is exclusively a manifestation of poor mental health.
Becoming only underscores how difficult it is to separate the artistic process from the artist; we assume chronology in curation from the captions, which follow the artist’s biography, but nothing is dated or titled, which only reinforces the sense that the artist never intended their works for public display.
Worst, the exhibition is framed around rising commercial interest, as Overtaci’s works show at the Venice Biennale (2022), in private collections and, perhaps most shockingly, other mental health institutions. The more time you spend in Becoming, the more it seems like mere voyeurism – the curation and perpetuation of the myth of a tortured artist, for economic benefit after their death, and by their estate.
In this respect, Overtaci shares more in common with Vincent van Gogh than the modern Cobra movement on display here.
We Kiss the Earth: Danish Modern Art (1934-1948), Je est un autre: Ernest Mancoba and Sonja Ferlov, and Becoming Ovartaci are on show as part of Cobra 75: Danish Modern Art at Cobra Museum of Modern Art in Amsterdam until 14 May 2023.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
For more, listen to this episode of the EMPIRE LINES podcast, with curators Pim Arts and Winnie Sze
