The Danish Avant-Garde and World War II

Download or read book The Danish Avant-Garde and World War II written by Kerry Greaves and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-03-18 with total page 447 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first book to focus on Helhesten (The Hell-Horse), an avant-garde artists’ collective active during the Nazi occupation of Denmark and one of the few tangible connections between radical European art groups from the 1920s to the 1960s. The Danes’ deliberately unskilled painterly abstraction, embrace of the tradition of dansk folkelighed (the popular) and its iterations of egalitarianism and consensus reform, called for the political relevance of art and interrogated the ideologies underlying culture itself. The group’s cultural activism presents an alternative trajectory of continuity, which challenges the customary view of World War II as a moment of artistic rupture.