Louisiana Museum of Modern Art - Placement report by Lise Groenvold

We all know the stories of artists who struggled without recognition in their lifetimes but were finally discovered sometimes decades after their death. There are also the stories of artists who were lauded and popular in their own times, but have since fallen out of art history. But most artists fall in-between these common story arcs. The Danish modernist painter Jens Adolf Jerichau (1890-1916) only lived to the age of 25 but was acclaimed enough to be chosen for some of the most important exhibitions of his time and sell fairly well. But after his tragic premature death, he became something of a painter’s painter; an inspiration to major Danish artists like Asger Jorn and Per Kirkeby, but rarely highlighted or exhibited alone. The story told about his life has primarily been that he was an unstable but promising artist, interested in biblical and mythical subject matter, who died by suicide after his fiancée broke up with him, just at the point where his paintings were starting to be good.

But a recent extremely comprehensive monograph by one of the leading Danish art historians, Mikael Wivel, suggests that there is more to him as an artist, and when I joined Louisiana for my work placement, curator Mathias Ussing Seeberg was organising the biggest exhibition of Jerichau’s work to date, a large retrospective comprising more than 150 paintings, drawings, etchings, and sculptures. Seeberg was particularly interested in the queerness and androgyny of Jerichau’s figures, and I was given the dream assignment of following this trail, reading Jerichau’s diaries detailing his relationship with the writer Aage Barfoed, 11 years his senior, their passionate and deeply emotional correspondence, and finding the many (often encoded) queer references suffusing Jerichau’s writing, notes, and paintings. Using the archive assembled by Mikael Wivel and art historian Troels Andersen before him, we came to a different understanding of Jerichau’s life and work. References to Michelangelo and Oscar Wilde, and paintings of Socrates and his young lover Alcibiades as well as of a particular scene from Dante’s Purgatorio, in which homosexual and heterosexual love are treated as equal, embed dreams of a society in which love between men is normal. (We do not know if Jerichau was bisexual or if his short-lived engagement to the fiancée, Sigrun Schalburg, was an attempt at a marriage of convenience – although the fact that she was a friend and in a precarious position as a divorced woman with four children could point to the latter.) Even within his biblical paintings Jerichau made unorthodox choices, juxtaposing the Whore of Babylon with the Biblical Magi to make a point about who is excluded by Christianity, or drawing out the sexual intensity of e.g., the motif of the Deposition of Christ.

To counter the emphasis on tragedy, (heterosexual) heartbreak, and death which had often been the focus in narratives of Jerichau’s life, I wrote an article about the importance of Jerichau’s relationship to Barfoed - who introduced Jerichau to the queer canon and whom Jerichau credited with giving him the courage to pursue his art - in the exhibition catalogue, and an article on his struggle with mental illness for the Louisiana Magasin. I also transcribed an artist’s book made by Jerichau in 1913-14, commonly known as The Book of Wisdom, and edited the transcription that was packaged with a beautiful facsimile edition published alongside the exhibition. Although I was originally meant to work on a different exhibition - a large interdisciplinary themed exhibition on creativity to be shown at the Louisiana in 2023 or 2024 – I am very grateful to also be included in the Jerichau project, which ended up being the main focus for most of my 6-month work placement. Between the two projects, I got to follow the exhibition process (which often takes at least 3 years from inception to finish) from the very earliest stages through opening day. After years of writing only in an academic context and for only a couple of examiners or supervisors at a time, it was revelatory (and nerve-racking) to write for a general audience, and then witness actual visitors to the museum stop to read and consider the texts. And it was exciting to see the exhibition reviewed in national newspapers to – almost – universal acclaim. Of course, there was a single reviewer, an older white man, who railed against the queer reading of Jerichau’s work and called it ‘distasteful’. This felt almost even more exhilarating! Clearly the exhibition and the queer lens was justified when it had the power to challenge parts of its audience in this way. 

I am very grateful to Mathias Ussing Seeberg for his support, mentorship and trust, all of the other brilliant colleagues at the Louisiana, and to CHASE for funding this work placement which gave me so much knowledge of museums, exhibitions, and the curatorial process. I also gained and honed practical skills, including writing for a more general audience, archival work, transcription, editing manuscripts and much more. The exhibition is featured on the Louisiana’s website here, and the English version of the catalogue can be found here.

The funded CHASE placement was a chance for me to gain professional experience that I would not have been able to get otherwise. As someone who had never worked in the arts sector before, it would have taken many unpaid internships to build up this level of experience (which has subsequently led to paid work both at the Louisiana and at a different art museum) – which I would never have been able to afford. It also gave me a chance to understand how many of the skills gained as part of the PhD-process can be transferred to other exciting sectors and types of projects. I am returning to the thesis invigorated and much calmer about future job prospects – something that is extremely had to come by in the current academic and job climate. I strongly recommend that others who have the opportunity explore and use the incredible chance that a CHASE-funded work placement represents. My advice would be to also consider places outside of the CHASE network – arranging a placement with an organisation that I had to approach myself was not that much extra work, and many places are grateful for an extra helping hand.