Axel Bentzen (1893-1952)

Axel Bentzen became familiar with visual art early on through frequent visits to exhibitions and museums, and already in his boyhood he copied old masters at the National Gallery of Denmark. He early embraced the modern simplification of form and the prioritization of color, but he maintained close contact with nature. While new art movements such as cubism, futurism and expressionism met with broad interest in the domestic art community, despite several attempts, it was not until 1922 that he succeeded in debuting at the censored exhibitions with his naturalistically oriented pictures. The range of motifs includes landscapes and parks with roads and trees, urban environments, portraits, figure paintings and interiors. In early pictures, the colors are subdued; only around 1920 does a more impressionistically influenced color scheme with contrasting, saturated colors appear on the canvas with broad, impasto strokes. An early picture, Egyptian Woman on a Balcony, 1920, is Matisse-inspired both in terms of motif and in the use of black as a tone color. The main elements in the landscape paintings of the 1920s and 30s are a tight composition and refinement of the coloristic with the blue tone as a strong color dominance, e.g. in Roskilde country road, 1928. The portraits are coloristically clarified and the characteristics are borne of psychological commitment, as in The Convalescent, 1923, and Jolanda, 1926. Some paintings that were done after a serious period of illness, e.g. Hospitalshaven, The Dreamer and Self-portrait, all 1925, testify to a tense, nervous sensitivity. B. had the self-taught artist's striving for freedom in form, color and technique, but also an orientation towards new directions and well-known contemporary artists. In several paintings, e.g. Young Italian Woman on a Chair, 1926, the rhythmic zigzag form of the woman and the surprising placement of the figure on the picture surface include cubist features that create spatial clarity. At the end of the 1920s, the form is tightened, large areas of colour are almost bricked up as in Svineryggen, 1928, and the arrangement of the material is not unlike Giersing's late landscape paintings. The more temperamental self-portraits are influenced by both Cubism and Lundstrøm's paintings from the curly period. B's mature main works, a large number of which were shown at Grønningen in the 1940s, seem almost expressionistic. This applies not least to pictures painted in Copenhagen parks with the rows of columns of trees, the deep blue cast shadows of the corridors and precisely placed figures that make the motifs alive and present. A recurring theme is the view of the Valby apartment, where the window frame forms the structure of the motif. It leads into the picture, opens to the outdoors and enters into dialogue with the green, fiery yellow and intense blue colours of the potted plants and the shadows, or forms sunspots in angular patterns inside the room. Whether B. rendered his impressions subduedly or with temperament, it was always done in a painterly, well-crafted form. In close contact with his time, he used a certain abstraction, and it was through this that his personal experience of the subject emerged.

Source: Weilbach's Artists' Encyclopedia