The Strange Tales of Niels Hansen Jacobsen - A Dane in Paris (1892-1902)

The exhibition focuses on the Parisian years (1892 to 1902) of Niels Hansen Jacobsen, who settled in Paris, which was then, along with Brussels and before the Vienna Secession, one of the capitals of early Symbolism, nourished by the exchanges and friendships forged between writers, musicians and artists from all over Europe.

Introduction

Niels Hansen Jacobsen, the son of a farmer, was born in Vejen, a small industrial town in Jutland, Denmark, and trained at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen in the tradition of the famous sculptor Berthel Thorvaldsen, steeped in the models of ancient statuary. 

In Paris, his studio at 65, Boulevard Arago became the meeting place for a group of francophile Danes, in a “cité d’artistes” where, among others, the ceramist Jean Carriès and the illustrator Eugène Grasset lived. This community of artists was associated with symbolist circles. From 1880 to 1900, this literary and artistic movement sought to transcribe the inexpressible by a play of poetical and plastic correspondences.

65, Boulevard Arago - A Danish symbolist circle in Paris

On completing The Little Mermaid (1837), Hans Christian Andersen confessed: ‘It is my only work that moved me while I was writing it’.

The Little Mermaid

Clay is a sculptor's raw material, but the completion of his work in bronze requires the intervention of founders, or in marble that of practitioners.

The alchemy of ceramic

Designed by Niels Hansen Jacobsen during a stay in Denmark in 1896, Troll, who smells the flesh of Christians is inspired by an immemorial figure from Scandinavian folklore.

Troll, who smells the flesh of Christians - Wildness of the psychic forest

Because it sums up the being in its simple face, because it is a striking abbreviation of it, the mask was a popular form for artists at the end of the 19th century, in search of synthetic expressions and powerful symbols.

Masks and Medusa: facing the Gorgon

Elusive by nature, the shadow is a figure of impermanence, uncertainty and even death. 

It is also a ‘signature of the real’, as Clément Rosset (2004) puts it, because only a tangible body can cast a shadow.

The shadow side

Even darker than The Little Mermaid (1837), The Story of a Mother (1847) reflects the impossibility of separating, as H.C. Andersen wrote, ‘the flower of misfortune’ from that of ‘blessing’.

Death and mother - A feminine arabesque