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MUSICAL
INSTRUMENTS
1949 - 1951
Music was important
to the Skov family also during the late nineteen forties and fifties. Skov
did not play an instrument but supplied the phonograph records for the
family collection. His eclectic taste ranged from Bach, Haendel and Mozart
to Ravel and Stravinsky, and from Louis Armstrong to Duke Ellington.
Isabella had played the violin since she was fifteen years old, and the
three sons were encouraged to select their own favorite musical instrument
and were then provided with professional music teachers for weekly lessons.
One played the guitar and the other two learned to play the clarinet and
the trumpet.
It is therefore not
surprising that musical instruments, and particularly the violin, guitars
and mandolins appear time and again as favorite motifs in so many of Skov’s
drawings and paintings, particularly during the boys’ school years.
Skov did not limit
himself to painting only musical instruments during this period, and many
other objects normally found in his living room and kitchen became motifs
for his still-lifes too. Often, together with the instruments, he also
included one or more of a variety of household objects in his still-lifes,
for example, a flask or garafe, wine and water glasses, playing cards,
sheet music or various fruits.
Over a two year
period starting in 1949, Skov painted more than twenty separate still-lifes
with stringed musical instruments, and in addition he made a number of
drawings with the same motifs. Skov’s technique varied considerably as his
development continued to evolve over this period. Several of the early
paintings can best be characterized as following an Analytical-cubist style
showing the disintegration of the object into multiple planes inserted
behind one another. The later paintings can more readily be identified as
expressions of Synthetic Cubism, although almost throughout there are signs
of an integration of these approaches.
Regarding the use of separate planes in
the description of the depicted objects, for example, he experimented with
the employment of unbroken single-color planes in some of the early
paintings, but then used smaller plane segments with impressionistically
dissolved contours in others, and planes with color gradations in yet other
paintings. At times one plane was inserted behind another, but often they
were linked together edgewise. These paintings are therefore interesting
also because they diagram his progress of the complete assimilation of the
Cubist aesthetics into a single integrated expression.
Skov’s objective
quite clearly was not directed towards the
achievement of a personal, individualistic painting style, but
rather
was aimed at exploring the various means available to achieve the
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