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exploring and expanding this idiom - actually had exhibited in
Copenhagen; and moreover could show a continuous, sustained and strongly
progressive, evolutionary artistic path, that neither reverted back to the
pre-Cubist perception nor jumped track and became non-figurative. Also, it
was in effect the only exhibition of Cubist paintings in Copenhagen since Skov’s 1950 event, and its uniqueness
within the context of Danish art history therefore became immediately
apparent, even if it was not generally appreciated at the time.
Perhaps this was
because the Danish art establishment generally assumed the future would
belong to Non-figurative Abstract Expressionism. Or maybe it was a result
of the personal preferences of the time and place, and, as noted earlier in
connection with the 1950-exhibition, the Danish cultural leadership had
long since declared Cubism to be dead, and then had seen to it that this
was to remain the case.
As in 1950, Skov
provided a short introduction for the exhibition catalogue in order to
share some of the principal thoughts underlying what he was addressing in
his paintings. Since this succinct essay presents Skov’s personal
conclusions, and is one of only a very few publications documenting
verbally his analysis of the philosophy of art, it provides a rare key to
the appreciation of his long range artistic objectives.
His intended the
analysis to be useful for others pursuing a similar line of artistic
inquiry, and assumed that it would facilitate the comprehension of his work
as well. His first point was that an important requirement of present-day
art, in order to be considered truly contemporary, had to incorporate the
new understanding of physical reality embodied in the evolving
twentieth-century ideology, since this provides the only basis for an
integration of Newtonian physics and Einsteinian space-time. Skov realized
that the emergence of an understanding of the four-dimensional nature of
reality, the space-time concept, was a key to being a truly modern person,
and, as a consequence he saw the pictorial visualization of movement as
being central to the modern painter’s perception. More than just being
coincident in time, the relevancy of contemporary art relates to its
capability to offer a representation of current ideological perception; and
art needs to address this fundamental issue in the artist’s medium, that
is, he said, by way of concrete, visual-methaphorical manifestations. A
valid artistic challenge existed, therefore, in the integration of form and
movement within the continuum of space-and-time, into a single perception,
and in finding an appropriate aesthetic-pictorial description of this new
consciousness.
The artist’s work,
Skov observed, is obviously first an expression of something especially
human, the human spirit and consciousness, with
particular aesthetic embodiment, in short, an expression of
humanism. “Humanism”, in his perception, denoted the most profound respect
for what
is recognized as essentially human, that is the aspirations to
achieve artistic
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