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THE LATE WORKS
1970 - 1990
The
nineteen-seventies became a period of personal tranquility for Skov as he
continued painting and drawing in his studio at the fifth floor in
Krystalgade. His work was only interrupted by his increasingly frequent
international travels that took him to Southern Europe, South and North America, and even an abbreviated chronicle of his trips
suggests that he was not particularly unhappy with these interruptions, and
that he rather enjoyed the invigorating changes they provided as he went
from one location and culture to another.
Together with
Isabella he visited Granada and Southern
Spain during the summer
of 1970, and Ponce, Puerto Rico six
months later followed by a short visit to New York. They spent the summer of 1971 in Barcelona and Mallorca seeing,
among other museums and collections, the Son Mas collection of art in
Antraix, Mallorca. The following summer they stayed for two months
in New Jersey and New York, visiting the Museum of Modern Art and the
Guggenheim Museum several times to see one of the finest collections of
Cubist paintings anywhere as well as the Gertrude Stein exhibition of
Ecole-de-Paris painters. During 1973 and 1974 they returned to Middletown, New Jersey to spend the summer months. Starting in December of 1977, Skov and
Isabella visited Sao
Paulo, Brazil for three months; and from late December 1978
through mid August 1979, they stayed in Houston, Texas
with one of their sons. In between, they also travelled on shorter
excursions to Greece, Italy, the Canary Islands, Sweden, and Germany.
Skov continued to
travel extensively also during the nineteen-eighties, and by then he
established a sort of routine by spending the spring and autumn months in
Copenhagen, the three summer months in a summer cabin in Ryssby, Sweden and
three to four months of most winters in Orange County, California.
With so much time
dedicated to travel, it is not surprising that Skov's productivity declined
during the later years, a process already observable starting in the mid-to-late
sixties; and by the late nineteen-seventies the restless pace of work and
personal urgency that had characterized his earlier work, had given way to
a more peaceful contemplative vision. For instance, he did not any longer
approach aesthetic challenges as problems requiring multiple series of
developmentally related paintings to be explored and resolved. Where he in
the past sporadically had identified himself with the myth of Sisyphus, he
now proceeded along his path without the feeling of shouldering the heavy
burden. His paintings generally represented a direct continuation of his
Neo-cubism of a decade earlier, but occasionally he also ventured in other
directions; for instance, he made several drawings while visiting in New Jersey and Houston, inspired by detailed observation of plants in
the gardens.
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