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AARSDALE PERIOD
1938 - 1939
Returning to
Denmark in June of 1938 from Provence, Skov visited for several weeks in
Strib with his parents who were very pleased to see him and the
grandchildren again and proudly showed him the commentaries in the press regarding
his work in France; e.g. from Jydske
Tidene, Fredericia, June 14, 1938: “The Painter Rasmus Skov - An
outstanding and promising young artist from Strib who appears to have a
great future. As noted, the artist Rasmus Skov has spent the last winter at
the French Mediterranean Coast and
subsequently has arranged a showing of his work in Paris, where
he has obtained so great a success, that he received the flattering request
to extend the duration of the exhibition. The exhibition is held at Gallery
Baker, and the success obtained has been further proven, since the work by
the painter from Fyn continues to attract a large
public interested in art. Additionally Rasmus Skov has been shown with an
exclusive Collectors-Exhibition in Niece [...]. He has spent three winters
at the French and Italian Riviera. [...]
Although the exhibit at Galerie Baker in Paris still continues, the artist
together with his wife [...] now has returned to Denmark, where they were
visiting during Pentecost with Skov’s father, the industrialist N. M. Skov,
at Villa Klinthuset, Strib. Thereafter the couple will reside in the
vicinity of Svaneke on Bornholm.”
Within a few weeks,
Skov departed from Strib via Copenhagen to Bornholm and
rented a small house in Aarsdale, only a short distance south of Svaneke
where he a year earlier had scouted out a number of motifs he looked
forward to paint.
In La Colle, Skov
had experimented extensively with the composition of his paintings and
elaborate sophisticated color effects in order to obtain the flattest
possible visual expression of three-dimensionality in both landscapes and
objects, and he was satisfied that he had explored these possibilities
thoroughly. His paintings from La Colle are superb studies in pure
composition and color, even as they also always present the recognizable
motifs as a pictorial challenge.
However, in Skov’s
view, they first and foremost represented a categorical reduction of the
three-dimensional world into the two-dimensional canvas. He now realized
that the next logic step along this path, one he was not willing to take,
would be an altogether non-figurative abstract aesthetic expression,
following, for example, Wassily Kandinsky at Bauhaus or Piet Mondrian’s “De
Stijl”; and yet, since he appreciated that art is something other, and
more, than representation, he felt that he could not revert entirely to his
earlier approach either.
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