Catalogue extract (UK): Bjørn Wiinblad

BJØRN WIINBLAD

Bjørn Wiinblad er en kunstner, som favnede det hele. Unikakeramik, platter, plakater, teaterkostumer, scenografi, vævede billedtæpper og store skulpturer. Fra det mindste til det største. Fra det håndgjorte til det masseproducerede. Som en fremmed fugl landede han i 1945 midt i den danske kunst- og designhistorie. Herfra satte han sit tydelige præg på de kommende årtiers visuelle kultur med sin fabulerende og altid genkendelige streg. Som fænomenal billedskaber skabte Wiinblad et eventyrligt univers, som siden blev del af vores liv og erindring. Dette katalog byder indenfor i Wiinblads verden. En verden af skønhed og sanselighed, af drøm og luksus. Det fortæller historien om Wiinblad, hans kunst og liv og skæve placering i kunstog designhistoriens store fortælling.

Bidrag af: Julie Thaning Mikines Nanna Mølbak Hansen Kristian Handberg Christian Björk Kristine Vedtofte

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CONTENTS

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PREFACE Christian Gether

15 WIINBLAD’S WORK, STYLE AND CAREER Julie Thaning Mikines 47 PICTORIAL OBJECTS AND META-TEXTILES Bjørn Wiinblad’s Scheherazade tapestries Nanna Mølbak Hansen 60 BIOGRAPHY Kristine Vedtofte 119 THE MAGIC LIVES ON On a retro journey with Bjørn Wiinblad Kristian Handberg 131 A BOUNDARY-BREAKING MODERNIST Wiinblad between form, function, consumption and fantasy Christian Björk 144 THE EXHIBITION

Opposite page: Cara, Left, 1970. Tapestry in woven wool.

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Wiinblad’s Work, style and career Julie Thaning Mikines

“Absolute hero of the day, dirt-cheap, we’re crazy about the find of the day (smiley)” “ – back home to the collection.”

“I’ve loved Bjørn Wiinblad since I was a child and we had a couple of plaques and vases.

His joy, his line, his lightness, the colours ...

I get sort of happy looking at his things ... especially in colour, because everything is in such balanced colours today, but the ornate drawings have a joy in colour that gets me completely high.”

“Peps up the imagination and I constantly find new details (smiley)” These are some of the things you can read at the Facebook group Bjørn Wiinblad lovers, where Wiinblad fans share pictures of their family heirlooms, new purchases, favourite works and latest flea-market finds with one another. Interest in Wiinblad is great and there is lots of cheerful comment on the many postings in the group’s space, where the members admire one another’s Wiinblad collections and offer clarificatory knowledge of the various items.

The phenomenon can be called ‘retro’, but Bjørn Wiinblad (1918-2006) is also more than that. Wiinblad is an artist who embraces it all: all the way from plaques to large bronze sculptures. A phenomenal image-maker whose oeuvre is both narrow and broad in scope, both high and low. Wiinblad abolishes the existing categories, because he does it all. He is a master of everything from

drawing, gouache, ceramic, glass, tapestries, costumes, stage sets, tiles, textiles and wallpapers to jigsaw puzzles and fountains.

For some people, he is too much, for us he is precisely something because of all the things he does. ARKEN’s major exhibition shows the breadth of Bjørn Wiinblad’s work – an oeuvre that is inclusive, fabulous and magical.

But how is one to approach this overwhelming oeuvre? What was it that Bjørn Wiinblad created? We can find a way into the issue at his artist home. On a small side-road in Kongens Lyngby north of Copenhagen with the Open Air Museum as its closest neighbour there is a bright blue wooden house with white-painted windows.1 The building contains a workshop, studio and home, and from 1966 until his death in 2006 functioned as a base for Bjørn Wiinblad. The Blue House, as it is called, is home to the treasures which, far more than a thousand plaques, characterize the man and the artist Bjørn Wiinblad. Since his death the house has stood untouched and is preserved exactly as he left it. One is thus still guided as a guest through the Sanderson-wallpapered hall, where the flowery curtains match the wallpaper, which matches the colour scheme of the carpet, which in turn matches the tone of the blue cladding of the house. This hall, where the flowers wind in arabesques along walls and curtains and where a portrait of the artist as a young flautist graces the end wall, is only a small foretaste of the consistent wealth of detail that says much about who and what 15

1 the house was built around 1900 and was originally a barn. later it was expanded and rebuilt and the large wooden house of 700 m2 has innumerable little secret rooms. in 1934 the swedish craft artist brita drewsen (1887-1983) took over the house and turned it into a small spinning and weaving mill under the name ‘the blue Factory’. there, she and Gudrun clemens made carpets, furniture coverings and home textiles. brita drewsen has her private home at the blue Factory but she later built a small guest house of 110 m2 at the far end of the site, which she furnished with her own furniture designs. in 1966 bjørn Wiinblad took over the factory and renamed the place ‘the blue House’. For the first few years brita drewsen stayed there in the little guest house. bjørn Wiinblad and brita drewsen mounted several garden exhibitions together, where they showed their own designs – including utility art and furniture.

opposite page: interior, the main entrance, the blue House.

2 the full quote from bjørn nørgaard is: “When i was young he was everything you didn’t care for: he was the flamboyant artist type with a big hat and swirling cape who played the artist role to the point of parody. since we were busy abolishing the artist role we saw him as a bit of a fool.” see camilla stockmann, “bjørn Wiinblad deler vandene – er han mormor eller ultramoderne?”, in Politiken, 6 February 2015.

interior, the salon, the blue House. opposite page: top: interior, the salon, the blue House. left: interior, the hall, the blue House. right: interior, the blue room, the blue House.

Bjørn Wiinblad was. The house is an Aladdin’s cave of art, books, music, glass art and ceramics – an exuberant visual cornucopia that testifies to a luxurious lifestyle.

Not all that much has been written about Wiinblad, and what has been written is about the man, not so much about his work. This may be because Wiinblad himself created a myth about himself that still typifies the image we have of the artist today. As the artist Bjørn Nørgaard writes in 2015, Wiinblad was known as the “flamboyant artist type with a big hat and swirling cape”,2 and with his grandiose persona he has sometimes stood in the way of his work. And although The Blue House appears as the ultimate mise-en-scène of Wiinblad’s universe, it is perhaps precisely here, in the culmination of his private art collections, his own productions, books and interiors that the true artistic qualities of the work emerge. Books from floor to ceiling 16

bear witness to Wiinblad’s incredible love of reading, and if one looks more closely at his large collection of art books, it is names like Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Amedeo Modigliani and Vilhelm Lundstrøm who have most clearly inspired and left their mark on Bjørn Wiinblad’s line.

The Blue House gives us a unique opportunity to experience the world with Wiinblad’s eyes and draw a direct line to Wiinblad’s most important sources of inspiration. But most importantly of all, through detailed inspections of the work we let Wiinblad’s lines and his works speak for themselves.

Wiinblad finds his line At the end of the back passage a staircase goes down to a large low-ceilinged basement with several rooms where full cabinets, tightlypacked picture shelves, poster tubes, boxes, dusty porcelain and cobwebs predominate.

left: Reclining Woman, 1940. drawing from the academy, ink on paper. right: Muk with Horse, 1944. Pencil on paper.

On one of the shelves lies a sketch folder: the first sheet shows a reclining woman with her face turned away and bare breasts. The ink drawing is signed Bjørn Wiinblad 1940.

This was the year when Bjørn Wiinblad was admitted to the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. There he studied in the Graphics programme at the School of Painting under Professor Aksel Jørgensen. His earliest works from there are clearly naturalistic and graphic in expression, but one also sees that it is not long before he finds and settles on his own quite unique line. As early as the drawing Muk with horse (1944) we see Wiinblad’s characteristic curved lines and his special way of drawing the triangular nose and the almond-shaped eyes – two elements that until this very day make it easy to spot a Wiinblad.

move freely and nonchalantly around, and the costumes in the Aladdin illustrations are decorated with an ornamentation and wealth of colours that are all his own. His line is effervescent, fantastical and sinuous as music. He himself loved to listen to the music of Mozart and he was always surrounded by music when he worked – often until far into the small hours. Wiinblad’s characteristic line also recurs in his handwriting, which is exaggerated in size, with voluminous curves and an insistence on its right to be so. His signature, for example, is also magnificent and proud. Wiinblad was inveterately industrious and decorated things with a zeal that few have matched. He was unable to say stop, for there was always a curlicue to add, always another colour field to fill.

As a new graduate in 1943 Wiinblad was engaged to illustrate the tale of Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp. The illustrations, which fill out the margin of the two-column text, present the richly detailed fairytale universe for which Wiinblad later becomes so famous.

Wiinblad’s quick, feather-light brush strokes

Almost all the media – ceramics, stage curtains, tiles, textiles, wallpaper etc. – that Wiinblad would come to work with throughout his life are represented in these Aladdin illustrations. This is described by Erik Lassen in connection with the Museum of Decorative Arts’ exhibition of Bjørn Wiinblad in 1981: “Here

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we see in the patterns and colours of the material the seed of his later printed textiles and here too we see, in among cushions and musical instruments, bowls, vases and jars with multi-coloured decoration, a precursor of his ceramics. The best pictures show that Wiinblad also had the rare gift dropped on his plate of being able to compose colours (...)”.3 It is interesting that already here at the beginning of Wiinblad’s artistic career we see elements that are all to become part of his later work – it is almost as if he could predict the media he would work in. In particular, the onion-shaped lidded jars that appear in the Aladdin illustrations are a direct precursor of

the one-off ceramic works decorated with a cow’s-horn slip trailer that firmly established Bjørn Wiinblad’s artistic talent. It is Wiinblad’s distinctive, recognizable and consistent use of line that ties all these media together and creates the exuberance in genres and materials. Wiinblad’s artistic universe is a continuation of this Aladdin universe, which he invented in 1943, and it is the line that Wiinblad sticks to and uses as a formal element – it is this line that connects up and aestheticizes Wiinblad’s world.

Wiinblad’s ceramics Wiinblad’s work with ceramics arose by 19

3 erik lassen, foreword to the catalogue of the exhibition Bjørn Wiinblad – Arbejder gennem 40 år, copenhagen: kunstindustrimuseet, 1981, 3-4.

Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp, 1943. illustration for book, gouache and pencil on paper.

4 bjørn Wiinblad, “40 års arbejde”, in Bjørn Wiinblad – Arbejder gennem 40 år, 11-20.

The Man Who Lived in a Flower, n.d. childrens book, gouache on paper. opposite page: lidded jar with knobs on the lid, n.d. ceramic with slip and horn decoration.

chance when he was introduced to a ceramics workshop by a friend from the academy. In the young Wiinblad a special passion was ignited for this ceramic slip decoration work: “I’ll never forget the moment when I took the cow’s horn in my hand and began decorating – it was a great and happy moment, and when I left there I knew that I had experienced something crucial”.4 Wiinblad never became an actual ceramicist (he was no good at turning the clay himself). His strength lay in the artistic decoration of the material, and the uniquely decorated pottery manifests Wiinblad’s incredible understanding of colour.

In 1943 he learned the ceramic decoration techniques at Syberg’s workshop in Taastrup, where he was allowed to work with his own things. These first works in ceramics are all made with the slip technique, including the cow-horn decoration, which is a technique rich in tradition where you decorate the clay by making coloured slip flow through a painting-horn. The challenging thing about the technique is that you constantly have to imagine the resulting colour effects, since they only appear in the last firing with a transparent glaze. As can be seen in Lidded jar with knobs on the lid (n.d.) Wiinblad fully mastered this technique.

Wiinblad’s first exhibition For two years Wiinblad worked determinedly with ceramics, and in 1945 he opened the doors to his first exhibition, Drawings and Pottery, in rented premises on Palægade in 20

5 Preben Wilmann, “talentfuld debutant”, in Socialdemokraten, January 1945.

6 Wilmann.

7 k.F, “Morsom keramik”, January 1945.

8 Pierre lübecker, “Hellere slaa kolbøtter end være for stilfuld”, in Aftenbladet, January 1945.

opposite page: 30th anniversary plaque, nymølle, 1976. Faience with printed decoration. the 30th anniversary plaque marked three decades of collaboration between Wiinblad and the faience factory nymølle. the birds and the woman’s flowery hair form a favourite motif that can be seen in many of Wiinblad’s faience works.

Page 24-25: the monthly plaques, nymølle, 1965. Faience with printed decoration. the monthly plaques from 1965 tell the story of an amorous encounter between a man and a woman which begins with the first flirtation and ends with the birth of the little child.

Copenhagen. There he showed his ceramic works for the first time, as well as the naturalistic portraits and drawings from the academy. He also exhibited children’s books that he had written and illustrated himself for his nephew, including The Man Who Lived in a Flower (n.d.), The Story of Ole (1943) and the Aladdin illustrations (1943).

The exhibition aroused a lot of attention and was enthusiastically reviewed: “Talented debutant”, “An unusual debut”, “Rather turn somersaults than be too stylish” and “Amusing ceramics” were some of the headings in the newspapers over the next few days.

Preben Wilmann from Socialdemokraten wrote among other things: “Unlike his large, thoroughly elaborated figure drawings, which with their clear view of the totality and sober lines are much influenced by the academy but stiffen into a well-behaved “master style”, he manifests a healthy, captivating personality in his decoratively ornamented ceramic dishes. Here we have the man in all his lustre and splendour, bold in the use of technique, exuberant in his ornamental imagination and cheerful in his choice of subjects”.5 Nor is the well-behaved “master style” that Wilmann criticizes characteristic of Wiinblad’s later expression, and the ceramic works are one of the fields where he concentrates his energies.

Wiinblad had trained as an illustrator, which means working with images that explain, interpret or decorate a text or a message.

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The prime task of the illustrator is thus to tell stories with his drawings, which is exactly what Wiinblad was praised for by Wilmann: “In an illustration of Aladdin we recognize the young artist’s urge toward the magnificent. The pages are finely composed together and the subjects are permeated by variegated oriental ornamentation”.6 Another critic emphasizes a possible source of inspiration for Wiinblad in these illustrations: “In his illustrative art the models are more of the English-Oriental Beardsley-like character, but not without flashes of a personal sense of humour”.7 This is a reference to the English illustrator and draughtsman Aubrey Beardsley (1872-1898), who had exerted great influence on recent decorative art. Beardsley’s principal activity was book illustration, and it must be admitted that in the Aladdin illustrations Wiinblad is clearly inspired by Beardsley’s imaginative, sophisticated line effects as well as the Englishman’s decadent, exotic universe; but as also noted, with a clearly personal element.

Pierre Lübecker, then the art critic on Aftenbladet, wrote of Wiinblad’s first exhibition: “His art catches fire, it seems surprisingly fresh, astounding, and it breaks with the tradition in Danish ceramics, where in recent years it has mainly been an interest in the material that has prevailed”. 8 This quote emphasizes that Wiinblad stood out from his time. And he really did. Not only in the ceramics, but in almost all media. He did not fit into modernism’s formal idiom and in

that sense was a rare bird among many of his contemporary artist colleagues.9 Asger Jorn graduated from the academy the same year as Wiinblad began, and Jorn, unlike Wiinblad, was part of the avant-garde of the time: for Jorn and the artists who in 1948 formed the ‘COBRA’ movement, art was about political, philosophical and psychological issues in a more abstract idiom. This could not have been

further from Wiinblad, who wanted to show beauty in his works through an ornamental, figurative fairytale world. In addition Wiinblad was apolitical.

As we can read out of the reviews of Wiinblad’s first exhibition in 1945, the critics were very enthusiastic about this humorous, highly colourful element. Perhaps this was related 23

9 For further discussion of Wiinblad in relation to modernism, see the catalogue’s two articles by kristian Handberg and christian björk.

10 Unknown author, “kagefad med selvportræt”, 11.01.1945.

11 Wiinblad, 12.

12 Wiinblad, 18-19.

opposite page: interior, the staircase, the blue House.

Page 28: Play Yourself, 1946. sketch for poster, gouache on paper.

Page 29: Tivoli Night, 1981. sketch for poster, gouache on paper.

to the optimism that prevailed towards the end of the German Occupation. A last press cutting about the exhibition says: “There were 350 guests at the opening, and there were sales of 1000 Kroner”.10 Among these 350 guests several could see the quality of Wiinblad’s works and the exhibition led to commissions that were to be of crucial importance to Wiinblad’s further work and life: the first poster exhibition, the first theatrical job, the first collaboration with the crafts organization Håndarbejdets Fremme and the beginning of the collaboration with the Nymølle Ceramics Factory.

The collaboration with Nymølle In 1946 Bjørn Wiinblad began a close collaboration with the craft artist Jacob E. Bang, whom he had met at the exhibition on Palægade. Jacob E. Bang was at this time the head of the Nymølle Ceramics Factory, which was an important company in the Denmark of the time. Besides Wiinblad, many other artists have worked for factories, including Ib Spang-Olsen, Kamma Svensson, Hans Scherfig and Poul Høyrup. Jacob E. Bang quickly saw the potential of Wiinblad’s style, and on his initiative the young Wiinblad began to work for Nymølle. There Wiinblad created the ceramic universe for which he is probably best known: plaques, candlesticks, small dishes, ashtrays, vases etc. The Nymølle style differs greatly from Wiinblad’s first ceramics with cow-horn slip, as it used a quite different technique – copperprint. This technique 26

makes it possible to make reproductions and Wiinblad loved the wealth of detail that could be created with copperprint. As he put it in retrospect, “I loved to sit with the finest pen and draw tiny details. These pen drawings were then transferred by way of a copper plate to the faience. There was also the amusing aspect for me in choosing this very simple technique and sticking to it, that I was thus constantly forced to tell new stories on each thing I made”.11 It was Wiinblad’s clear choice and wish precisely to create products that could be mass-produced, such that more people could enjoy them. However, he was criticized a great deal for this in his time by his contemporary colleagues, who all thought that it was artistic prostitution to work with reproduction. Wiinblad looked at it differently: “It can never be the quantity of a thing that is wrong – it can only be the quality. I put just as much thought, just as many deliberations, and just as great zeal into doing the right thing in my work when I make wrapping paper as I do when I create a set for the Royal Ballet [...]”.12 Wiinblad thus had a different view of art as early as 1946, a view that made it possible for him, unlike most of his contemporary colleagues, to earn money from his art. Let us now return to The Blue House and let us move up from the basement ...

The language of the poster If you choose to enter by the back door of The Blue House, on the left you come to a staircase leading up, which is papered from floor to

above: interior, the drawing office, the blue House.

Wiinblad’s drawing office in the blue House, where Wiinblad’s posters, book illustrations, costume designs and the designs for tapestries were created. opposite page: The Arabian Nights, n.d. sketch for poster, gouache and pencil on paper.

Page 32: Eva, n.d. Faience with brush decoration.

Page 33: Eva, 1976. Faience with brush decoration.

ceiling with Wiinblad’s brilliantly coloured posters. The first poster, which Wiinblad made in 1946, was for ‘Music Week’ – an association with the aim of encouraging people to play music themselves rather than listen to the gramophone or radio. The poster Spil selv (Play Yourself) (1946) shows someone playing a flute solo by Händel. The melody comes out of the flute as notes on a stave and moves into the player’s own ear as if to emphasize that he is playing himself, for himself. The original model for this poster is a gouache drawing that demonstrates Wiinblad’s clear poster idiom at its best. It is important that a poster is clear in its expression, as it has to convey a message in urban space, where one is often on the way from one place to another. The first Spil selv posters that Wiinblad made were much discussed and reproduced in various 30

parts of the world and thus also became his springboard to working abroad; the first time in 1950 in Paris, where he worked for the American Embassy.

The clear formal idiom of Wiinblad’s first posters was overshadowed in some of his later posters by the artist’s great urge to decorate, and almost appears more like decorative art than actual posters. One thinks for example of the posters for the collection of tales The Arabian Nights, a major work of popular Arab narrative art (Tusind og én nat, Gyldendal, 1975). But we must remember that Wiinblad was not a graphic designer, like most other poster artists of the time. He was an illustrator and his works had the relevant narrative, decorative and atmosphere-creating quality.

At the end of his career he found his way

back to the direct poster expression that we see for example in the Tivoli poster (1981).

Wiinblad’s poster universe is multifarious,13 and the gouache models for these posters underscore Wiinblad’s indisputable talent as a colourist and communicator.

Wiinblad’s first ceramic workshop In 1952, Wiinblad’s great success with the first posters made it possible for him to buy and set up his own ceramic workshop at Hjortekær in Kongens Lyngby north of Copenhagen.

There he continued his production of horndecorated one-off works, but also began, with the assistance of his staff of ‘painter-girls’, on a huge production of both small and large decorated faience works – the same as those produced to this day by the ‘painter-girls’ in The Blue House after Wiinblad originals. These faiences together create a vast universe populated by the figures that Wiinblad named Eva, Titania, Dyveke, Tulipa, Celestine etc. It was also through this production that the four seasons, the festive flower arrangements

and his Tivoli Fountain became known. The faiences were usually blue-painted – a mode of expression for which Wiinblad found inspiration in both Chinese porcelain and Dutch faience. In The Blue House one can today experience Wiinblad’s overwhelming collections of blue-painted faience and porcelain; for example in the blue dining room and in the open fireplace room, where Delft Blue from Holland and the fine blue-painted white porcelain from China are mixed on walls, shelves, tables, assemblages and in display cases. Wiinblad was a passionate collector of both genres, while his own new interpretations of blue-painted faience became collectors’ items and were loved by people all over the world. His major collectors include people all the way from Norwegian housewives to the late Queen Ingrid and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The German porcelain giant In 1957 Philip Rosenthal, the director of Rosenthal Porzellan AG, was introduced to 35

13 Wiinblad made posters for UniceF, tiVoli, the national society for the Prevention of eye diseases, advertising posters, theatre, concert and book posters etc.

candlestick with female head, n.d. Faience with brush decoration. Wiinblad’s home is full of art from all over the world and many eras. often Wiinblad drew inspiration from his private art collection, and this found expression in form, colour and ornamentation. this is his brush-decorated candlestick in faience inspired by a woman’s head from antiquity. opposite page: Pitcher with colour codes, 1971. Wiinblad’s assistants were popularly called ‘the painter girls’. they helped Wiinblad to fill his works with colour in accordance with the colour codes indicated by Wiinblad.

Romance, rosenthal, 1964. service in porcelain.

The Magic Flute, 1968. service in porcelain. opposite page: top: Portrait of bjørn Wiinblad with the shah’s service, 1971.

Wiinblad’s service for the iranian shah’s celebration of the 2500th anniversary of the birth of the Persian empire. in his hand Wiinblad holds a specially designed caviare bowl consisting of two parts – the top for caviare, the bottom for the ice that is to keep the caviare cold. bottom: the shah’s service, 1971. service in porcelain with gold-decorated plate borders.

Wiinblad’s works for Nymølle, and he asked Wiinblad to take a trip to Germany. This was the starting shot for an important and lucrative collaboration that lasted the rest of Wiinblad’s life. He made a large number of porcelain designs for the company, and for many years even worked as chief designer for the German porcelain giant. The services The Magic Flute, Romance and Lotus are just some of the classics that Wiinblad created in the Rosenthal context. The Magic Flute is in fact still in production today. The expression in these service designs appears more simple, pure and rigorous, and at first glance it may seem surprising that this is Wiinblad design. But when one looks more closely at the decor of the plate borders, Wiinblad’s line is clearly recognizable. Wiinblad was always able to remain true to his line. The Rosenthal collaboration contributed in earnest to Wiinblad’s great international impact and his designs are still the object of keen attention among collectors in Germany, Asia and the USA. And it was through the Rosenthal collaboration that Bjørn Wiinblad was commissioned to create the Shah’s service.

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The Shah’s service In October 1971, when Shah Reza Pahlavi of Iran was to celebrate the 2500th anniversary of the foundation of the Persian Empire, Wiinblad received a prestigious royal commission – to design the dinner service for the great banquet. The commission came because the previous year the Empress Farah Diba had seen Wiinblad’s service The Magic Flute. She wanted Wiinblad to create a service in the same style, but even more exuberant.

Formally the two services resembled each other, but the ornamentation on the golddecorated plate borders in the Shah’s service is inspired by ancient Persian decoration and motifs from the history of the Empire, and even today has a cool, contemporary look.

The celebration of the Persian Empire consisted of a long succession of festivities that lasted several days in October 1971. The intention of the celebration was to mark the long history of Iran and demonstrate the modern progress of the country under Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran. At the banquet there were six hundred guests, and the dinner lasted over five and a half hours, which made

14 back page editorial, Information, 13 october 1971.

the event the longest and most sumptuous official banquet in modern history.

15 Quote from bjørn Wiinblad in the article “Flere danske bag shahens kæmpegilde”, in Ekstra Bladet, 20 august 1971,

However, the celebration of the 2500th anniversary did not enjoy unanimous support in Denmark. An editorial in the newspaper Information, for example, questioned the participation of the Danish royal couple and their journey to Iran. As it said, it would have been better if the royal couple “had considered Danish neutrality highly appropriate in this case from the moment that the nauseating luxury of the feast was known. It is difficult to regard the journey as a private one!”14

The Nutcracker, royal danish theatre, 1971. costume sketch, gouache on paper. opposite page: interior, the open fireplace room, the blue House. the room with the open fireplace in the blue House is full of chinese porcelain and delft faience. characteristic of Wiinblad’s furnishing is the symmetrical hanging.

The criticism was due to the cost of the festivities, up to DKK 300 million. In addition Iranian fury at this extravagance developed into revolutionary groups and student unrest.

The government’s attempts to subdue the revolutionary groups had the result that the revolutionaries involved were mistreated by the security police, and in the months up to the festivities between 600 and 1000 people were interned as a security precaution. Criticism was expressed in the western media, and Ruhollah Khomeini, who later toppled the Shah in 1979, called the celebration “the Devil’s Festival”.

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This whole political issue was something Wiinblad refused to involve himself in. Politics was not his field – for him it was the whole magical Arabian Nights atmosphere and the honour of the commission that typified his involvement. When the newspaper Ekstra Bladet asked Wiinblad in August 1971 whether this extreme extravagance in a poor, oppressed country gave him no scruples, he promptly answered: “When I said yes, no criticism had arisen yet. Quite honestly I didn’t think about it. Of course I have done so since, but I treat it as an artistic commission.

[I] normally don’t investigate people’s morality when they want something done by me. And anyway, if you have a kingdom, it has to be celebrated (...)”15 The universe of the theatre In the drawing office in The Blue House stands a small model of a theatre stage – the actual stage box is a deep green colour and the scenographic content is a riot of colours, shapes and perspective effects. Throughout his long life Wiinblad was able to build up a large repertoire of theatre productions for the Royal Danish Theatre, Det Ny Teater, the Pantomime Theatre and others, for which he

drew and designed sets, props and costumes.

Throughout Wiinblad’s theatrical career he collaborated with people both in Denmark and abroad, such as Edwin Tiemroth, Paul Baker, Flemming Flindt, Erling Schroeder, Stig Lommer and Niels Bjørn Larsen. When Bjørn Wiinblad worked with theatre his fascination with and joy in creating whole universes could truly find expression. Wiinblad’s costume models have to a great extent been preserved, even though they were actually only models that the costumier was to use in the pattern and sewing work. But as usual Wiinblad was unable to leave a drawing alone and the costume models have a distinctively artistic quality. In Denmark Wiinblad is particularly well known for his stage design and costumes for the ballet The Nutcracker at the Royal Danish Theatre, which with its choreography

by Flemming Flindt was performed for many years from 1971.

Wiinblad’s magical line is prevalent in the stage design models which with fantastic precision capture and communicate the mood that a backdrop in a theatrical production is supposed to create. This is exactly where the strength of his line is manifested, as the fairytale-like universes that Wiinblad created for the theatre are consistent and convincing. Wiinblad’s imaginative line winds around the surfaces of both drop curtain and backdrop, and in the costumes and sets. In his theatrical works one is so to speak enveloped in his line.

opposite page: interior, the workshop, the blue House. in the blue House stands the plaster figure for the finished bronze sculpture The Gossips, which was made as a commission from the Hilton anatole Hotel in dallas in the Usa.

In private too Wiinblad loved to go to the theatre, primarily to see ballet and opera.

The first thing he did when he came to a new city was to investigate the opera programme there. He surrounded himself with actors and actresses, opera singers and ballet dancers, and today Wiinblad is buried in Søllerød Cemetery alongside his good friend the actress Lulu Ziegler.

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The adventure in Porto Bjørn Wiinblad’s woven tapestries are among the most impressive things in his oeuvre. The tapestries are produced in Porto in Portugal at the textile factory Fortunato Silvério, Lda. Bjørn Wiinblad and the factory were introduced to each other in 1969 through the American department store Bloomingdale’s in New York, which held a series of displays with the general title The Creators, where Wiinblad was to exhibit his works. In that connection he was urged to try working with tapestries, and the department store put him in touch with the owners of the weaving firm, Maria do Céu and Rolf Gemperle. This became the start of a long, fruitful collaboration. The first two tapestries from 1970, with the titles Cara, left (1970) and Cara, right (1970) (see page 4 and 145), which Wiinblad and Fortunato Silvério, Lda. produced together were thus intended for Bloomingdale’s. Even in these tapestries Wiinblad’s line is pervasive, and the noses and eyes are characteristic of Wiinblad, as is the actual subject: a woman in a colourful patterned dress surrounded by white birds and decorative ornamentation.

At the same time as the displays in New York Wiinblad received a very large commission from the American businessman and property developer Trammell Crow. Crow commissioned Wiinblad to decorate The Apparel Mart in Dallas, for which Wiinblad decided to create five enormous woven tapestries (the biggest measured ten metres in height and seven metres in breadth). Since The Apparel Mart was a shopping mall with the focus on fashionable clothing, Wiinblad created subjects that represent the end of the Arabian Nights, which he called literature’s first mannequin show. The subjects show the female narrator Scheherazade dressing her younger sister in brilliantly coloured, bejewelled silk costumes and sumptuous headgear (see page 48-51).

16 to give an idea of the huge effort behind the scheherazade tapestries it can be mentioned that it took almost 270 working weeks (10,000 working hours) to weave the tapestries and the actual design took 76 weeks of work. there was a weaver for every 70 cm of tapestry, such that the biggest tapestry had 10 women working at the same time shoulder to shoulder. it took Maria do céu Gemperle six weeks to transform Wiinblad’s drawings into a weaving pattern.

17 originally published in the periodical Partisan Review. reprinted two years later in susan sontag, “notes on ‘caMP’”, in Against Interpretation and Other Essays, london: Penguin classics, 2009 (1966).

opposite page: interior, the salon, the blue House.

Page 44-45: interior, the blue room, the blue House. the blue room in the blue House has formed the setting for many festive dinner parties where guests from denmark and abroad sat at the table.

The tapestries were woven in the rolinho technique, where the back of the tapestry is just as fine as the front. Various details in the subject, such as birds, hairstyle and flowers, are emphasized in the tapestries by making the colourful yarn work in several dimensions, so that it stands out from the basic weave.16 On Thursday 18 October 1973 the Scheherazade tapestries were unveiled at the Dallas Apparel Mart, where they hung until the shopping mall closed in 2004.

Dallas was in many ways Wiinblad’s city, and it was for the Texan city that Wiinblad created his large bronze sculpture group The Gossips. The bronzes show three women in sinuous postures who stand gossiping with one another. The group, which still stands there today, is at the Hilton Anatole Hotel in Dallas in front of the hotel’s bar, the Gossip Bar, which has taken its name from Wiinblad’s sculptural work.

A ‘camp’ sensibility “For some people he is too much, for us he is precisely something because of all the things he does.” So went the introduction to this article. And yes, Wiinblad is too much – because he does it all at the same time. In his practice he works across all the established categories such as art, design, craft art and illustration, and thus eludes any classification.

He creates pictures, dreams and universes that are situated miles from the Realpolitik and lived life of the real world. Seriously unserious, one could call him in view of the seriousness with which he grapples with the lightness of life. Or perfect ‘camp’, to draw on a slightly older concept from the archives of cultural history, although it does come from Wiinblad’s glory days and perhaps best of all describes Wiinblad’s line and artistic activity. In 1964 the American literary historian Susan Sontag published an essay abut a phenomenon she considered as yet undescribed at the time: a particular sensibility, or approach to 42

the world that she localized and which she called ‘camp’.17 The essence of camp is the ability to convert the serious into the frivolous.

As Sontag described it, it was a love of the unnatural: the artificially created and the exaggerated. In Sontag’s perspective, it could for example be opera productions, Tiffany lamps, Hollywood films like King Kong – and in this context, interestingly enough, also drawings by Beardsley, the artist to whom Wiinblad was compared as far back as 1945 in connection with his first exhibition. Reading further in the essay, there are many features of ‘camp’ that could equally well be associated with Wiinblad: the apolitical, for example, and the cult of form, texture and sensory surfaces over content. ‘Camp’ can be regarded as an aestheticizing approach to the world; as a way of looking at the world that sees it first and foremost as an aesthetic phenomenon.

Or in fact as a way of taking the unserious seriously – and thus assigning to the beautiful, the fantastical, the magical – image-making in itself – a central place in human life. The Blue House, with its imaginative furnishings, decorative assemblages, richly detailed ornamentation and strange mixtures of Wiinblad objects with Asiatic, Precolumbian, Dutch and Middle Eastern arts and crafts, can be seen as an epicentre of ‘camp’. Here the unifying principle is precisely aestheticism and expression rather than origin and dating.

In the same way Wiinblad’s line seems to contain the essence of this sensibility. It is in many ways far too much, exaggerated, unnatural, magical and fantastical – but for those very reasons it is something – for us.

Because it creates space and exceeds the boundaries of what is good and what is bad taste, what is high and what is popular culture, what is cool and what is kitsch, what is art and what is design.

Julie Thaning Mikines is MA, curator at ARKEN Museum of Modern Art.

Bjørn Wiinblad is an artist who embraced it all. One-off ceramics, plaques, posters, theatrical costumes, stage design, tapestries and large sculptures. From the smallest to the largest. From the hand-made to the mass-produced. Like some exotic bird he landed in 1945 in the midst of Danish art and design history. From there he left his clear imprint on the visual culture of the coming decades with his fantastical, always recognizable line and style. As a phenomenal image-maker Wiinblad created a magical universe that later became part of our lives and memories. This catalogue invites you into Wiinblad’s world – a world of beauty and sensuality, of dream and luxury. It tells the story of Wiinblad, his art and life and his idiosyncratic position in the larger narrative of art and design history.

Buy the catalog in ARKEN SHOP

Contributions by: Julie Thaning Mikines Nanna Mølbak Hansen Kristian Handberg Christian Björk Kristine Vedtofte

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