Protest! byJulie Moestrup

Protest!

IN 1967, CHARLOTTE BRÜEL HAD ENOUGH OF THE ROYAL DANISH ACADEMY OF FINE ARTS

53 years ago, the artist Charlotte Brüel declared her resignation from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. She was 23 years old and decided enough was enough. After three years at the Academy, her points of critique were many—so many that they took up 10 hand-written pages. Brüel denounced the institution’s rigid gender roles and teaching methods. She called for a larger art political engagement. For the vast majority of living Danish artists, the average income was below that of a supermarket cashier. Those were the conditions in the 1960s. They still are. Particularly when the artwork is signed by a woman. Charlotte Brüel has continued to fight for better working conditions in the arts alongside her artistic practice. But back to the protest of the past, the remnants of which are stored in the Danish National Archives—a story worth recalling in this context. Back then, one chair of the esteemed Professoriat was

LETTER FROM THE ACADEMY 8TH OF JANUARY, 1968

Charlotte Brüel has completed her degree in the Art Academy’s Painter School after approximately three years. She has an unusually refined painterly sensibility and, moreover, is a person of very high intelligence and morale. As Charlotte Brüel’s teachers we have followed her still richer artistic development, and we will very strongly recommend her for the economical support that she is seeking. At this point, it’s essential for her ongoing development to have peace and quiet to work, so she can entirely concentrate and devote herself to her painting.

Egill Jacobsen Professor Knud Nielsen Lecturer occupied by the Danish COBRA-artist Egill Jacobsen. He had been appointed in 1959. As the first representative of abstract painting, he took an anti-academic approach to art. In her diary entries from December 1967, which offers a backdrop for Charlotte Brüel’s protest against the institution, she writes: “I’m lacking in Egill an effort with the students in the more practical areas, like making students aware of competitions and discussing exhibition opportunities.”

Brüel also found that Egill Jacobsen neglected the academy and his students too frequently. But that he, “based on my current familiarity with the different professors, is absolutely the only option for me, personally. Before entering the academy, I had plans to register with the various painting schools during my time there to achieve the most diverse training. This seems to me now as the most unrealistic plan.”

With the student riots of 1968, young people had experienced a political awakening, but it was only in 1971 that students at the academy were given actual agency and influence on the curriculum. High on their wishlist were more opportunities for collaboration as well as shared classes across the academy’s different schools.

Another abstract Danish painter, Richard Mortensen, who was hired in 1964, “should most probably never even have been a professor,” Brüel noted in her diary. “I strongly distance myself from Mortensen due to his totally dominating and self-inflated affectation, which obviously produces a very bad environment for the students. He interferes too directly in students’ work based on the most superficial understanding of their person as well as their work as a whole. Too little gravity in his engagement with students, lots of self-inflation, and lack of a sense of humour.” Charlotte Brüel debuted at Kunsthal Charlottenborg’s Autumn Exhibition in 1968.

A few years later she registered in Comparative Literature at the University of Copenhagen, but eventually returned to the academy in 1974, where she attended the Graphic School and the Art-Pedagogical School, finishing there with a Master’s degree in 1978. What can you live off? What can’t you live off as an artist? Charlotte Brüel has continued to pose these questions as an active voice within the artistic-political debate in Denmark. She found like-minded allies in the eco-movement of the 1970s, who fought for the unification of human and nature—and this is seen as a more existential (than political) layer in Brüel’s practice and choice of materials. ◻