Danish Avant-Garde and World War II

Description:

This is the first book to focus on Helhesten (The Hell-Horse), an avant-garde artists' collective active during the Nazi occupation of Denmark and one of the few tangible connections between radical European art groups from the 1920s to the 1960s. The Danes' deliberately unskilled painterly abstraction, embrace of the tradition of dansk folkelighed (the popular) and its iterations of egalitarianism and consensus reform, called for the political relevance of art and interrogated the ideologies underlying culture itself. The group's cultural activism presents an alternative trajectory of continuity, which challenges the customary view of World War II as a moment of artistic rupture.

subjects: Art, political aspects,  Art and society,  Art and war,  Art, european,  Art,  History,  Aspect politique,  Histoire,  Art et société,  Art et guerre,  General,  Modern (late 19th Century to 1945),  Art & Politics,  European,  Political aspects,  Helhesten (Group of artists),  Avantgarde,  Kunst,  Helhesten