Literature: Jan Würtz Frandsen: “Richard Mortensen: Ungdomsårene 1930–1940. Mellem surrealisme og abstraktion”, Copenhagen, 1984, fig. 215, reproduced p. 194 and mentioned p. 190. Exhibited: Grønningen, Copenhagen, 1936, cat. no. 111.

“During his summer stay in Gudhjem in 1935 with the address Holkedalen, Richard Mortensen sought new paths within surrealist aesthetics and through automatic drawing managed to free himself from the influence of Salvador Dali. The free arabesques of the drawing process condensed into a flat painting of defined abstract forms, and a dynamic and organic painting arose, where plant motifs mix with symbol-laden figures. Well-known concrete pairs of sexual symbols such as cup-shaped vagina and bone-phallus, bird and egg, are added together with the sexual symbolism of plants and flowers in a kind of erotic perception of nature” (Villads Villadsen in “New Danish Art History. Vol. 7. Tradition and Surrealism”, Copenhagen 1995, p. 220).

The work is one of seven paintings exhibited at Grønningen in 1936 under the collective title “Objects between night and day” and painted in Gudhjem in 1935. Jan Würtz Frandsen describes how the works are “permeated by the experience of nature, by a charge towards the mystery of nature, as Mortensen saw it fulfilled in the island's flora”. He quotes a letter from the artist to the collector Elise Johansen: “the flowers spread everywhere over here. cowslips stand like dandelions and color the grass - like yellow candies. the nature and the colors are really very rich” (quoted from the above p. 191).

Illustration: Overview from Grønningen's catalog with accompanying lyrics by Paul Eluard.

Cat. 109 (Introduction) in the collection at Bornholm's Art Museum. Cat. 113 (Fourth time) in the collection at Vejen Kunstmuseum. Cat. 115 (Capriccio) in the collection at the National Gallery of Art, Copenhagen.