Literature: Jan Würtz Frandsen: “Richard Mortensen: Afklaringens år 1940–1958. Besættelse og rekonstruktion”, Copenhagen, 1992, fig. 262 (recto) and fig. 197 (verso), ill. pp. 207 and 161.

The present painting by Richard Mortensen is in fact two paintings - both created during the Second World War. The period 1940–1946 has been characterized as an intermezzo in the artist's production. During these years, placed between the artist's surrealist phase in the 1930s and his position in the 1950s as a pioneer in concrete art and in international modernism, Mortensen is working with a kind of Expressionism, in many ways reminiscent of, and fully equalling, the future CoBrA painters.