Jais Nielsen – A Danish Modernist Pioneer

Add the Gravitas of Art History to Your Own Collection

The offered collection consists of the many different facets in the broad artistic oeuvre of Jais Nielsen (1885-1965). From his earliest, stylized life-drawings and ceramic works to his studies for one of Denmark's most spectacular fresco paintings and some fine examples of the late work in his career. Here then, is the opportunity to add works that combine a high decorative value with the gravitas of art history to your art collection.

Part of the Modernist Breakthrough

From 1907 to 1909 Jais Nielsen was taught by Kristian Zahrtmann at the Danish art school Kunstnernes Frie Studieskoler (The Free School of Study for Artists). The school was in a historical opposition to the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and became a gathering place for the artists who, throughout the 1910s, came to define the Modernist Breakthrough in Danish pictorial art. Jais Nielsen already exhibited before 1910 with the circle of younger Danish avant-gardists in "De Tretten" (The Thirteen), but the most significant period regarding his artistic development was between 1911 and 1914, where he first settled in the art metropolis of Paris.

Decorative Cubism

Up until the outbreak of the first World War, the city of cities was a melting pot of artistic movements. Late Impressionism, Fauvism, Cubism and Futurism. Jais Nielsen consumed all these impressions, brought them home to Denmark and transformed them in the second half of the 1910s into a personal idiom, which has been called Decorative Cubism. Jais Nielsen's ceramic production - which has since become his most well-known works of art – was also established in the years immediately after his return from Paris, and here the influence of Cubism was clear in the early work. The simplification and play between space and surface runs as a red thread throughout most of Jais Nielsen's art, also after he around 1920 focuses on more historical motifs and becomes one of Denmark's most significant artists who works with a religious theme.

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