Greenlandic Craftsmanship: Between Man and Myth

The Greenlandic culture was and is closely tied to nature and man's relationship with animals and the spiritual world. Mythical creatures, along with seals and bears, were (and still are) often depicted in the art, just as almost everything is handmade in material provided by nature.

Many of the items made were relatively small and could be held in one hand. Even very functional objects were made with stylized, human features, which can be seen, for example, in an offered set of wound plugs in carved bone and wood.

The auction also includes several tupilaqs cut from bone or tusk, as well as objects made of wood that washed ashore as driftwood and was subsequently used for figures and tools. Even when just simple cuts have been made, one is in no doubt about what the objects are supposed to represent – for example, a bear or a bird.

The Isolated Eastern Coast

About half of the art objects at the auction originate from the east coast of Greenland – an area that until the end of the 19th century was highly isolated and rarely visited by Danish explorers.

Hans Egede had in his search for the Norse people’s eastern settlement in 1723-24 covered parts of this area, but it was only with Gustav Holm's expedition in 1883-85 that the area was explored and described. Contact was made here - not to the descendants of the Norse people, but to the people who had inhabited the area for centuries. In the spirit of the times, the expedition brought home ethnographic items to Denmark, which was donated to the Danish National Museum's ethnographic collection and subsequently partially returned to Greenland.

Items from Danish Collectors

The Greenlandic objects on offer are, however, primarily collected by travellers or emigrants from Denmark who settled in Greenland and with great interest collected these tokens of the Greenlandic culture.

A number of the offered items were brought home by aircraft mechanic Baldur Harken. He lived on the east coast in Angmagssalik for a number of years after World War II and until 1954. A more well-known collector of Greenlandic decorative art was the artist Ib Geertsen, who among other things wrote about Greenlandic masks. In his possession was also a wooden figure of a woman which was called "Emmy" because it had been owned by Emmy Langberg. In the 1920s and 1930s, she was secretary to the polar researcher Knud Rasmussen and accompanied him on four Greenland expeditions.