CROOKED LINES  Many people know Willumsen's paintings, and most also know that alongside his painting, he was a skilled architect, photographer, ceramist, sculptor and graphic artist, but few are aware of how extensive the graphic part of his production actually was. He made etchings, lithographs, posters and woodcuts from the simple to the cartoonish and to the technically complicated.

In contrast to the colorful universe that Willumsen is known for in his paintings, it is a more monochrome world that we are invited into through his graphic production. Although he also experiments with color in some graphic prints, it is the contrasting encounters between dark and light surfaces that dominate, which sometimes reinforces the caricatured element in the figure drawing.

Scandal art

At the end of the 1800th century, Willumsen worked mainly with etchings. Fertility (1891) which is today considered a major work in Danish symbolist art, is a simple etching depicting Willumsen's pregnant wife Juliette Meyer depicted next to an ear of corn and a French text. Both the choice of motif and the production provoked strong reactions at the time. Some believed that the picture must have been done by a five-year-old child, while others demanded that the police ban it.
Perhaps because of all the controversy, it would be 25 years before Willumsen took up the etching technique again.

Poster art

Willumsen instead turned to the lithographic poster. The Danish poster experienced an artistic and quantitative breakthrough in the mid-1890s. Until 1910, Willumsen drew drafts for several product advertisements, including soap, champagne and beer. The Tuborg brewery held a competition for a poster. Willumsen won the first prize of 10.000 kr. with a man's head leaning back to take a sip. However, his proposal was never put into production, as Tuborg's director wanted to use an iconic image of the sweaty, beer-drinking man on a sunny country road.

Distorted motives

During World War I, Willumsen made a series of striking etchings in which he expressed his outrage at the horrors and horrors of war. The grotesque emerges in the everyday, and the boundary between animal and human behavior is blurred. Even in the portraits of Willumsen's wife and children, more than one reality is at play. In the 1940s, he returned to lithography. The horrors of war are gone, but faces and bodies are still distorted.
Among other things, he produces a series of prints of a colorful gallery of people from a French café, sketched in a cartoon-like style, which is also found in his paintings from the period.

“Crooked lines” shows a large selection of Willumsen's graphic works, many of which are today considered masterpieces in Danish art. In addition to the chronological and stylistic presentations, the museum offers the public an insight into the various graphic techniques. Throughout the exhibition period, the public has the opportunity to make their own graphic prints in our workshop.