Why is it that artists since the 1500th century have passionately revolved around apocalyptic themes of death and misfortune?

In 2023, Museum Curator Anne Gregersen has received a generous grant from Ny Carlsbergfondets research fund for the project “(Post)apocalypse Aesthetics from 1500 to the Present Day”.

The purpose of the project is to examine how the apocalyptic has manifested itself in art from the 1500th century to the present day, and how the meaning of the concept has changed in recent times. Where it previously denoted something that was beyond our control, it is increasingly the self-created destruction that we fear. With JF Willumsen's violent painting "Naturskræk. Efter stormen nr. 2" from 2016 as the focal point, the artistic depictions of the apocalypse and what comes after are unfolded and examined. This provides space for reflection on how we are currently affected by a world with climate change and disasters, which make the apocalyptic present and man-made.

The research project will result in an exhibition at Willumsens Museum in 2026.

In the Nordic context, El Greco was rediscovered as early as the late 1880s. In 1888, the artist Johan Rohde was the first in Denmark to write about his works, which he had seen at the Museo del Prado in Madrid, and through Rohde, JF Willumsen became acquainted with El Greco, whose works he himself sought out in Madrid and Toledo. Willumsen subsequently described his relationship with the artist as “an obsession”. When Edvard Munch came into contact with Johan Rohde no later than 1888, he may also have been exposed to the El Greco euphoria at an early age.

JF Willumsen's deep interest in El Greco is well documented and resulted, among other things, in the purchase of a number of counterfeits and a single genuine painting by the artist (which belongs to the Willumsens Museum) and in the publication of a two-volume work in French about El Greco's youth. The book contains many factual errors, but is groundbreaking in its search for ethnographic material and the uncovering of El Greco's working method. Willumsen shows how the artist develops his hybrid idiom by allowing artistic expressions and traditions to migrate from place to place, thereby breaking with the geographical boundaries that defined the schools of older art.

The research project resulted in the exhibition “El Greco and Nordic Modernism.”

During the First World War, the German artists Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880-1938) and Jens Ferdinand Willumsen (1863-1958) each chose to realize their own individualistic projects and to stand outside the currents of the times. From 1917, the Swiss mountains became the refuge of the mentally broken Kirchner, while Willumsen settled in the South of France in 1916 and calmed down, as he expressed it many years later. Neither of the two returned to their respective homelands, but devoted the rest of their lives to pursuing a personal artistic vision in self-imposed exile.

With the exhibition Staged nature and life. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Jens Ferdinand Willumsen – the late works It was the first time that an exhibition and accompanying book related Willumsen's work to contemporary trends on the German art scene – and more specifically to one of the most important representatives of German expressionism, the visual artist Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. The exhibition was also the first major presentation of Kirchner at a Danish museum.

Willumsen's own art collection contains approximately 2.000 objects. Willumsen himself envisioned this collection hanging in his imagined museum as a echo room and called it an “appendix” or an addition. When Willumsens Museum opened in 1957, Willumsens’ collection was finished and hidden away in a warehouse. Only a few times in the last sixty years has it been the subject of special attention. With “EKKORUM. Thorvaldsen, Willumsen. Jorn and their collections” we look at the collection with a new eye and connect it with selected parts of the collections of Bertel Thorvaldsen (1770-1844) and Asger Jorn (1914-1973). Common to the three artists is their almost manic building of extensive collections of art, from Northern Europe to East Asia, and their desire for these to be accessible to the public.

Ny Carlsbergfondet has supported a project through two generous grants PhD and a postdoctoral project in the years 2011-2019 at the Department of Art and Cultural Studies in connection with Willumsens Museum. The PhD project has dealt with the reception of Willumsens late works and a new interpretation of them. The postdoc project has dealt with artist-curated exhibitions based on the museum's own exhibition history.