JF Willumsen had his first encounter with modern French art when he traveled to Paris and Southern Europe in 1888. The encounter became the catalyst for a radical shift in Willumsen's art, which until then had been characterized by realism and naturalism. In the years 1890-94, when Willumsen lived in Paris, he found himself in the midst of the artistic melting pot of the time. Artists such as Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Paul Gauguin and Odilon Redon influenced the young artist. In later years, Willumsen has been considered one of the first true exponents of modern art in Denmark. His works from the 1890s are among the main works of Danish modernism.

JF Willumsen's private art collection, also known as the Old Collection, contains 2072 works. It ranges from antiquities, both authentic and stylistic imitations, to Byzantine icon paintings, Mannerist drawings, modern French painting and Danish contemporary art. The works cross-fertilize each other in a lively dialogue that reflects the artist's many travels in Europe and his lifelong commitment to the diversity of art.

The artworks were purchased for small sums from art dealers, antique dealers, antique dealers, at auctions and from private individuals. Some of the works were received by Willumsen as gifts. JF Willumsen has carefully listed all the works in the Old Collection in a protocol.

With its versatile content, which begins with antiquity and ends with the present, and geographically covers large areas from Denmark to Southeast Asia, JF Willumsen's collection of art is a personal art historical narrative.

JF Willumsen was a unique figure in Danish art with his pluralistic style and versatile production of works. He was also a diligent letter writer, as his extensive and now digitized letter archive attests.

A large part of JF Willumsen's letter archive is now available online on the digital platform Sources of Danish Art History, KTDK. A series of correspondences with colleagues and critics show how Willumsen's works, art knowledge and personality have led to admiration and outrage in the contemporary world, both at home and abroad.

About Sources for Danish Art History

Digitalization is part of New Carlsberg Foundation big bet Sources for Danish Art History, KTDK, where the foundation provides funds and a digital platform for the work of digitization and accessibility. KTDK also includes the digitization and accessibility of a number of other collections of source material about Danish artists and artist groups.

In 1900, during a stay in New York, Willumsen began collecting thousands of illustrations. The images came from magazines and newspapers as well as purchased photographs, postcards and reproductions. The clippings were pasted onto sheets of paper and after returning to Denmark, Willumsen divided the material into fourteen large albums.

There is some indication that the idea from the beginning was to create a private reference work in book form. This resulted in an image bank that Willumsen could refer to and that investigated selected topics that had his particular interest. The twelve general categories and subcategories reflect an effort to systematize these topics, but also to record different forms of expression down to the smallest detail. For example, when a foot is lifted or a hand is extended.

Willumsen bequeathed his entire collection of his own works, his art collection and his rich archive of photographs, books, letters, diaries, notes and records, collected over a long life, to the museum.

In the notebook from 1893, you can read about Willumsen's philosophical and art theoretical considerations, which form the basis for jotunheim and the first drafts of the The Great Relief.  

In small notebooks, Willumsen recorded information about his daily life throughout most of his life, and they constitute an invaluable source of precise knowledge about his working process and activities. You can follow the artist on his travels around Europe and read about his meetings with other artists, museum people and art historians. The notebooks provide insight into his purchases of art, show his accounts and reveal a meticulous record of weather conditions. In 1914, for example, Willumsen writes with characteristic dryness: “Sun / left Rome at 9 a.m. arrived / at Siena at 2 p.m. / gray weather, a little / rain”. During World War II, we can read about distress and danger: “The fleet is bombing / the coast west of Cannes / and Cannes itself is close / by us. / A piece of a grenade is found / on my bed”.

A large part of Willumsen's notebooks are transcribed.
Click on the individual years and read them here:

Willumsen renewed painting with images that were carried by a completely personal style. He drew on tradition and at the same time was in dialogue with the popular culture of the time. Rapid movement, caricature and fiery colors are thus elements in many of his paintings. As a sculptor, he produced monumental works. Probably the most well-known is The Great Relief, which is currently on display in the museum's largest hall, but was originally intended for a bar in Chicago.

Willumsen designed several buildings, including his own house in Hellerup. In the 1930s he also conceptualized a Willumsen's Museum for his own art and the collection of older art he had built up. However, the museum only opened in Frederikssund, his grandfather's birthplace, in 1957.

For over 70 years Willumsen was active as an artist and experienced two world wars, a resounding technological development, the break of avant-garde art with the recognizable motif and the birth of modern, abstract painting. He visited the USA, North Africa and many countries in Europe. From 1916 until his death he lived in the South of France. Over the years Willumsen lived with three different women, all artistically oriented. In his life and art, the sculptor Edith Wessel, whom Willumsen married in 1903 and never formally divorced, and the partnership in his later years, the French dancer Michelle Bourret, played a particularly important role.

Many of Willumsen's major works stand today as significant contributions to Nordic modernism, but some works were also rejected and were only rediscovered in recent years. Willumsen defiantly continued to innovate and go his own way, but in his later years he withdrew more and more, while critics and experts came up with several fiery adjectives to describe his art: "Demonstratively violent, corrosive in color and extreme in every way, the old man's pictures eat their way into our eyes," wrote a critic in 1947, ten years before his museum opened in Frederikssund amid heated debate.

Some of the most radical and color-explosive works date from Willumsen's advanced age. This late period has until recently been misunderstood, but is being rediscovered in recent years and connected to other experimental figurative artistic expressions from the period as well as from the present.

JF Willumsen died in Cannes in 1958. He is buried in the museum's park together with his second wife, Edith.