Playfulness and loud colours

Around 1930 there is a major upheaval in Willumsen’s life. After completing monumental The Great Relief in marble shown in this gallery, and approaching 70, he turns to the stage in his private life as well as in his art. His wife Edith has left him, taking both their daughters back to Denmark. Alone in the South of France, Willumsen meets the young French woman Michelle Bourret. She becomes his student and model, and later also his partner.

Bourret is a dancer and actress, and her sense of scenic art reinvigorates Willumsen’s life and art. The years that follow are marked by boldness, playfulness and loud colours. Michelle dances light footedly towards us in rooms that look like stage sets. Faces and dogs of snow appear among mountain glaciers. His mountain paintings are the closest Willumsen comes to the abstraction and geometrical forms that dominate modern art in the 1930s. Everything is brought to the surface – there is neither depth nor perspective. Both the mountains and the woman rise above realism and convention in these large-scale paintings.