Smile at the World, and It Will Laugh at You – Helhesten’s Folkelig Avant-Garde
In: A Cultural History of the Avant-Garde in the Nordic Countries 1925-1950Search for other papers by Kerry Greaves in
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Abstract
Traditionally the wartime Danish activist collective Helhesten (The Hell-Horse, 1941–1944) has been viewed as a transitional and fairly inconsequential moment in the careers of the artists it involved, most of whom went on to form the more internationally recognised Cobra group a few years later. In actual fact, Helhesten artists such as Asger Jorn, Henry Heerup and Egill Jacobsen reformulated a range of local and international sources to innovate aesthetically and engage art as a mode of cultural activism during the German occupation of Denmark, marking it as an important and crucial avant-garde movement in its own right.