In the year of his 150th birthday, the Danish artist J. F. Willumsen (1863–1958) is on his way to become an artist’s artist. Recognized for his merits as a modernist in the eighteen-nineties, his late works have long been regarded as commonplace, self-ironic, and kitschy in his home country, whereas his entire oeuvre has remained largely unknown to an international public. In this way, the reception of Willumsen’s late work resembles that of the figurative works from the thirties and forties by French artist Francis Picabia (1879–1951) before they were elevated to warrant sophisticated postmodernist reflection on painting in the late eighties. The book brings these two artists together with the American artist and film director Julian Schnabel (*1951) and discusses the transhistorical similarities in their painterly strategies and explicit self-staging of their role as artists. It also reflects on the reception history of the works and more broadly on the mechanisms of upgrading and downgrading within art history.

Exhibition schedule: Willumsens Museum Frederikssund, September 8–December 31, 2013