Seminar: Artists’ Collections and Echoes of the Past in the Present

The art collections of artists constitute a distinct sub-category of private collections. They can be seen as personal narratives that nourish the artists’ own practice and locate it in an art-historical framework – formed and tailored to fit the artists’ own idiosyncratic criteria. In a reciprocal relationship the artists activate the objects and the objects the artists – and like an echo the collections resonate in the present.

The purpose of this seminar is to explore the specific nature of several artists’ collections and to discuss how image collections at a broader level have contributed to the development and transformation of artistic and art historical practices over a period of 150 years.

Moving from Thorvaldsen’s ‘reservoir’ of over 15,000 antiquities, contemporary paintings and lithographs, to Rodin’s copious collections of objects of every kind, then onto Willumsen’s so-called Old Collection, and finally to Asger Jorn’s untameable picture archive covers a vast range, but also provides a basis to ask some principal questions: Do artists’ collections challenge or contradict the canon of art – and can a collection ‘write’ art history? What happens when artists’ collections enter or form the basis of a museum, and a previously private narrative enters the public realm? How can the afterlife of images be traced in an art practice that draws on a collection? And how did the accelerating reproduction culture of the 20th century affect the possibilities for comparing and juxtaposing visual material?

We look forward to welcoming art professionals, scholars, artists and others with an interest in the field to the seminar.

Limited places. Please register: www.jfwillumsensmuseum.dk/artists-collections

PROGRAMME FOR THE SEMINAR:

9:40 Welcome by Lisbeth Lund, director of J. F. Willumsen’s Museum

9:45 Introduction by Anne Gregersen, J. F. Willumsen’s Museum / University of Copenhagen

SECTION I: THE ART COLLECTION AS A PERSONAL PARTHENON OR COUNTER CANON

10:00 KEYNOTE: Dr. Pascal Griener, Université de Neuchâtel, “The Rodin Galaxy of Objects. Creative Collecting around 1900 and its Interpretation within the History of Collections”

11:00 Rasmus Kjærboe, Ribe Kunstmuseum / Aarhus University, ”The Private Museum – Collections as Artworks from Sir John Soane to Prince Eugen”

11:30 Anne Gregersen, J. F. Willumsen’s Museum / University of Copenhagen, ”The Rejection of a Museum Collection and What to Do With J. F. Willumsen’s Wild Attributions”

SECTION II: THE IMAGE COLLECTION AS A TOOL FOR WRITING ART HISTORY

13:00 KEYNOTE: Dr. Uwe Fleckner, Universität Hamburg, “The Rhetoric of Synopsis. Collecting Images as an Act of Historiography: Aby Warburg, Carl Einstein, and Some of Their Contemporaries”

14:00 Jens Tang Kristensen, University of Copenhagen / the Free Exhibition, “Archives, Avant-Garde and Anarchy – Asger Jorn and the Imaginary Museum”

SECTION III: ARTISTS INTERACTING WITH THEIR COLLECTIONS AND THE AFTERLIFE OF IMAGES

15:00 Yannis Hadjinicolaou, University of Hamburg / Warburg Haus, ”Collecting Greco – Painting like Greco: J. F. Willumsen”

15:30 Karen Benedicte Busk-Jepsen, Thorvaldsen’s Museum, “Dragging off Hylas to the 1830s. Thorvaldsen’s Transformation of an Antique Motif ”

16:00 Panel discussion and concluding remarks

16:40 – 17:30 Reception at Carlsberg Akademi

Thursday Nov. 15 there is a guided tour of the exhibition "Echo Room. Thorvaldsen, Willumsen, Jorn, and Their Collections" at J. F. Willumsen’s Museum in Frederikssund starting at 17:00. To register: www.jfwillumsensmuseum.dk/artists-collections

Venue: Carlsberg Akademi, Gamle Carlsberg Vej 15, 1799 Copenhagen V