Our Now of 1920

Valdemar Andersen, cover of the Sunday edition of "Magasinet" for Politiken,
July 15, 1923. Private collection.

Valdemar Andersen made the tumult of modern life one of belonging right after 1900.

Valdemar Andersen, Ex libris for his
 wife, Juliane, ca. 1920.
Private collection.

He drew emancipated women on bicycles, prams, stray dogs and the weaving of many people amassed at the same event into one of soft rounded lines, dots and stripes. His lines are open and fluid. The commotion is never stuffy, but light and airy. It is each time a welcoming situation of positivity and even tranquility.

His compositions are opening to the sky. Calm is always part of city life, just as nature has a constant presence. Valdemar was a townie all his life, but we are never in doubt what time of the year we see in his cartoons.

"I see everything", he told in an interview in 1926, "I cannot walk with my eyes closed. I am always occupied by what I see". Seeing was an analysis to him and he laid out how a portrait is a piece of architecture, compiled by many tiny observations.

He would draw the first onset of spring through the tiniest of dots of ink, which formed into knotted branches. The dots are hardly even there, but the readers of the paper he worked for would sense a promise of warmer days soon when the dots would form into leaves.

Valdemar Andersen, cover of the Sunday edition of "Magasinet"
for Politiken, January 17, 1926. Private collection.

At once structure and living form with change within them, the branches are the architecture with which he would define the sky. Pointing upwards and out, they are dense, yet delicate against which the sky is all the lighter with a tint of blue for instance. A blue which in turn is never a solid one. Summers are humid here and summer nights hardly grow dark and he creates a presence of both.

To this we may add the fact that the weather and consequently the sky is never a constant in this part of the world and his blackbirds add that movement and energy to the scene, each one busily making itself known to the world.

Today marks Valdemar's 155th birthday, a day after Kyndelmisse here, the day of "candle mass" marking the coming of spring.

While these words are being written our blackbird is scolding everybody around outside. I happen to live in his old neighborhood, or rather it is divided into a number of hoods by the blackbirds fiercely guarding each their own territory. We recognise the singing of "our own" blackbird today, just as we feel that he drew it for us.

The now in his drawings is the now that we recognise a century later. He saw it all.