The Daily Valdemar No. 41: April 22
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| Valdemar Andersen, sketch for the café at Opera Comique in Oslo, 1918. Two papers are glued on top of each other to make room for the foliage. Private collection. |
A wild cat in the wild in the shape a café of a newly built theatre house in 1918, which points to our environmental situation today as the result of a deeply ingrained problem in Western civilization.
For one Valdemar Andersen chose a leopard from his first-hand observation of the animal in the Copenhagen Zoo. It feels truly to be there before us, though, with concentration in every detail of its body at the ready to jump out of the foliage and sink its teeth in its prey when the moment is right.
It constitutes a fully rounded drama and was painted as a central motif on an otherwise solidly colored wall. It was a way of scaling back decoration and present stark and strong modern walls, which still had a visual interest to them and the inspiration to it all came from Pompeji.
Oslo, still called Kristiania at the time, absolutely hated all of it and the theatre closed down three years later. It was not in tune with its time and place, in which there is some consolation about a leopard in the wild on a wall. The sketch in its intensity and light wash of blue across the back, however, is still a leopard very much alive before us.
