Valdemar Andersen, Street view in Stockholm for the Sunday edition of the daily Politiken,
Published on February 1, 1928. Photo: Niels C.B. Larsen.
Counterfactual history is as enticing as it is contested and counterfactual art history is even more so in that it is about art works that never came about.
Yet, it is tempting to make what is after all a qualified guess. We have the hints - we could say we have the premises - for what could have been if Valdemar Andersen had lived at least another decade.
Valdemar passed away in 1928 at just 53. He was hospitalised in February of that year for his leukemia. The two present examples are both from 1928 and are consequently both created in January. They were in other words among his very last works. He had been poorly for years by then, albeit as yet undiagnosed, and still they are a testing ground for new ideas and inspirations.
"We must not adapt, we must create", Piet Mondrian wrote in 1926 and indeed in the two works shown we recognise the newest sparkling concepts from artists of the time such as Mondrian.
Most interesting of all, Valdemar seems to have understood the aspirations of Mondrian. The compositions are not just a cheap adaptation. There is vibrancy and structure as movement through coloured billboards, artificial lights and buildings constructed to reflect their utilitarian purposes and all of it is composed through pure colours and black alike in clear planes that create unity and equilibrium of the myriad before us.
The eternal movement is the equilibrium, Mondrian stated. The newspaper cartoon above takes us to the street itself, while the sketch for a book cover below is a structure for thoroughfare not unlike a street. People are walking in and out of the department store in parallel lines, each dedicated to their own goal and yet forming the mutual structure that belonged to the modern day metropolis of 1928.
It is not a cheap adaption in that Valdemar makes the two scenes come alive. They are still uniquely his. The softness of the black outline, which even makes a scroll of the wheel of the car to the left above, just as the speed lines across the body of the buss in the middle, while the background is calmly blue. It is as always in his work a place for curious fascination to step into with room for us to belong.
Mondrian and Valdemar were contemporaries. They were by then mature artists and both were constantly seeking to manifest light and lightness with as little means as possible. Valdemar would have recognised that striving in the other, which in turn inspired him to take it on as his new eyes before streets that were not familiar to him - these are both drawn in Stockholm on the last travel of his life - and while Mondrian wrote of paintings, which the new and transformed human would take onto the streets to inspire their transformation too, Valdemar's works were mass-produced the distribution of which belonged to the new metropolis.
Valdemar Andersen, sketch for the cover of the novel Det store Varehus
(the great department store) by Sigfrid Siwerts, 1928.
Shown with permission from The Centre for Maps, Prints and Photographs, The Royal Library.
I apologize for the poor quality of the photo; it was taken by me for study purposes.
We know the first source for this inspiration, which inevitably would have come from Valdemar's son, Ib Andersen, who was a student of architecture at this time and travelled with him to Stockholm. There would have been exchange on all levels, from books and magazines to the young and rebellious of the time that Ib brought home to assist his father in the latter's experiments in bronze or a game of chess.
Valdemar's readiness to take on the new and make it his own is everything in this story.
Ib would go on to draw scenes not unlike the ones above, but his artistic temper would take them apart in his quest to define the origin of life and matter. The layers of debris with which he filled his drawings would make for intricate storytelling. Had we had the two work side by side as Ib matured and Valdemar continued to explore his artistic and intellectual curiosity would have been epic.
