AFTER my humiliating interview with the gymnasium teacher, and after graduating from high school, I considered seriously what I should do with my life. If my fate was not to earn a university degree, I mused, perhaps I should return to my early talents as an artist.
I had begun painting in earnest, outside the school environment, when I was fourteen, joining my father at his easel. While my father concentrated on abstract paintings, I painted abstracts and landscapes as well. Now, at sixteen, and unsure of how to proceed in my life without the advantages of a gymnasium education, I was again painting alongside my father in the evenings. This was satisfying to us both, and I believe it helped my father improve his outlook on life, as he was struggling to recover from tuberculosis.
After leaving the military at the end of the war, my father had started an import-export business in Copenhagen with a businessman who had been a prisoner in a concentration camp in Germany during the war. The business failed, and my father found a job in a larger import-export business in Copenhagen. It was while he was working there that he contracted tuberculosis. One of the female employees, a German national who had moved to Denmark, had a severe case of TB as a result of the deprivations she’d suffered during the war. Unfortunately, the employees all shared the same coffee cups during breaks, and my father contracted TB, becoming an invalid for a year or more. This created serious financial problems for my parents. My mother was forced to work as a waitress in restaurants in Copenhagen, and I contributed to the household income by working days on any odd jobs I could find, such as being a messenger boy and washing windows in the apartment blocks in our neighbourhood in Valby, a suburb of Copenhagen. I also worked for several months as delivery boy for a florist in Copenhagen. My job was to go to churches prior to funerals and place a bouquet of flowers on the corpse lying in an open coffin. This evoked in me a dread of death as powerful as any of myexperiences and fears during the wartime bombing raids, as I stood in the quiet church contemplating someone’s dead relative and the fleeting years of life.
When I was fifteen, I saw an exhibition of paintings by the Russian-French abstract painter Serge Poliakoff in a small gallery in Copenhagen, and was very impressed with his work. I was struck by the marvellous juxtaposition of brown, red and blue in his paintings, as well as the unique combination of abstract forms. I began to daydream of going to Paris to become an artist, taking lessons from Poliakoff if he would have me. Working at my odd jobs since leaving school, I managed to save enough money to journey by train to Paris. In contrast to my father’s experience, in which his father forbade him to go to Rome on an art scholarship, my father strongly encouraged me to pursue this dream.
In my youthful ambition, I imagined my work being exhibited in major galleries in Europe and America. I was excited by the idea of living in Paris and becoming part of the bohemian artistic life there. I had developed a deep passion for my art, and could imagine no other life than the pursuit of beauty through painting.
I had just turned seventeen when I boarded the Northern Express from Copenhagen to Paris in 1949. We stopped in Hamburg for two hours, and I walked around the Bahnhof, the railway station. It was only four years since the war had ended, and I was astonished to be able to look from the Bahnhof out to the horizon of the city, because so many of the major buildings in Hamburg had been flattened by the unremitting Allied bombing. I also saw several German veterans in grey uniforms, missing arms or legs, walking around with the help of crutches and begging for money.
When I arrived at Gare du Nord in Paris early the next morning, I collected my bicycle from the luggage car and hoisted my satchel containing all my belongings onto my back. I decided to do a little sightseeing on my first day in Paris, and took a detour through the expansive Place de la Concorde on my way to the Seine. It was a bright, sunny spring morning and due to the shortage of gas, there were few cars on the roads. Travelling on Parisian streets by bicycle then was a safe venture, in contrast to today.
All my expectations of what Paris would be like were met on that morning. The tall, grey buildings with their iron-grille balconies, colourful potted plants and dark grey slate roofs with innumerable chimney pots formed a backdrop for the intense activity of the city. I bicycled past the many cafés where waiters in white aprons were moving chairs and tables out onto the pavement. Street cleaners were flushing water down the gutters, and there was a distinct smell of Paris that I can still recall: a clean smell sharpened by the musty odours of an ancient city.
I crossed Pont Saint-Michel and stopped halfway across the bridge to watch the grey-green, muddy water of the Seine passing below, and the barges docked at the stone mooring walls. Looking up to my left, I was overwhelmed by the soaring towers and huge rose window of Notre Dame, and the gargoyles springing out of the stone walls that shimmered in the early-morning light. Turning the other way, I saw in the far distance the massive edifice of the Louvre.
I bicycled on up Boulevard Saint-Michel and arrived at the Place Denfert-Rochereau with its massive stone lion gazing mournfully over the Parisian scene. I was on my way to Porte d’Orléans on the outskirts of Paris where I had arranged by letter to rent a room.
After settling into my accommodations, I soon discovered rue de Seine, the part of town where most of the famous art galleries were located, and luckily, one was showing Poliakoff paintings. I asked the gallery owner how I might contact Poliakoff, and he gave me an address on rue Madame, on the Left Bank, where Poliakoff had a small studio and also lived with his wife and child.
One afternoon I plucked up my courage, located the artist’s street address, entered an inner courtyard and knocked on the door of a little room that was behind a toy shop facing rue Madame. I was feeling apprehensive as I waited for someone to answer my knock. Would today be a new beginning in my life, or was I to be disappointed again?
A striking-looking man with black hair and lively brown eyes opened the door. He was friendly to me, an unexpected visitor, and introduced me to his wife, an Irish woman whom he had married while studying at the Slade School of Fine Art in London. Poliakoff spoke fluent English as well as French, so we conversed in English. After I explained to him how I had admired his paintings in Copenhagen and had come to Paris recently to pursue an art career, he invited me to spend time with him in his studio, where I became his student.
Serge Poliakoff was very kind to me, accepting me as his only student even though I had no money to pay him, and spending a year teaching me the techniques of abstract painting. He taught me, in his unique way, how to make oil paints from the original powder sold at a special shop in Paris. This technique of producing oil paint was one of the secrets of the vibrant colours in his paintings. He also told me to visit the Louvre once a week in order to appreciate and learn from the works of the great masters. At this time, Poliakoff was living in quite poor circumstances. As painting was not providing a living, he also played the guitar in cafés at night, specializing in Russian folk music.
My small rented room in Porte d’Orléans was in a turn-of-the-century greystone apartment building in rue des Plantes. I would paint my abstract canvases by propping them up against an ancient wooden wardrobe opposite the large oak bed, making sure that I didn’t drip too much paint on the Turkish rug, which would upset my landlady, who took a motherly interest in my welfare. My paintings were in the style of abstract expressionism developed by the Parisian school in the 1940s and ’50s. I used bold colours and developed planes of colour with expressive brushstrokes.
One day, Poliakoff told me to bring five of my paintings to his studio. We would each hang five of our paintings in a spring