ArtistDanishb.1910–d.1998
Egill Jacobsen
1 active items
Egill Jacobsen was born on 16 December 1910 in Copenhagen and died on 21 April 1998. He grew up in a middle-class home where his father painted as a pastime, and worked briefly as a tailor's apprentice before training at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts private painting school in 1932–33, under Kræsten Iversen and Peder Hald.
In 1934 Jacobsen traveled to Paris, where encounters with Matisse, Picasso, Léger, and Miró reshaped his artistic outlook. A personal meeting with Picasso drew him toward primitivistic and ethnographic art, and he began building a visual language of beak-like, mask-derived forms in saturated color. From the late 1930s these masks dominated his canvases, becoming both a formal obsession and a biographical one -- each painting channeling mood and experience through the human/inhuman face.
In 1937 he exhibited with the avant-garde group Linien, and at the outbreak of war he joined the circle around Asger Jorn that produced the journal Helhesten. In 1948 Jacobsen was one of the founding participants of the international movement CoBrA -- named for Copenhagen, Brussels, and Amsterdam -- which advocated spontaneous, expressive, often childlike imagery as a rejection of both academic tradition and cold rationalism. He contributed to the CoBrA journal and participated in the movement's exhibitions through 1951.
In 1959 Jacobsen was appointed professor at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen, the first abstract artist to hold such a position. He taught there until 1973. That same year, 1959, he was awarded the Eckersberg Medal. In 1961 the Museum of Modern Art in New York presented an exhibition of his work.
His paintings are held in the collections of Statens Museum for Kunst (the National Gallery of Denmark), Aalborg Kunstmuseum, and the NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale's CoBrA Collection, among others. He continued painting mask motifs until his death.
At auction, Jacobsen appears primarily through Danish houses. On Auctionist, 32 works have been listed, with 8 currently active. The leading seller is Bruun Rasmussen in Lyngby and Aarhus, accounting for 23 of the 32 lots. The top recorded result in our data is 140,000 DKK for a composition titled "Rejsen til friheden" (The Journey to Freedom). Most works sell in the range of 2,000–10,000 DKK, reflecting the market for his works on paper, watercolors, and prints.