ArtistDanishb.1885–d.1961
Jais Nielsen
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Johannes Knud Ove Jais Nielsen was born on 23 April 1885 in Denmark and trained from 1907 at Kunstnernes Frie Studieskoler under Kristian Zahrtmann - an institution that positioned itself in explicit opposition to the Royal Danish Academy and served as the nucleus of the Danish modernist breakthrough. By 1909 he was exhibiting with De Tretten (The Thirteen), a loosely organized circle of socially conscious avant-garde artists who represented a new generation in Danish art.
The years 1911 to 1914, spent in Paris, redirected everything. Nielsen absorbed Late Impressionism, Fauvism, and Futurism, but it was Cubism - its fractured perspectives and analytical dismantling of form - that gave him his distinctive vocabulary. He exhibited at the Salon d'Automne and encountered the Section d'Or circle. Back in Denmark from 1915, he began producing sculptures in a Cubist idiom and developed what critics would call Decorative Cubism: a personal synthesis of angular fragmentation and surface tension that ran through all his subsequent work, whether on canvas, paper, or clay.
A trip to Italy in 1920 deepened his engagement with monumental and religious imagery. Studies of Giotto's frescoes in Assisi pushed him toward stronger figure contours, more deliberate spatial structures, and an increasingly biblical subject matter. The large painting "Brylluppet i Kana" (Marriage at Cana), shown at the Artists' Autumn Exhibition in 1921, signaled this shift. Nielsen became one of the most significant Danish artists working with religious themes in the twentieth century, contributing fresco commissions and decorative programmes to Danish churches.
From 1921 to 1928 he worked as a sculptor at the Royal Copenhagen porcelain factory. The collaboration produced some of his most recognized work: stoneware figures of the Good Samaritan, multiple versions of Jacob wrestling with the Angel, and ceramic vessels decorated in oxblood, celadon, and ironstone glazes with relief or engraved biblical figures. In 1925 his work "The Potter" won the Grand Prix at the Paris Exhibition - a formal acknowledgment that the cubist energy of his earlier paintings had translated fully into the three-dimensional medium.
Denmark recognized him with the Eckersberg Medal in 1929 and the Thorvaldsen Medal in 1948. His works entered the permanent collections of the National Art Museum in Copenhagen (SMK), the National Gallery of Norway in Oslo, and the Museum Lolland-Falster in Maribo. He died on 8 November 1961.
On Auctionist, 20 lots by Nielsen appear across Danish and Nordic auction houses, with Bruun Rasmussen in Lyngby accounting for the largest share. Works span paintings, drawings, and Royal Copenhagen ceramics. Top hammer prices include DKK 12,000 for an Indian ink and wash drawing of "Sankt Jørgens kamp med dragen," DKK 11,500 for a stoneware Good Samaritan figure with celadon glaze, and SEK 10,037 for a large oxblood stoneware vase.