ArtistDanishb.1909–d.1957
Vilhelm Bjerke-Petersen
2 active items
Vilhelm Bjerke-Petersen was born in Copenhagen on December 24, 1909, and spent his formative years moving between Scandinavia's leading art institutions. He studied under Axel Revold at the Norwegian National Academy of Fine Arts from 1927 to 1929, then made the pivotal move to Bauhaus Dessau from 1930 to 1931, where Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky were his primary teachers. The Bauhaus immersion shaped both his visual practice and his thinking about the relationship between abstract form and psychological depth.
Back in Denmark, Bjerke-Petersen channeled his Bauhaus training into a theoretical project. In 1933 he published "Symboler i abstrakt kunst" (Symbols in Abstract Art), a text directly modeled on the compulsory Bauhaus reading he had studied - Klee's "Pädagogisches Skizzenbuch" and Kandinsky's "Punkt und Linie zur Fläche" - and applied their ideas to a Surrealist framework. The following year, in January 1934, he co-founded Linien together with Ejler Bille and Richard Mortensen, the first Danish avant-garde association organized around abstract and Surrealist principles. The opening exhibition showed 177 works and drew 2,500 visitors.
The internal friction that characterized Linien from early on came to a head when Bjerke-Petersen published the book "Surrealismen" (Surrealism) in October 1934 without the consent of his co-editors. Despite this rupture, his ambitions for the Nordic Surrealist project remained large. In 1935 he organized the international exhibition "Kubisme = Surrealisme" at Den Frie Udstillingsbygning in Copenhagen, assembling works by Jean Arp, Salvador Dali, Max Ernst, Alberto Giacometti, René Magritte, Man Ray, Joan Miró, Yves Tanguy, and Paul Klee alongside Danish artists. André Breton later referred to him as the promoter of the Surrealist movement in the Scandinavian countries.
During World War II Bjerke-Petersen moved to Sweden, where he settled permanently from 1944. In Sweden he became associated with the Halmstad Group and extended his practice into applied arts, working as a ceramist and designer at Rörstrands Porslinsfabrik. This period reflects his consistent interest in art as something that could operate across disciplinary lines - painting, theory, ceramics, and institutional organization all fell within his scope. He died of heart disease at a hospital in Halmstad on September 13, 1957, at the age of 47.
At auction, works by Bjerke-Petersen appear primarily at Nordic houses. On Auctionist, his 15 catalogued items skew heavily toward paintings, with the majority handled through Bruun Rasmussen in Lyngby. Recorded sale prices in the platform range from 350 SEK for a ceramics set to 2,000 DKK for surrealist compositions, reflecting the modest scale of the works currently circulating - though his auction record globally is considerably higher, with a major painting selling for over 39,000 USD at Bruun Rasmussen in 2021.