Helhesten was an avant-garde art magazine, and was published in Denmark between 1941 and 1944. It came out with 12 issues (6 single issues and 3 double issues), and was edited by architect Robert Dahlmann Olsen in close cooperation with artist Asger Jorn.
The magazine’s name is taken from the three-legged horse of Hel upon which the dead would ride (Hel was the underworld of Norse mythology). Or perhaps it is taken from the related three-legged Helhest of Danish folklore, which would foretell death: if you saw it, then somebody close to you — or yourself — would die soon after. According to Danmarks Nationalleksikon it was Asger Jorn who suggested the name. It was supposed to be a subtle symbol of resistance to the occupying Nazi regime: the artists wanted to reclaim the cultural heritage which had been stolen by the Nazi propaganda machinery, and simultaneously use the Hel-horse as a sinister symbolical threat aimed at the Nazis. Apparently the symbology was so subtle that the magazine went under the radar of the German censorship, but clearly a lot of the art that was showcased in the magazine (and on its covers) would fall in under what the Nazi regime termed Entartete Kunst — degenerate art which was an insult to the German ideals.
Interpolated with works by the group of abstract expressionists connected to the magazine, the magazine contained articles about international artists who inspired the Danish group, non-Western arts, ethnography, petroglyphs, children’s art, and more. The style and contents of the magazine is akin to other art magazines that existed around the same times, like Wolfgang Paalen’s Dyn in Mexico City, and George Bataille’s surrealist magazine Documents which had been published in Paris a few years earlier.
Bibliography
- Huvenne, Paul, editor. Cobra: A Pictorial and Poetic Revolution. Hannibal Books, 2022.