On the living room wall in my childhood home hung a poster: it advertised an anniversary exhibition at the Storm P. museum in Frederiksberg, Denmark, and featured a reproduction of storm P.’s painting Back to nature.
Tilbage til naturen, which is the original Danish title of that painting, is a watercolor from 1945, measuring 44 x 57 cm (17 x 22 in). Rendered in a naivist, cartoonish manner, the left side of the painting shows a mass of people — anonymous, gray, shoulders stooped — walking in line away from the viewer and towards a big group of buildings in the background. There are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people, the line disappears in the distance, and they walk so close together you as a viewer can sense the claustrophobia, and you know that the people in the line avoid the panic this claustrophobia would cause by resigning into apathy and give themselves over to the numb anonymity of the crowd. They appear to be on their way to work, and judging from the style of buildings they are walking towards — with smokestacks belching dirty smoke — the people are factory workers. The factory buildings are also, like the workers filing towards them, gray and drab and dreary.
On the opposite half of the painting — on the right side — leading off to the right from the road that all the workers are on, we see a country road. It’s breezy, lined with trees, and the ground around is almost psychedelically colorful. On this road, walking away from the line of workers, we see one single character. It’s a man, a vagabond, bearded and clad in tattered, brown clothes. He is wearing an illfitting hat, also brown, hands in trouser pockets, and he smiles contentedly as he walks into the countryside.
My father once expressed to me that he wasn’t sure the message implicit in the painting was morally acceptable: he worried about the protagonist of the painting turning his back — physically, yes, but also metaphorically — on the working class. Despite his ethical concerns, my dad chose to let the poster hang.
And so I had plenty opportunity to contemplate the vagabond, who never ceased to entice me … I don’t know if anybody looking at the painting would identify with anybody or anything else — the narrative is pretty loud and clear … and I spent much time fantasizing about his choice. The vagabond, with his amused facial expression — childlike anticipation — and his big, bulbous, red nose, is clown-like in appearance. But he is perhaps the type of clown whose jokes and silliness exposes the perceptions that the rest of us stove away in hidden pockets of our souls — out of sight in our daily lives — because they create too much of a dissonance should we fully admit their pertinence. We know about this motif, it speaks to a timeless civilization critique which stays ever relevant, we know about it because we carry it with us, but we brush it off as romanticizing, naïve, and dreamlike, and we do our best to ignore the consequence of our feelings and convince ourselves that yes, it’s probably best to let the machine grind on.
Storm P. (1882-1949) was a Danish artist, author, and actor, but is perhaps best remembered for his abundant output of humorous newspaper illustrations. He returned to the character of the vagabond many, many times in his art.