Born: 1904 Hillerød, Denmark
Died: 1998 Copenhagen, Denmark
Year of Migration to the UK: 1939
Biography
Surrealist artist Rita Kernn-Larsen was born in Hillerød, Denmark on 1 January 1904. Her interest in painting emerged early and was already evident while she attended the private Marie Mørks School. She subsequently moved to Norway for her studies, enrolling at the National School of Drawing in Oslo from 1924 to 1925. The following year, she was admitted to the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen. However, finding the academy too embedded in tradition, she abandonned her studies and relocated to Paris in 1929. There, she became an apprentice to Fernand Léger at his Académie Moderne, where she acquired the fundamentals of composition. In 1933, she returned to Denmark and became involved with the Surrealist circle gathered around the magazine Linien. Her debut exhibition was held in 1934 at Chr. Larsen’s Art Gallery in Copenhagen. She then took part in the renowned international exhibition, Cubism–Surrealism at the Den Frie Exhibition Building in 1935. By that time, she had fully emerged as a surrealist.
Before moving to London during the war years, Kernn-Larsen was one of the few women included in the major London International Surrealist Exhibition, held at the New Burlington Galleries in 1936. Surrealism had reached Britain later than other parts of Europe, with this exhibition playing a key role in establishing the movement’s presence in the UK. Further important prewar Surrealist exhibitions in which she participated included Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism (MoMA, New York, 1936) and the scandalous Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme (Galerie Beaux-Arts, Paris, 1938). In 1937, Kernn-Larsen was in Denmark but soon returned to Paris, where she met Peggy Guggenheim. Guggenheim then mounted a solo exhibition of her work in London in 1938 at her newly opened Guggenheim Jeune Gallery. Kernn-Larsen and her husband, the Austrian-Jewish art dealer, Isak Grünberg, subsequently chose to remain in London, due to mounting instability in Europe.
Although her time in London was brief, coinciding with the war years, Kernn-Larsen made significant contributions to the British art world, and her stay greatly influenced her artistic practice. In 1940, she gave birth to her daughter, Danielle Grünberg. (Although Grünberg’s parents moved to France after the war, where she grew up, she later returned to the UK and made a name for herself as a theatre actress, director, and political activist.) In 1942, Kernn-Larsen’s works were included in The Seventh Civil Defence Artists’ Exhibition at the Cooling Galleries, where she was noted in the catalogue as a fire guard, and as living on Downshire Hill in Hampstead, neighbour to German émigré painter, Fred Uhlman (whose home was the headquarters of the Free German League of Culture and the Artists Refugee Committee). During the war, Kernn-Larsen largely rejected Surrealism, instead embracing a more realistic style. Her Surrealist paintings, however, which are her best known, are marked by a dreamlike quality, often featuring organic forms, fluid lines, and an interplay between figuration and abstraction. Human figures and facial features frequently merge with natural and abstract elements, creating a disquieting ambiguity. A visual rhythm is achieved through the use of curving shapes and sparse, deliberate brushwork. Kernn-Larsen’s imagery conveys a sense of inner worlds, strikingly blending the real with the imaginary.
Later in life, her profile as a Surrealist gained currency among scholars, and she was included in important exhibitions, such as Surrealism in Denmark (Statens Museum for Kunst, 1986) and La femme et le surréalisme(Museé cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne, Switzerland, 1987), while a major retrospective, Rita Kernn-Larsen – An International Danish Surrealist was held at Denmark’s Randers Art Museum in 1995. Posthumously, her work featured in survey shows of women artists in Surrealism, including Women’s Surrealism in Gammel Strand, Denmark in 2018 and in the Fantastic Women at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in 2020, while a one-person exhibition, SOLO, was displayed in the Kunsten, Aalborg. Rita Kernn-Larsen died in Copenhagen, Denmark on 10 April 1998. In the UK public domain, her work is represented in the National Trust collection.
Related books
- Kerry Greaves, ‘Scandinavian Surrealism’, in Kirsten Strom, ed., The Routledge Companion to Surrealism (Abingdon: Routledge, 2022), pp. 279-287
- Marie Arleth Skov, ‘Shady Plants, Ecstatic Trees, and Vulva Seashells: Symbols of Erotic Nature in the Surrealist Work of Rita Kernn-Larsen and Elsa Thoresen’, in Kerry Greaves, ed., Modern Women Artists in the Nordic Countries, 1900–1960 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2021), pp. 134-145
- Marianne Ølholm, ‘Women Artists in and around the Danish Journal linien’, in Kerry Greaves, ed., Modern Women Artists in the Nordic Countries, 1900–1960 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2021), pp. 88-98
- Ulla Angkjær Jørgensen, ‘Rita Kernn-Larsen–An International Surrealist Career’, in Benedikt Hjartarson et al, eds., A Cultural History of the Avant-Garde in the Nordic Countries 1925-1950 (Leiden: Brill Rodopi, 2019), pp. 409-422
- No Author, ‘Civil Defence Pictures Amongst Old Masters’, Hampsted News, 15 October 1942, p. 4
Related organisations
- Civil Defence Artists (member)
Related web links
- artnet
- AWARE
- Centre Pompidou
- Magda Michalska, 'Meet the Surrealist Rita Kernn-Larsen', Daily Art, 26 May 2023
- National Museum of Women in the Arts
- Rita Kernn-Larsen, Christie's
- Rita Kernn-Larsen: Peggy Guggenheim Collection
- Rita Kernn-Larsen biography in Danish
- The Met
Selected exhibitions
- SOLO (solo exhibition), Kunsten, Aalborg, Denmark (2019)
- Women’s Surrealism (group show), Gammel Strand, Copenhagen, Denmark (2018)
- Rita Kernn-Larsen: Surrealist Paintings (solo exhibition), The Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, Italy (2017)
- Rita Kernn-Larsen – An International Danish Surrealist (solo exhibition), Randers Art Museum, Randers, Denmark (1995)
- La femme et le surréalisme (group show), Museé cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne, Switzerland (1987)
- Surrealism in Denmark (group show), Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen, Denmark (1986)
- The Seventh Civil Defence Artists’ Exhibition (group show), Cooling Galleries, London (1942)
- Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme (group show), Galerie Beaux-Arts, Paris (1938)
- Rita Kernn-Larsen (solo exhibition), Guggenheim Jeune, London (1938)
- London International Surrealist Exhibition (group show), New Burlington Galleries, London (1936)
- Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism (group show), MoMA, New York (1936)
- Cubism–Surrealism (group show), Den Frie, Oslo, Norway (1935)
- Rita Kernn-Larsen (solo exhibition), Larsen’s Art Gallery, Copenhagen, Denmark (1934)
