Café Dolly

by Annette Johansen

In the year of his 150th birthday, the Danish artist J.F. Willumsen (1863-1958) is on his way to becoming an artist's artist. Recognized for his merits as a modernist in the 1890s, his late works have long been regarded as commonplace, self-ironic, and kitschy in his home country, whereas his oeuvre has remained largely unknown to an international public. In this way, the reception of Willumsen's late work resembles that of the figurative works from the thirties and forties by French artist Francis Picabia (1879-1951) before they were elevated to warrant sophisticated postmodernist...