Carl-Henning Pedersen

Carl-Henning Pedersen (Copenhagen, 1913 – Copenhagen, 2007) was a Danish painter and one of the central figures of the CoBrA movement, founded in the late 1940s. His vividly coloured, fantastical imagery made him one of the leading Danish artists of the second half of the twentieth century, and he was sometimes called the "Scandinavian Chagall".

Born in Copenhagen in a poor district, Pedersen held radical political views in his youth. In 1933 he joined a folk high school in Elsinore, where he met the self-taught painter Else Alfelt, who encouraged him to paint. They married in 1934. He first exhibited in Copenhagen in 1936 with four abstract works, a modernist style that clashed with the socialist realism favoured by his communist friends.

In 1939 he walked to Paris, where he saw work by Picasso and Matisse, and on the way home he visited the "degenerate art" exhibition in Frankfurt, where Chagall's paintings left a lasting mark on him. During the Nazi occupation of Denmark he worked with the Høst group and kept producing abstract work. In 1948 he was among the founders of CoBrA, a name drawn from Copenhagen, Brussels and Amsterdam. The group dissolved in 1951, having pursued spontaneous, strongly coloured images inspired by primitive and folk art.

After the war he received several awards, including the Eckersberg Award and a Guggenheim Award, and he represented Denmark at the Venice Biennale in 1962. In the 1960s and 1970s he turned to monumental work, including a mosaic for the H. C. Ørsted Institute at Copenhagen University and a large tiled wall in Herning. From 1983 to 1987 he worked on the decoration of the Gothic cathedral in Ribe, with murals, painted glass and mosaics illustrating Bible stories. His imagery returns to birds, horses, eyes, suns, moons and castles.

After Alfelt's death in 1974 he moved to Burgundy in the 1980s, though much of his work still drew on Danish sources. His legacy is preserved in the museum dedicated to the couple at Birk, near Herning, and in the collection he gave to Copenhagen. He died in 2007 after a long illness.