Oluf Høst: A Farm, a Harbour and the Light of Bornholm

In 1935 Oluf Høst bought a small farm called Bognemark, near Gudhjem on the Danish island of Bornholm, and set up a second studio there. He then painted it, by the account of Den Store Danske, in hundreds of versions. The Oluf Høst Museum adds that he could keep as many as fifty unfinished canvases going at once. Few Danish painters have spent so long looking at one place.

Born on the island

Høst was born in Svaneke, on Bornholm, on 18 March 1884. His father, Niels Peter Nielsen Høst, was a district official who later practised as a lawyer; his mother was Augusta Thomine Anthon. After his confirmation he served a painter’s apprenticeship in his home town, so that he came to art through a trade.

His training in Copenhagen was long and patchy. According to the Dansk Biografisk Leksikon, he attended Gustav Vermehren’s school, spent about a month and a half at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in the autumn of 1909, studied with Johan Rohde at the Artists’ Study School from 1910 to 1912, and went to Harald Giersing’s school from 1915 to 1917. He showed for the first time at the Artists’ Autumn Exhibition in 1909. On 5 April 1913 he married Hedvig Wiedemann in Copenhagen.

It was at Giersing’s school, the Leksikon says, that Høst met German Expressionism and found the expressive voice he would use for the rest of his life. The museum describes the same encounter in broader terms, as his first contact with European expressionism.

1921

The decisive year was 1921. Høst spent time with the painter Karl Isakson in Gudhjem and on Christiansø, and the Leksikon treats those months as the turning point of his career. That summer he went to Berlin and Cologne to see exhibitions of Cézanne and van Gogh. Those two painters, together with his long interest in the Swedish animal painter Bruno Liljefors, formed the basis of his mature work. A friendship with Edvard Weie pushed him further towards painting the pull of nature directly.

The Bornholm School

Isakson and Weie belonged to a loose group of painters now called the Bornholm School. Bornholms Kunstmuseum lists its members as Karl Isakson (1878 to 1922), Edvard Weie (1879 to 1943), Olaf Rude (1886 to 1957), Kræsten Iversen (1886 to 1955), Niels Lergaard (1893 to 1982) and Høst himself, and dates its most active period to 1910 to 1930. The museum is careful to call them an artistic community rather than a movement with a programme. What they shared was an appetite for French painting, for Cézanne, Matisse and Picasso, and a willingness to let line, surface and colour work on their own terms. Painted landscape became their main field of experiment, and out of it came what the museum calls a new Nordic tradition of landscape painting.

Høst had one distinction among them. He was, as both Den Store Danske and the island’s tourist board point out, the only member of the group who was born on Bornholm. For the others Bornholm was a place to paint; for Høst it was home.

Nørresån

In 1929 Høst moved to Gudhjem for good and built a house there that he called Nørresån. The Leksikon describes the house as the centre of his subject matter from then until 1966. Behind it a rock garden runs towards the cliff called Bokul, old quarry workings, and fig and mulberry trees, according to Destination Bornholm. The studios where Høst and his son worked still stand in the grounds.

From that house he painted the island in a recurring set of subjects. The museum lists views over Gudhjem harbour, the smokehouses where herring were cured, the bonfires lit on St John’s Eve and dramatic fires. Den Store Danske adds the island’s round churches and winter night skies with the constellation Orion. One of these, Vinternat, sydvesthimmel (Winter night, southwest sky), dates from 1950.

The work did not always travel safely. Den Store Danske records that his painting Aften (Evening), from 1930, was confiscated by Nazi Germany as degenerate art.

Writing the colour down

Høst wrote as well as painted. The Leksikon notes that throughout his life he kept diaries in which he recorded his experiences and his impressions of colour in nature, sometimes as preparation for a painting and sometimes as a kind of prose poetry in their own right. The museum counts more than 1,500 of these logbooks. His son Niels later recorded readings from them.

It is hard not to read the Bognemark pictures in the same spirit. A single farm, painted hundreds of times, works less as a subject than as a fixed instrument, against which a painter can measure changes of light and colour that he was also trying to pin down in words. The Leksikon singles out one recurring device in his work, the view through the gate of a farmhouse wing, painted square to the picture plane, which turns a farmyard into something close to a stage.

Recognition

Honours came steadily. The Leksikon lists the Anckerske grant in 1923, the Eckersberg Medal in 1933, the Hartmannske grant in 1939, the Thorvaldsen Medal in 1943 and the Swedish Prince Eugen Medal. In 1955 Svaneke made him an honorary citizen. Destination Bornholm notes that his work was shown in New York, Venice and Brussels, and the Leksikon lists public collections holding it in Malmö, Stockholm, Gothenburg, Oslo, Trondheim, Copenhagen and Aarhus.

Oluf Høst died in Gudhjem on 14 May 1966. Hedvig lived until 1973. In 1998 Nørresån opened as the Oluf Høst Museum, and his paintings now hang in the rooms and studios where they were made, not far from the farm that he painted for more than thirty years.