Carl-Henning Pedersen

Carl-Henning Pedersen (23 September 1913 – 20 February 2007) was a Danish painter and a key member of the COBRA movement. He was known as the "Scandinavian Chagall", and was one of the leading Danish artists of the second half of the 20th century.

Pedersen was born in Copenhagen and brought up in the poor area near Vigerslev Alle. He held radical political beliefs. He joined the International Folk High School in Elsinore in 1933, where he met self-taught painter Else Alfelt. They married in 1934, and their first daughter, Vibeke Alfelt, was born later that year. Alfelt encouraged Pedersen to paint, and he first exhibited at the Artists' Autumn Exhibition (Kunstnernes Efterårsudstilling) in Copenhagen in 1936, where he showed four abstract works. His modernist style was at odds with the socialist realism preferred by his communist friends, who snubbed him and he argued with Bertolt Brecht about his art. His abstract works, with flat planes of colour, emulated the works of cubists and of Paul Klee.

Pedersen travelled on foot to Paris in 1939, where he saw works by Picasso and Matisse. He visited the exhibition of "degenerate art" (entartete Kunst) in Frankfurt am Main on his way home, where he was inspired by the paintings on show, particularly the works of Chagall, which remained a strong influence on his art for the rest of his life. His second daughter, Kari-Nina, was born in 1940. He joined the Høst group during the Nazi occupation of Denmark, writing about medieval Danish murals for its journal, Helhesten, and continued to produce seditiously modern abstract works.

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