Vilhelm Bjerke-Petersen (Danish, 1909-1957)

Executed in 1931, Vilhelm Bjerke-Petersen's Ohne Titel betrays the influence of Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky under whom the young artist had studied at the Bauhaus in Dessau where he developed a fascination for the expressive potential of purely abstract forms. Asger Jorn expressed Bjerke-Petersen's tendency to instil his works with subtle points of reference to the real world by stating '“he created abstract art which did not believe in abstraction' (cited in U. Peters, Internationale Sprachen der Kunst: Gemälde, Zeichnungen und Skulpturen der Klassischen Moderne aus der Sammlung Hoh, exh. cat., Nuremberg, 1998).