Else Alfelt

Through a life shaped by determination, experimentation, and an international outlook, Else Alfelt (1910-1974) forged her own artistic path and is today regarded as a central figure in postwar Danish art history.

Below follows a brief introduction to a significant Danish artist who, with nature, the cosmos, and the inner landscape as her point of departure, developed a distinctive abstract visual language that attracted attention both in Denmark and internationally.

Else Alfelt (1910-1974) was born and raised in Copenhagen but spent most of her childhood in foster care and in an orphanage. While living there, she received a paintbox from an aunt. This paintbox became the starting point of her future as a painter.

She depicted everyday life at the orphanage by portraying the other children or painting fragments of the park and the church she regularly visited. When she painted, she forgot the small and large conflicts of daily life as well as the sadness of having ended up in institutional care. She experienced a sense of calm in both body and mind and became absorbed in another world.

Else Alfelt was rejected from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in her youth, but this did not deter her from pursuing her dream of becoming an established artist. Instead, she, so to speak, took the brush into her own hands and gradually developed her own visual language, moving from a naturalistic approach toward an increasingly abstract expression.

In 1934, she enrolled at the International Folk High School in Helsingør with the vision of both painting in the studio and learning languages in the classroom to realise her ambition of experiencing the wider world. There she met the young communist Carl-Henning Pedersen, and their meeting developed into a close partnership in both life and art.

After their stay at the folk high school, Else and Carl-Henning moved in together, got married, and soon had their first daughter, Vibeke, later followed by her younger sister Kari-Nina. The small family lived in a one-and-a-half-room apartment, which formed the setting for both family life and the couple’s passionate artistic work. The parents took turns bringing the children to the park and working at home, where the bed was turned into an easel. With no stable income, the young artists lived on the limited public assistance provided by the municipality. This required constant improvisation in both art and everyday life. Their works were therefore created on scraps of wallpaper and plywood rather than acid-free paper and canvas, and dinner often consisted of potatoes served with potatoes.

In the mid-1930s, Else Alfelt and Carl-Henning Pedersen met the painter Egill Jacobsen at an anti-war demonstration. Through him, they were introduced to a circle of experimental artists—including Richard Mortensen, Henry Heerup, Asger Jorn, Erik Thommesen, and Sonja Ferlov Mancoba—who were working with abstract painting. This marked the beginning of Alfelt’s involvement over the following decades in a series of groundbreaking artistic associations, each leaving a distinct mark on art history.

She was present throughout the artistic avant-garde, participating in artist groups and exhibition initiatives such as Linien (1934-39), The Harvest Exhibition (1932-49), Scandinavians, and The Hell Horse (1941–44), which became a precursor to the international CoBrA movement, securing the artists’- and also Alfelt’s - international breakthrough in the late 1940s. She actively participated in this international collaboration, driven by a desire for collective experimentation and spontaneous creative expression.

With her breakthrough, new opportunities arose for Else Alfelt to fulfil her long-held dream of travelling, supported by grants. After the Second World War, she undertook her first journeys to Lapland, Norway, and Iceland, where she painted a series of airy, colourful watercolours inspired by the majestic nature she encountered along the way.

Alfelt became deeply fascinated - indeed spellbound - by the landscapes she encountered and depicted. In particular, the mountains captured her imagination, as she herself expressed: “Mountains are a boundary between the real and the unreal; they are the place where heaven and earth meet. When I walk in the mountains, I have a wonderful sense of connection with all times. There is nothing time-bound; I believe it has always been like this, from the very beginning, and will remain so until the very end. It is something constant in a world that is otherwise always changing.”

The nature in Alfelt’s works may appear familiar and even serene, but it is at the same time new, abstract, forceful, wild, and overwhelming. One might say that she did not only depict external landscapes, but also inner landscapes as reflections of states of mind and society.

This new way of portraying nature attracted considerable attention, and in 1951 she became both the first woman and the first abstract painter to receive the prestigious Ny Carlsberg Foundation Rome Prize, enabling her to travel even more widely across Europe.

During her travels in Italy, Else Alfelt became fascinated by the many beautiful mosaics found throughout the country, particularly the monumental works in church interiors. She was especially drawn to the so-called Ravenna technique, in which each individual tessera is cut by hand, giving it its own unique shape and edges. The irregularities of the edges refract light more intensely than in the so-called indirect method, where all tesserae are uniform and the surface is flat.

Her dream of working with mosaics - both physically demanding and costly - was realised when Carl-Henning received the Guggenheim International Award in 1958, which came with a substantial financial prize. Although receiving such a large sum of money was, in fact, somewhat at odds with the couple’s shared values, they reached a compromise: part of the funds was used to establish a studio in Bovbjerg, while the rest was spent on glass sheets for their extensive mosaic work.

In the early 1960s, trains arriving in Bovbjerg caused curiosity among locals as they carried crates of glass directly from Murano in Italy to the remote western Jutland coast. Over the years, these glass sheets were taken to the workshop, where they were manually broken into mosaic tesserae. These pieces became the foundation of many of the artists’ mosaic works, including Kloder i Gyldent Rum, created by Else on commission for the Danish Arts Foundation.

In 1967, a long-held dream came true for Else Alfelt when she travelled to Japan for the first time. There she visited, among other places, a Zen Buddhist temple. In the temple, she observed how monks moved through so-called Zen gardens, drawing patterns in the sand with a stick and placing stones and other natural materials to create ephemeral works of art. The patterns were executed with great precision and concentration, fully aware that even the slightest breeze or drop of rain would erase them forever. For the monks, it was not the result of the artistic process that mattered, but the process itself. The aim was not to create a work for display, but to find inner calm and balance - to reach a state of Zen.

It became clear to Alfelt that her own art, here - on the other side of the world - finally found its true mirror image. She felt at home. Ever since childhood in the orphanage, she had experienced how art brought calm and balance to her life and thoughts. Throughout her life, she had therefore intuitively approached art in a way that resonated with Japanese principles, in her repeated depictions of nature and the cosmos. The journey became a revelation, and impressions from the temple gardens in Kyoto and the full moon over Mount Fuji merged with the brushstrokes of Japanese calligraphy within her artistic universe.

Alfelt’s Japanese inspiration was directly expressed in the exhibition The land of stone lanterns (1968), where she transformed the gallery space into a Zen garden with the aim of guiding visitors into a meditative state. Her well-known series The universe’s flower illustrates how she herself found Zen through the artistic process. In this series, she created nearly 100 works using the same technique. Each work begins with an automatic drawing, in which she draws overlapping circles with a pencil. This is followed by an extensive process of colouring all the resulting fields. No two areas are alike, and Alfelt carefully applies paint so that the pencil lines remain visible, creating space between the many vibrant fields. The work on the series was extensive and physically demanding, and she used repetition as a meditative tool to find Zen in the process.

With The universe’s flower, she sought to create a new and different kind of art experience for the viewer. Instead of encouraging narrative interpretation, she invited the audience to use the series as a means of finding their own sense of Zen by letting the gaze move from image to image, becoming absorbed in the flowering universe until repetition itself creates calm in both body and mind. This approach represented a significant shift in the 1960s and remains relevant today - perhaps even more so than ever.

In 1973, Else Alfelt was awarded the Thorvaldsen Medal. The following year, she died suddenly after collapsing in the street, only 63 years old. In addition to her family and a wide circle of friends and fellow artists, she left behind an extensive body of work consisting of watercolours, paintings, and mosaics—a unique oeuvre in which her consistent and highly distinctive style secured her a singular position within the avant-garde movements of her time, making her an important and significant figure in both Danish and international art history.

Following her sudden death, Carl-Henning Pedersen donated her artistic estate of 1,000 works to Herning, where his museum was under construction. At the opening in September 1976, the building was named the Carl-Henning Pedersen & Else Alfelts Museum. Carl-Henning created the inaugural exhibition exclusively with works by Else, as a tribute to the woman with whom he had shared both life and art for more than 40 years.

This tribute continued in 1993, when the museum was expanded with the Prism Halls, whose architectural form echoes the prism shapes found in Else’s iconic nature paintings. Today, the museum continues this homage by regularly presenting special exhibitions that offer new perspectives on Else’s life and work, while also lending her works to exhibitions in Denmark and abroad.