Helhesten (Year 1, Booklet 4)


Helhesten (Year 1, Booklet 4)
Editor	Robert Dahlmann Olsen
Issue date	October 18, 1941
Cover design	Hans Scherfig
Followed by	Helhesten (Year 1, Booklets 5 & 6)

Helhesten (Year 1, Booklet 4) is the fourth issue of the Danish art journal Helhesten, edited by Danish architect Robert Dahlmann Olsen. This issue features Egill Jacobsen’s important profile of Asger Jorn, a poem about the hell-horse by national poet Steen Steensen Blicher, and Jens Sigsgaard’s influential essay on children’s drawings.

This article is part of the Helhesten collection.

Background

The fourth issue of Helhesten appeared in October 1941, maintaining the journal’s remarkable pace of publication during its first year. This issue deepened the journal’s exploration of the theoretical foundations of Danish spontaneous-abstract art while continuing to connect modern practice to historical folk traditions.

Cover Design

Hans Scherfig (1905–1979) designed the cover for this issue. Scherfig was a Danish painter, illustrator, and author known for his satirical work, naïve painting style, and Communist sympathies. His inclusion among the cover artists reflects Helhesten’s embrace of artists across the Danish modernist spectrum—Scherfig was an established figure whose popular illustrations and political engagement aligned with the journal’s populist and anti-fascist ethos, even though his style differed from the younger abstract-expressionist core of the group.

Key Contents

“Asger Jørgensen” (Profile of Asger Jorn)

Egill Jacobsen contributed a substantial profile of Asger Jorn (then still using his birth name Asger Jørgensen), offering critical insight into Jorn’s working methods and aesthetic philosophy. Jacobsen described Jorn’s approach to small-scale works:

We must go out into the great cosmic night, not to sleep a heavy dreamless sleep, but out to experience the small beings of drives and desires, as they are in the transition between dream and reality. They move in the rhythm that corresponds to the dreaming state, in the rhythm that leads from dream toward a richer reality.

- Egill Jacobsen, “Asger Jørgensen,” Helhesten 1, no. 4 (1941)

This text articulated the group’s interest in dream states and the unconscious as sources of artistic inspiration—ideas that would later become central to the Cobra movement.

“E hælhæjst” (The Hell-Horse)

The issue published a poem about the helhest by Steen Steensen Blicher (1782–1848), the Danish national poet best known for his depictions of rural peasant life. The inclusion of Blicher’s poem connected the journal’s provocative mythological symbol to established Danish literary tradition, demonstrating that the hell-horse was not merely an avant-garde invention but was rooted in centuries of Nordic folklore and poetry.

“When Children Draw” (Naar børn tegner)

Jens Sigsgaard contributed an essay on children’s drawings, exploring the uninhibited creativity that the Helhesten artists saw as a model for authentic artistic expression. This interest in children’s art was central to the group’s philosophy—they believed that children’s drawings conveyed an uninfluenced sense of reality that academic training systematically destroyed.

As Kerry Greaves notes, the Helhesten artists’ interest in children’s art “showed the trend and inspiration in modern art” and highlighted “affinities to primitive and oriental art and to the free creative play of children.”

Artistic Philosophy

The fourth issue continued to develop what Carl-Henning Pedersen had termed “fantasy art” (fantasikunst) in the previous issue—art that set out “from something central in people, something which everyone can understand and feel without prior knowledge. Something they themselves have experienced as a child but have forgotten, convinced of the necessity to grow up and follow foolish social traditions.”

The Helhesten Series

Helhesten was published over nine issues from April 1941 to November 1944. The journal was illustrated with over fifty original, mostly colour graphic works, and printed in editions of 800. It was affordable to the general public; a full set of all issues cost twelve kroner, or the equivalent of $2.30 in 1944.

Other issues in the series include:

Helhesten Year 1, Booklet 1 (April 13, 1941) — Cover by Henry Heerup
Helhesten Year 1, Booklet 2 (May 10, 1941) — Cover by Egon Mathiesen
Helhesten Year 1, Booklet 3 (September 17, 1941) — Cover by Jens Søndergaard
Helhesten Year 1, Booklets 5 & 6 (November 18, 1941) — Cover by Axel Salto
Helhesten Year 2, Booklet 1 (October 30, 1942) — Cover by Niels Lergaard
Helhesten Year 2, Booklets 2 & 3 (March 10, 1943) — Cover by Storm Petersen
Helhesten Year 2, Booklet 4 (December 24, 1943) — Cover by Ejler Bille
Helhesten Year 2, Booklets 5 & 6 (November 11, 1944) — Cover by Carl-Henning Pedersen

Explore the Book

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Creators

Asger Jorn