Else Kirsten (neé Henriksen) Madsen

Else Kirsten Henriksen was born on January 31, 1906 in Copenhagen, Denmark. She enrolled in a vocational arts high school in 1921 at the age of 15. There she underwent studies typical of the time period including figure drawing, watercolor, and charcoal.

During this time Else painted watercolors which reflected Cezanne’s influence. A small body of work remaining from this time period show her interest in still life drawing of perfectly rendered flowers in vases, and occasional landscape drawings executed from photographs and rendered in an Impressionist style

Upon finishing her schooling about two years later, she went to work for Royal Copenhagen, the world renowned Danish manufacturers of hand painted ceramic figures. Examples of Else’s ceramic work for Royal Copenhagen can still be found. Else worked at Royal Copenhagen for about a decade. She met and married Axel Rasmus Madsen in 1932 and left work in 1933. She had her first child a year later.

It is the artwork executed after 1947 that will prove to be important in comprehending Else Madsen’s artistic legacy. She was fortunate in her later years to be able to travel internationally twice annually with her husband, regularly into the major European cities, to Africa, North and South America and other places. Although not recorded, it can be assumed that she visited some museums and galleries during those travels as some of the major modern trends in painting are apparent in her own workThat artistic exploration focused on using Post-Impressionistic formal considerations and techniques which appear to have been taken from Van Gogh, Edvard Munch, and perhaps early 20th century Russian painter, Vassily Kandinsky

At this time she began working in oil on canvas. The scale of her work is typically intimate, usually no larger than 18 x 24 inches. As she became more secure in the maturity of her style and technique, the scale of her work increased. One example on display is the untitled 1969 landscape inspired by the Guadalupe River in Ingram, Texas. This work shows the larger scale at which Else could work and also the confidence with which she painted in her later years

As the above mentioned work and a smaller 1971 painting of an indigenous rural home in Cochabamba, Bolivia show, she had fully assimilated Van Gogh’s brushstroke and made it her own. The subjects in her paintings and drawings from the 60s and 70s capture a light and suggest a vibrancy as to give them an otherworldly life. Although Else was painting sixty years after most of the Post-Impressionist painters, her finest paintings rival the quality of work produced by many of those artists.

Perhaps the most curious aspect of Else Madsen’s story is that she painted only for herself and was reluctant to sell or bequeath any of her works. She was not a particularly social person and seemed to be most comfortable in the tranquility of her studio and in the company of her paintings. It is believed that she participated in only one exhibition in her lifetime during the 60s in which three paintings were exhibited and none sold. Upon her death, several hundred oil paintings, watercolors, and drawings were rescued by her daughter-in-law and now most are distributed among her descendants.
The paintings on display here at the Else Madsen Gallery are a small tribute from a loving grandson to his grandmother.