Les Contes Étranges de Niels Hansen Jacobsen at Musée Bourdelle exhibition graphics

Paris Musées:

This exhibition, the first to be dedicated to Niels Hansen Jacobsen (1861–1941) in France, invites visitors to an oneiric journey into the world of this Danish sculptor and ceramist, a contemporary of Antoine Bourdelle (1861–1929).

His work was strongly marked by a taste for the bizarre, the ambiguous, even the macabre – the “uncanny”, to quote an expression coined by Sigmund Freud a few years later. His sculptures revived Nordic mythology and Scandinavian legends, the orality of folklore and the fantastic aspects of Andersen’s tales.

From 1892 to 1902, Hansen Jacobsen settled in Paris. His studio at 65, Boulevard Arago became the meeting place for a group of francophile Danes, in a “cité d’artistes” where, among others, the ceramist Jean Carriès and the illustrator Eugène Grasset lived.

Alias Harbour, sometimes electronically slanted, is used for headline graphics throughout, with Ivar Text for text.