In Denmark, artworks depicting Greenlandic subjects by artists who travelled to Greenland are largely absent from art collections; they are primarily found in collections dedicated to cultural history instead. Having been more or less written out of Danish art history, such scenes of \u2013 and gazes upon \u2013 Greenland are rarely treated as artistic constructs embedded in a specific tradition and time, and as a consequence the colonial context of such artworks is not challenged. This issue is addressed and problematised by Mathias Danbolt et al. from the academic network The Art of Nordic Colonialism \u2013 Writing Transcultural Art Histories,<\/em>https:\/\/artsandculturalstudies.ku.dk\/research\/the-art-of-nordic-colonialism-writing-transcultural-art-histories\/<\/a>\">4<\/a><\/sup> for example through the lens of visual anthropologist Elizabeth Edwards\u2019s concept of \u2018elsewhere\u2019, which points out \u2018how colonial history has been disconnected from the narratives one meets in northern European museums in particular, to instead be relegated to other geographies, other historical eras and other disciplines (such as anthropology).\u2019Periskop <\/em>no. 27, 2022, pp. 36\u201357, pp. 42\">5<\/a><\/sup> However, it should be added that the past ten years have seen a resurgence in curatorial and academic interest in artists who have visited Greenland, resulting in a range of art exhibitions, MA theses and research articles on which this article partly relies.GR\u00d8NLANDSMALEREN Emanuel Aage Petersen (1894\u20131948) \/<\/em> Emanuel A. Petersen in Greenland<\/em> at Nordatlantens Brygge\/North Atlantic House in 2015 drew attention to the fact that Emanuel A. Petersen\u2019s works had primarily been seen from a cultural historical perspective rather than an art historical one. At the 2018 exhibition Kortl\u00e6gninger <\/em>(Mappings) at R\u00f8nneb\u00e6ksholm Kunsthal, expedition artist Aage Bertelsen\u2019s works from the Danmark<\/em> Expedition (1906\u201308) were displayed alongside works by contemporary artists Jacob Kirkegaard (b. 1975) and Pia Arke (1958\u20132007). The 2021 exhibition Gr\u00f8nland \u2013 I kunsten gennem 300 \u00e5r <\/em>(Greenland in Art through 300 Years) at Museet for Religi\u00f8s Kunst included Danish artists living and working in Greenland during the period 1870\u20131940; the exhibition focused on Greenland as subject matter in art and was curated by Christine L\u00f8ventoft, director of Museet for Religi\u00f8s Kunst, in collaboration with one of the two authors of this article, Laila Lund Altinbas. A major retrospective exhibition of the life and work of Gitz-Johansen was presented in 2022\u201323 at Bornholms Kunstmuseum. Also worthy of note here is the aforementioned recent inclusion of J.E.C Rasmussen’s work in SMK\u2019s permanent display, see page 3 of this article.\">6<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n Thus, the present article dovetails with an ongoing dialogue about the decolonisation of the art history discipline. Scholar Eve Tuck and professor K. Wayne Yang state that decolonisation is not a metaphor we can apply to all places at all times, as decolonisation requires that the multifaceted narratives and structures of colonialism be made visible. Taking their starting point in the question of what colonialism is, as posed by author and politician Aime Cesaire, they write:<\/p>\n Because colonialism is comprised of global and historical relations, Cesaire\u2019s question must be considered globally and historically. However, it cannot be reduced to a global answer, nor a historical answer. To do so is to use colonisation metaphorically. \u2018What is colonisation?\u2019 must be answered specifically, with attention to the colonial apparatus that is assembled to order the relationships between particular peoples, countries, the \u2018natural world\u2019, and \u2018civilisation\u2019. Colonialism is marked by its specialisations.<\/em>Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society <\/em>, vol. 1, no. 1, 2012, pp. 1\u201340, p. 21; [accessed 18 June 2024] https:\/\/clas.osu.edu\/sites\/clas.osu.edu\/files\/Tuck%20and%20Yang%202012%20Decolonization%20is%20not%20a%20metaphor.pdf<\/a>\">7<\/a><\/sup><\/p><\/blockquote>\n In this sense, this article constitutes an effort to foreground a specific period and a selection of artists, particularly Christine Deichmann, who are almost all absent from art museums and art historical contexts in Denmark, which in turn reflects an absence of colonial history(-ies) within the art history discipline in Denmark. Raising a point pertinent to this discussion, Yale University professor Tim Barringer states that the very concept of decolonising art history rests on a misconception: \u2018Art history can decolonise itself only to the extent that it acknowledges that Euro-colonial art and our discipline itself are themselves products of empire.\u2019Art History<\/em>, 43, no. 1 2020, pp. 8\u201366, p. 11\">8<\/a><\/sup> The raison d’\u00eatre for the present article is that by shedding light on a number of the many-sided and specific narratives of colonialism in a Danish-Greenlandic context found within the art history discipline in Denmark, we can make visible the underlying structures of which those narratives are manifestations \u2013 including their significance for society today. As Barringer goes on to say about the art historian\u2019s role in a decolonisation process:<\/p>\n We can formulate critiques of art-historical legacies and lexicons, and of colonialism itself as manifested in the visual and material. Art history can and must take a critical approach to empire and colonialism, and can use the privileges of its position to undermine the assumptions implicit in an imperial subject position<\/em>.9<\/a><\/sup><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Based on the dual question: Under what historical conditions did the forgotten\/overlooked artist Christine Deichmann\u2019s (1868\u20131945) create her artworks representing Greenlandic subject matter, and what distinguishes her position compared to the male artists travelling to and in Greenland during the same period?, <\/em>we want to address, problematise and probe the marginalisation (and re-inscribing) of Danish artists in Greenland 1870\u20131940 in Danish art history. We do this in order to reflect and deconstruct these artists\u2019 outsider\u2019s views of Greenland; gazes which in many ways reach all the way up through time to our present day.<\/p>\n More than forty years ago, art historians Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock emphasised the point that the very structure on which we build our art historical narratives must be challenged in order to (re)inscribe marginalised (women) artists. This is not a question of integrating or annexing the forgotten\/overlooked artists into the existing body of art history writing, but rather of approaching artists and their art based on the historical conditions under which the works were created and of which their practice was a part.Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology, <\/em>Bloomsbury Academic, 2021 (1981), p. 53\">10<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n In this article, we have chosen to outline the circumstances and framework surrounding Christine Deichmann by first offering a presentation of Danish artists travelling to Greenland with a focus on Deichmann\u2019s male colleagues and the images of landscapes and folk life they predominantly created. We place them within a Danish art historical context that also harks back to the travels and grand tours of Danish Golden Age artists. We then turn to Deichmann and examine how her choices of subject matter contrast with those of her male fellow travellers to Greenland, partly due to Deichmann\u2019s position as a woman artist in Denmark and as a spouse accompanying her husband to Greenland. To establish the backdrop for this, we will consider aspects such as Deichmann\u2019s education and her participation in exhibitions, and we will explore parallels between Deichmann and fellow women artists in Denmark and Greenland, among them Anna Ancher and Ellen Locher Thalbitzer. All this serves to ultimately posit Deichmann\u2019s artistic work as a complex duality: her art challenged the period\u2019s colonial views of the Greenlandic landscape and people, and at the same time she was a Danish artist in Greenland with all the colonial implications inherent in such a position.<\/p>\n Christine Deichmann moved to Greenland in 1901, making her, as far as is currently known, the first Danish artist in Greenland who was a woman. The years 1870\u20131940 saw an increasing influx of Danish artists travelling to Greenland, bringing along their canvases and brushes. Some were part of the official Danish expeditions, others travelled on their own.11<\/a><\/sup> The period was dominated by male artists who go by monikers such as \u2018Gr\u00f8nlandsmalere\u2019, meaning \u2018Greenland Painters\u2019. A term whose origin is unknownKunst.gl <\/em>, 2020, [accessed 18 June 2024] http:\/\/kunst.gl\/groenlandsmaler\/ <\/a>and Anna Maria Dam Ziska: Ethno-aesthetics: The Development of the Image of Greenland in Danish Art <\/em>, University of Copenhagen, 2021 [MA thesis]\">12<\/a><\/sup>, but which in European exhibition contexts has been used to describe Danish male artists who travelled to and found inspiration and subject matter in Greenland during the period 1870 to the 1940s. The \u2018Greenland Painters\u2019 are not a movement, a group or an artists\u2019 colony, but rather a designation used about individual artists who applied different styles and were rooted in different times.13<\/a><\/sup> \u2018Expedition art\u2019 is another term often used in this context, denoting (male) artists associated with the Danish scientific expeditions14<\/a><\/sup> where the artworks created and the subject matter depicted were all part of a scientific, colonial project intended to gather knowledge about and create records of Greenland in different ways. The Greenland Painters and expedition artists exhibited at the established Danish art scene of the time, including at the juried academy exhibitions at Charlottenborg, as well as at the various World\u2019s Fairs, colonial exhibitions and Greenland Exhibitions of the period.15<\/a><\/sup> At the latter platforms, artworks featuring scenes from Greenland were placed in an ethnographic context, representing Danish-colonial views of Greenland. For example, this held true of the Greenland Painter Jens Erik Carl Rasmussen\u2019s (1841\u20131893) A Stretch of Coast in Greenland. Midnight<\/em>, 1872, which was bought by the Royal Collection of Paintings (later Statens Museum for Kunst, SMK). The work was the first painting in the SMK collection to depict Greenland, and it was exhibited at venues such as the world\u2019s fairs in Paris in 1878, in Chicago in 1893 and at the International Colonial Exposition in Paris in 1931. In 2023, the work was added to SMK\u2019s range of works on permanent display; as yet, it is the only scene from Greenland created by one of the Danish visiting artists addressed in this article to have achieved this status.https:\/\/open.smk.dk\/artwork\/image\/KMS993?q=carl%20rasmussen <\/a>. For more about J.E.C. Rasmussen, see for example: Anna Vestergaard J\u00f8rgensen: \u2018Traveling Images: On Carl Rasmussen\u2019s Paintings from Greenland\u2019 in Konsthistorisk Tidsskrift<\/em>, 92, 2, pp. 106\u2013124; Anne Sofie Langer Jordt: \u2018Carl Rasmussens blik p\u00e5 det gr\u00f8nlandske landskab\u2019, University of Copenhagen, 2022 [MA thesis]; Karsten Hermansen: … saa maler jeg, hvad jeg har set. Jens Erik Carl Rasmussen<\/em>, Marstal Maritime Museum, 2016\">16<\/a><\/sup> A Stretch of Coast in Greenland. Midnight<\/em> is one of the first works to show the kind of subject matter that would later become typical of expedition art and the Greenland Painters: landscape paintings showing magnificent natural scenery and\/or depictions of folk life with more or less Romantic images of Greenlanders\/Inuit in arctic scenery.17<\/a><\/sup> Other examples can be found in the oeuvre of the Greenland Painter Emanuel A. Petersen (1894\u20131948), whose work was also shown at the colonial exhibitions in Paris and in Rome in 1931.Kuratering af en samlingsudstilling p\u00e5 Nuuk Kunstmuseum. En revurdering af Emanuel A. Petersens rolle i gr\u00f8nlandsk kunsthistorie<\/em>, Aarhus University, 2017 [MA thesis]\">18<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n A great paradox concerning these works is that while the Greenland Painters and expedition artists appear to be unknown or overlooked in Danish art history, virtually everyone in Greenland knows these images. They hang in people\u2019s homes and virtually colonise, in copious numbers, not only the cultural history museums but also the two Greenlandic art museums in Greenland,Gr\u00f8nlands Kunst<\/em>, Gyldendal, 1990 (1979). She does, however, include the Greenlandic landscape painters mentioned later in this article.\">19<\/a><\/sup> several of which museums were set up by or at the instigation of Danes.Gr\u00f8nlands Nationalgalleri for Kunst. En kritisk gennemgang af relevante problemstillinger<\/em>, University of Copenhagen, 2013 [MA thesis] and Laila Lund Altinbas 2017.\">20<\/a><\/sup> At the same time, many of the landscape images evoke a sense of local recognition. Former director of the Ilulissat Art Museum, Ole Gamst Pedersen, explains the phenomenon using Emanuel A. Petersen\u2019s paintings as an example:<\/p>\n Most of the tourists have long since fallen thoroughly in love with Greenland, and they swallow Emanuel A. Petersen\u2019s romantic scenes of Greenland hook, line and sinker, with no reservations whatsoever. While we ourselves, here in Greenland, often take a more pragmatic approach to Emanuel\u2019s pictures. For example, this might manifest in comments such as: \u2018Oh, I know that location; I went there when I visited my wife\u2019s family ten years ago.\u2019<\/em>Kunst og kulturtidsskriftet Neriusaaq<\/em>, no. 3, 2011, p. 25\">21<\/a><\/sup><\/p><\/blockquote>\n On the one hand, Gamst Pedersen here reaffirms how such scenes represent the gazes upon Greenland that tourists swallow whole (and are eager to see\/apply themselves); on the other hand he points to the element of recognition being the most essential aspect for locals, something we have also found to be the case at the Nuuk Art Museum.<\/p>\n The work of photographer Jette Bang can be seen in this light, too, as accounted for by the author behind a monograph about Jette Bang, Leise Johnsen (former head of the Nordic Institute in Greenland and current head of the Greenlandic House in Copenhagen) in an article in the art and culture journal Neriusaaq<\/em>: here Johnsen addresses how Bang\u2019s photographs first and foremost prompt recognition of people and places.Kunst og kulturtidsskriftet Neriusaaq<\/em>, no. 3, 2011, pp. 10\u201311\">22<\/a><\/sup> Professor of S\u00e1mi culture Veli-Pekka Lehtola points out similar issues of recognition pertaining to archived photographs of the S\u00e1mi, which are most often perceived by the S\u00e1mi themselves as part of a narrative about our stories<\/em> rather than being seen as part of a wider colonial and external narrative:<\/p>\n The S\u00e1mi themselves approach the archival photographs often from the community perspectives, revealing \u2018small stories\u2019 of us <\/strong>and our <\/strong>ancestors rather than \u2018big histories\u2019 of colonial circumstances and contradictions with outsiders\u2019 societies.<\/em>JOURNAL OF AESTHETICS & CULTURE <\/em>2018, VOL. 10, 1510647, p. 1\">23<\/a><\/sup><\/p><\/blockquote>\n In Greenland, landscapes also constitute the subject of paintings created by a number of Greenlandic artists in the first half of the twentieth century, such as Steffen M\u00f8ller (1882\u20131909), Peter Rosing (1892\u20131965), Otto Rosing (1896\u20131965) and Henrik Lund (1875\u20131945). As had been pointed out by associate professor at the University of Copenhagen Kirsten Thisted, in the 1930s the writer and artist Hans Lynge and the authors Frederik Nielsen (1905\u20131991) and Pavia Petersen (1904\u20131943), drawing inspiration from Danish Golden Age art, began to see the Greenlandic landscape as a natural element of an overall effort to strengthen Greenlandic identity and national feeling.Den usynlige vilje<\/em>, Forlaget Gladiator, 2018, pp. 157\u2013179\">24<\/a><\/sup> The Greenlandic landscape painters inscribe themselves as part of this moment. From the 1970s onwards, one finds several critical voices on the Greenlandic contemporary art scene that specifically problematise the gazes associated with expeditions and colonisations \u2013 including representations of landscapes. A lithograph called De rejste og rejste <\/em>(They Travelled and Travelled) from 1979Anne-Birthe Hove<\/em>, Milik Publishing, 2016, p. 105\">25<\/a><\/sup> by artist Anne-Birthe Hove (1951\u20132012) offers a simultaneously humorous, reflective and bitingly critical depiction of (European) scientists brandishing various equipment within a small area, measuring and naming things, while a (Greenlandic) man by a fire and a woman bent over a seal or fish are placed out to one side and in the background, a lot of bones in front of them. Incidentally, depictions of a man and a woman around a fire with the woman in this characteristic bending position is a recurring motif in, for example, the work of the Greenland Painter Emanuel A. Petersen.<\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n In their letters and diaries, the male Danish artists travelling to and in Greenland were generally critical of the colony and the so-called modernisation taking place there. Several of them speak of a Greenland about to be lost: they strive to capture this lost land and so preserve it for posterity. It goes without saying that applying such a gaze to landscapes and people \u2013 and having that kind of longing to experience and portray the \u2018authentic\u2019 and \u2018original\u2019 \u2013 influenced these artists\u2019 perception of what they saw. The Greenland Painters and expedition artists most often left out all textiles, objects and machines that did not seem \u2018original\u2019 to them. According to art historian Karina Lykke Grand, something similar held true in the Danish Golden Age. The travelling artists of this period, which roughly corresponds to the Romantic era, showed pictures of \u2018lush local folk life, picturesque ancient ruins, magnificent temples, beautiful mountain peaks and sun-drenched bays with local fishermen.\u2019Dansk Guldalder \u2013 rejsebilleder<\/em>, Aarhus University Press, 2012, p. 68\">26<\/a><\/sup> Such idealising depictions stood in stark contrast to the artists\u2019 own travelogues and other written sources, which paint a picture of a very different Italy: a country full of tourists and rapid developments. Deliberately seeking out \u2018foreign\u2019 subject matter can also be seen as a criticism of the Europe from which the artists came. As art historian Alena Marchwinski writes, during the Danish Golden Age the orient came to serve<\/p>\n as a reflection of the Europeans\u2019 own dreams and needs and even as an implicit critical commentary on Western civilisation. The European observer, wearied by civilisation, projects onto the image of the Orient his longing for a lost past with all that this might have entailed in terms of adventure and freedom of expression.<\/em>M\u00f8det med den Anden: et motiv i dansk kunst fra Wilhelm Bendz til L.A. Schou<\/em>, Museum Tusculanum, 2009, p. 68\">27<\/a><\/sup><\/p><\/blockquote>\n The Danish artists visiting Greenland voiced a similar weariness with civilisation. J.E.C. Rasmussen articulates such views in a letter to his fianc\u00e9e written in 1872, recollecting Greenland from Paris:<\/p>\n When, like me, one has seen the grand, elevated, pure Greenlandic nature and felt closer to the Creator, and done so in moments when one seemed to be lifted up above the Earth and away from the petty struggles of civilised life, then it becomes exceedingly difficult to enter an enraptured state of ecstasy at sights such as the one I saw the other day at Montmartre, seeing the whole of Paris half hidden by fumes from its gutters and stove, joining the endless smoke and dust that hangs over the entire city, whatever the weather.<\/em>Marstal S\u00f8fartsmuseum \u00c5rsbog 2022, <\/em>vol. 32, Marstal Maritime Museum, 2023, pp. 27\u201367, pp. 31\">28<\/a><\/sup><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Such civilisation fatigue or critique is also connected to the wider European debates on colonial issues seen in the second half of the nineteenth century. The Danish colonial authorities were keenly interested in the question of whether the civilisation process had gone too far. Knowledge gathered from various sources, including expeditions, was used to level criticism against the colonies and how they were managed. The expression the <\/em>white man’s burden <\/em>became widely used among the European colonial states, denoting \u2018the feeling that you owed the peoples you had colonised to help them grow in numbers, prosperity and civilisation.\u2019<\/a>S\u00f8ren <\/a>Thuesen et al.: \u2018Koloniale Strategier i en ny samfundsorden 1845\u20131904\u2019, in Hans Christian Gull\u00f8v (ed.): Gr\u00f8nland: den arktiske koloni<\/em>, Gad, 2017, pp. 172\u2013235, pp. 199\">29<\/a><\/sup> The nations further discussed \u2018the seeming inability of indigenous people to survive the encounter with Western civilisation\u2019s individualism, perception of property rights and free market economy.\u201930<\/a><\/sup> In Denmark, this led to the conclusion that the Greenlanders should be protected from being overwhelmed by too many features of Western civilisation, and the colonial policy of the nineteenth century was based on the principle that the Greenlanders should constitute a nation of sealers.31<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n As was the case for other travelling artists of the nineteenth century, all of the artworks created by the artists who visited Greenland were aimed at European exhibitions and an increasingly affluent European middle class. This contributed to establishing the parameters for the \u2018foreignness\u2019 of the subjects depicted. For example, Marchwinski describes how the middle classes \u2013 the bourgeois subject \u2013 took an interest in all that seemed in their eyes titillating, unusual and different and how they sought, by way of comparison, to \u2018define and highlight their own national identity.\u201932<\/a><\/sup> The world\u2019s fairs, colonial expositions and Greenland exhibitions were not just displays of art and objects; they were also part of a geopolitical game between the colonial powers. During the so-called age of imperialism from 1884 to 1945, the scientific expeditions were driven by the European colonial powers\u2019 need for knowledge about geographical conditions, about natural resources and raw materials as well as about the local populations, which had to be understood in order to be controlled.Dansk Ekspeditionhistorie bind 2 – For fremskridtet og nationen i imperialismens tidsalder 1850\u20131945<\/em>, Gad, 2021, pp. 6\u201321, pp. 19\">33<\/a><\/sup> But as head of research and collections Christian Sune Pedersen and curator Jesper Kurt-Nielsen at the National Museum of Denmark state, the expeditions in particular cultivated a view of culture based on \u2018the notion of the \u00a0authentic as a kind of immutability: a culture that had always been there until European modernity swept across the world.\u201934<\/a><\/sup> But, they add, \u2018what these expeditions with their scientific ballast tended to overlook was that culture and cultures are dynamic quantities […] most often informed by previous cultural encounters, migrations and technological developments.\u201935<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n Christine Deichmann was part of this era, but her works nevertheless \u2013 and unusually \u2013 include imported textiles and objects in their depictions of scenes from Greenland. These textiles and objects reflect a \u2018modernity\u2019 which in fact dated back several hundred years. Christine Deichmann did not paint sublime, harsh and desolate landscapes or Greenlanders\/Inuit clad in traditional costumes; rather, she painted women and children in everyday clothes, and here European textiles and fashion were mixed with leather and fur clothing. With this move, her works offer a different view of Greenland, one that can potentially problematise and deconstruct her (male) contemporaries\u2019 gaze upon Greenland and Greenlanders\/Inuit; a gaze which, to a present-day observer, still contributes to reproducing a narrative about Greenland that focuses on overwhelmingly sublime nature, \u2018untouched\u2019 wildernesses and (European) concepts of the original.Ultima Thule,<\/em> Gyldendal, 2020. Speaking of this project, Saxgren has said: \u2018I applied the rule that when people saw my pictures, they should ideally feel that the scenarios unfolding in my photographs could just as well have unfolded 300 years ago\u2019. Christine L\u00f8ventoft [ed.): Gr\u00f8nland – I kunsten gennem 300 \u00e5r \/ Kalaallit Nunaat \u2013 Eqqumiitsuliorneq ukiuni 300-ni<\/em>, Museet for Religi\u00f8s Kunst, 2021 [Exhibition catalogue], p. 188\">36<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n Like her male fellow artists, Deichmann exhibited at the Gr\u00f8nlandsudstillingen <\/em>(Greenland Exhibition) in Copenhagen 1921 and at the Colonial Exhibition in Rome in 1931. In these exhibitions, Deichmann\u2019s works contributed to shaping European views of Greenland as a country and the Greenlanders as a people, and in that sense her art formed part of Denmark\u2019s continued colonisation and struggle for the right to Greenland. According to the list of works for the great Greenland Exhibition<\/em> held in 1921 in Nikolaj Church in Copenhagen, Deichmann exhibited twenty-seven works; as many as the expedition painter Aage Bertelsen (1873\u20131945) and surpassed in number only by the expedition painter Harald Moltke (1871\u20131960). Notably, the majority among those of Deichmann\u2019s exhibited works that depict people have titles such as Young Girl<\/em>, Alibak<\/em>, Old Marie<\/em> and The Breadwinner<\/em>.Gr\u00f8nlandsudstillingen: 1721-1921: St. Nikolai Kirkebygning<\/em>, Copenhagen, 1921 [exhibition catalogue]\">37<\/a><\/sup> Particular attention should be paid to the fact that, except for one work, the titles almost never refer to the people depicted as \u2018Greenlanders\u2019, which was otherwise customary at the time. Instead, the artist uses names or other designations. Secondly, the choice to focus on people at all appears to be unusual compared to the other paintings in the exhibition, which, judging from the titles, were mostly landscapes. The few among Deichmann\u2019s works at the exhibition that did in fact feature landscapes had been forwarded at a later date because Deichmann\u2019s daughter had informed her that the exhibition committee wanted more Greenlandic landscapes.38<\/a><\/sup> In what follows, we will discuss how, in Deichmann\u2019s works, we see glimpses of a gaze other than that which we have so far described as dominant among the expedition artists and the Greenland Painters. First, however, we will provide a brief introduction to Deichmann\u2019s endeavours as an artist.<\/p>\n Christine Deichmann left only few art historical traces for us to follow. We know that Deichmann took lessons from the artists Frederik Rohde (1816\u20131886), Simon Simonsen (1848\u20131921) and at Vilhelmine Bang\u2019s School of Drawing before going on to attend the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 1891\u201394, studying at the academy\u2019s then very recently opened school for women. From 1896 to 1912, Deichmann exhibited regularly at the annual juried Spring Exhibition at Charlottenborg, and in 1907 she exhibited at the Artists\u2019 Autumn Exhibition at the same venue. Together with her husband, Henrik Deichmann (1871\u20131939), and their daughter, Elisabeth Deichmann (1896\u20131975), she lived in Greenland from 1901 to 1910. Henrik Deichmann worked as a doctor, first in Qaqortoq (then called Julianehaab), then in Sisimiut (then called Holsteinsborg). Deichmann also exhibited at Kvindelige Kunstneres Retrospektive Udstilling <\/em>(Women Artists\u2019 Retrospective Exhibition) in 1920 and at the aforementioned Greenland Exhibition<\/em> in Nikolaj Church in 1921 as well as at the Colonial Exposition in Rome in 1931. After Christine Deichmann\u2019s death in 1945, her daughter Elisabeth Deichmann arranged a memorial exhibition in 1947.<\/p>\n As far as Danish museum collections are concerned, Christine Deichmann is represented at Kunsten Museum of Modern Art in Aalborg (two original watercolours), Vardemuseerne (not a work related to Greenland), Museum VEST (a reproduction of drawing) and M\/S Maritime Museum of Denmark (original drawing). The Danish Arctic Institute also owns a number of reproductions of Deichmann\u2019s drawings and watercolours, as well as a number of photographs by Christine Deichmann.https:\/\/billedarkiv.mfs.dk\/fotoweb\/archives\/5001-Museet-for-S% C3%B8farts-billedarkiv\/mfs\/Arkiv-172\/000062901.jpg.info#c=%2Ffotoweb%2Farchives%2F5001-Museet-for-S%25C3%25B8farts-billedarkiv%2F%3Fq%3Ddeichmann <\/a>and Kunsten Museum of Modern Art : https:\/\/collection.kunsten.dk\/search?creatorsNames=Christine+Deichmann&lang=da <\/a>. The reproductions in the Danish Arctic Institute collection and photographs by Deichmann can be seen here [accessed 14 January 2024]: https:\/\/www.arktiskebilleder.dk\/pages\/search.php#<\/a>\">39<\/a><\/sup> Turning to Greenlandic museum collections, the Nuuk Art Museum owns two works by Christine Deichmann, but the largest collection of Deichmann\u2019s works on Greenlandic soil is found at Nunatta Katersugaasivia Allagaateqarfialu\/Greenland National Museum and Archives (NKA). The latter collection was donated to what was then Landsmuseet in the 1960s by her daughter Elisabeth Deichmann, with a further donation made by Radcliffe College, Massachusetts, USA in 1998.Atuagagdliutit <\/em>no. 5, 19 January 1999, vol. 139, p. 24. [accessed 14 January 2024] https:\/\/timarit.is\/page \/3851156?iabr=on#page\/n23\/mode\/2up\/search\/christine%20deichmann<\/a>\">40<\/a><\/sup> This article takes its starting point in the works from the two museum collections in Greenland, focusing particularly on depictions of women and children. Christine Deichmann personally highlighted such subjects as especially characteristic of her art.41<\/a><\/sup> Some of these images remain well known in Greenland today: when Deichmann’s works were donated to the NKA in the 1960s, a range of postcards and posters were printed to help raise funds for a kindergarten in Nuuk. In 1978, a new range of postcards of works that had not previously been reproduced was issued, this time in aid of an expansion of the Knud Rasmussen Folk High School and of the school\u2019s work with young people. In addition, in 1999 the NKA presented an exhibition showcasing their collection of Deichmann\u2019s works. Deichmann\u2019s pictures can still be found on postcards and posters sold in Greenland and are now more generally known in a Greenlandic than in a Danish context. As we have touched upon in connection with the works of photographer Jette Bang and the Greenland Painter Emanuel A. Petersen, Deichmann\u2019s images generally evoke a response of recognition in Greenland, rather than being seen as part of a wider colonial narrative imposed from above.<\/p>\n In her submission for her entry in Weilbachs Kunstnerleksikon<\/em> (Weilbach\u2019s Biographical Dictionary of Artists), Christine Deichmann herself highlighted her \u2018Greenlandic figure scenes, particularly those of women and children\u2019;42<\/a><\/sup> subjects that had received scant attention from the other (male) Danish artists in Greenland. In work after work, sketch after sketch, Deichmann shows women and children occupied with chores in spaces that are indistinct, almost blurred. It would appear that the main point here is not to depict the exact nature of what they are doing; rather, the emphasis is on the general act of concentrating on something and being absorbed in it. As viewers, we get a clear sense of looking in on these scenes from the outside, and at the same time we feel the artist\u2019s deep fascination with what is being depicted. One perceives Deichmann\u2019s urge to capture and record the intimate space occupied by those she depicts, but also a fascination with portraying another culture, one to which she, being a Danish woman in Greenland, has only limited access. Deichmann was not in Greenland to settle permanently, rather, the Deichmann family could be regarded as posted labour. It should be added that although some Danes settled and stayed, Greenland was not a settlement colony per se; rather, the main objectives were \u2018trade\u201943<\/a><\/sup> and missionary work. Having said all this, Deichmann was a resident of Greenland for nine years, which gave her access to these everyday spaces occupied by women and children. At the same time, her everyday life as the doctor\u2019s wife was different from that of many Greenlanders. Being the wife of a doctor, Deichmann was part of the Danish colony set-up and bourgeoisie in Greenland. Within the colonial administration, marriages were regulated by contracts and prohibitions right from the early stages of the colonisation era. In 1782, a ban on mixed marriages was introduced. Concurrently with this, those with the highest-ranking positions within the trade sector were given the opportunity to bring their Danish wives and any children with them to Greenland, and from the 1820s onwards the number of wives and children accompanying the head of their family grew.‘Married to the Daughters of the Country’ \u2013 intermarriage and intimacy in Northwest Greenland ca. 1750 to 1850,<\/em> Ilisimatusarfik\/University of Greenland, December 2012 [Ph.D. thesis]\">44<\/a><\/sup> The European wives served as a kind of \u2018moral bulwark against relations between Danish men and Greenlandic women.\u2019Nulialo\/\/Og Hustru \u2013 Christine Deichmann, Ellen Locher Thalbitzer, Oda Isbrand<\/em>, Nuuk Kunstmuseum, 2021, unpaged\">45<\/a><\/sup> Dalliances between the colony\u2019s top Danish officials and Greenlanders was considered problematic because \u2018it blurred the boundaries and balance of power between Europeans and Greenlanders necessary to maintain the social order of the colonial project.\u201946<\/a><\/sup> The arrival of accompanying wives and children meant that over the course of the nineteenth century, a Danish bourgeoisie arose in the colonial towns; an upper class of Danish homes and Danish families who primarily socialised with other Danish families.47<\/a><\/sup>\u00a0In her capacity as a doctor’s wife, Christine Deichmann entered this community; for example, her daughter was home-schooled alongside the only other Danish-speaking child in the colonial town.Bulletin of Marine Science <\/em>, vol. 26, no. 2, 1976, pp. 281\u2013283 [Accessed 10 October 2023:] https:\/\/www.ingentaconnect.com\/content\/umrsmas\/bullmar\/1976\/00000026\/00000002\/art00014?crawler=true<\/a>\">48<\/a><\/sup> The divide between Danish and Greenlandic everyday life was also emphasised many years later by the artist\u2019s daughter, Elisabeth Deichmann, in a letter in which she describes a girl whom Christine Deichmann used as a model: \u2018we called her the \u201cFamily breadwinner\u201d because she essentially kept her old grandmother alive on what she earned by being a model for my mother.\u201949<\/a><\/sup> Elisabeth Deichmann does not mention the little girl\u2019s name, even though they were both children in the same small town at the time. In being called the \u2018family breadwinner\u2019, the girl is first and foremost seen as a paid model for the writer\u2019s mother, accentuating the unequal nature of their relationship. As a Danish doctor\u2019s wife, Deichmann had a position which required her to observe certain niceties of etiquette to uphold the distinction between coloniser and the colonised. Had she been in Denmark, her position would require her to socialise only with a particular type of people. From a practical point of view, sticking to such a restricted social circle was difficult in Greenland, as only very few people in each town belonged to this bourgeois class. So on the one hand, she was on a footing of \u2018everyday intimacy\u2019 with the people depicted in her works; on the other hand, her status as a doctor\u2019s wife and part of a Danish bourgeoise automatically put her in a position where she saw Greenlandic society from the outside, observing it at a distance. A complex duality which we believe is expressed in her works.<\/p>\n In terms of her education and exhibition practice, Christine Deichmann was part of and reflected the contemporary Danish art scene. However, her images of women and children, including her portrayals of motherhood, are unusual within that scene. As art historian Anne Lie Stokbro has pointed out, motherhood was a rare choice of subject matter among women artists in the late nineteenth century; a period which saw a boom in the number of women artists and in their opportunities to study fine art. Women became independent and no longer felt obliged to fulfil the role that patriarchal society expected of them.Historier om m\u00f8dre<\/em>, Nivaagaard Collection 2020, pp. 79\u201397\">50<\/a><\/sup> Seen from a slightly different angle, they were artists who, due to their gender, needed to fight a hard battle to be recognised for being something other than the bourgeois ideal of an \u2018angel in the house\u2019 and mother, a role diametrically opposed to the male artist role, which even today continues to be associated with genius and virility as well as a bohemian and eccentric way of life.Ett eget rum: konstn\u00e4rsrollen under det sena 1800-talet<\/em>, Prins Eugens Waldemarsudde, <\/a>2021, p. 27\">51<\/a><\/sup> Another Danish artist in Greenland, Ellen Locher Thalbitzer, also created images of motherhood and relationships between women and children. Locher Thalbitzer wintered in Greenland from 1905\u201306, and in 1914 she spent the summer in Greenland as accompanying wife and assistant to the philologist William Thalbitzer (1873\u20131958). The question is whether the position as accompanying wives and travelling artists, leaving behind the art scene centred around Copenhagen, gave these two artists greater freedom in terms of their choice of subject matter? Based on their biographical data, neither of them seemed to aim to fulfil the role of \u2018angel in the house\u2019. Both trained as artists, exhibited regularly, were actively involved in the art scene, and spent long periods of time in Greenland. Both came from the affluent upper middle class, and all available data indicates that their families supported their decision to become professional artists.52<\/a><\/sup> In a review of the Women Artists\u2019 Retrospective Exhibition<\/em> from 1920, Ellen Locher Thalbitzer sums up the situation with dry precision:<\/p>\n They were able to paint before us, they have been able to paint throughout time. We have always known that Bertha Wegmann could do it, and her large portrait of an old lady tells us so again. Lei Schielderup\u2019s Portrait of Mrs. Hennings tells us too, though not as clearly as her small, marvellous study of a rose in a glass. Had it been signed by Manet, it would be worth a fortune; as things are, its value is nil or priceless, according to the eyes that see.<\/em>\u2018\u00d8jebliksindtryk fra Kvindelige Kunstneres Retrospektive Udstilling i Den Fri Udstilling<\/em>\u2019, in Illustreret Tidende<\/em>, no. 40, 1920, p. 458 [bound volume]\">53<\/a><\/sup><\/p><\/blockquote>\n It might seem obvious to conclude that these female artists paint women and children because it is a subject to which they, being women, have unimpeded access. But as art historian Sofie Olesdatter Bastiansen insistently asserts in a piece about the artist Anna Syberg (1870\u20131914), the domestic should not be regarded as the artistic project itself. If Syberg\u2019s work \u2018with watercolour was about capturing and depicting the presence of the moment,\u2019Perspective Journal,<\/em> 2022, [Accessed 10 October 2023] https:\/\/www.perspectivejournal.dk\/oejeblikkets-skoenhed\/<\/a>\">54<\/a><\/sup> then the interruptions found in the (family) home constituted \u2018a fundamental condition imbued with a rewarding and positive driving force, one in which the circumstances of life have become an amplifying aspect of a deliberately sought-out mode of artistic expression.\u201955<\/a><\/sup> \u00a0This is to say that Christine Deichmann\u2019s spaces of engrossed introspection populated by women and children should not necessarily be read within the context of her position as a doctor\u2019s wife with all that this entails in terms of Danish expat bourgeois living and home schooling. Rather, her choice of subject matter should be seen as a sign that the artistic project she endeavoured to carry out was different from the one pursued by expedition art and the Greenland Painters.<\/p>\n Time and time again, Deichmann draws and paints women and children who are fully absorbed by their task, entirely in the moment. Most of the time we do not quite get to see exactly what they are doing. Looking for parallels, turning to Danish artist Anna Ancher (1858\u20131935) and her work with space seems an obvious choice. Besides the fact that Deichmann is very likely to have seen Anna Ancher\u2019s works exhibited at Charlottenborg, Deichmann\u2019s professor at the art academy was Viggo Johansen (1851\u20131935), who was a Skagen Painter like Anna Ancher and furthermore married to her cousin. According to art historian Mette Houlberg Rung, Anna Ancher \u2018constructs a space in which a full-length figure (depicted from behind, from the front or in profile) is engrossed by their own chores.\u2019Anna Ancher,<\/em> Skagens Kunstmuseum \/ Statens Museum for Kunst, 2020, pp. 69\u201393, pp. 79\">56<\/a><\/sup> Deichmann\u2019s works, like Ancher\u2019s, have a keen sense for such moments of rapt absorption, and they are carefully composed, often based on preparatory sketches. On an undated sketch sheet, Deichmann has drawn various bodies or figures walking and sitting. Their poses seem relaxed, as if the sitters had been observed unaware while lost in their own thoughts. These are studies of human bodies, but also of this distinctive space around the body.<\/p>\n In one work, a mother (or grandmother) sits with two children eating nikku\/seal meat. One of the children is on the woman\u2019s lap, while the other leans against her. A line runs through the bodies, extending from the little girl\u2019s fingers holding the nikku, up through the woman\u2019s hand, which holds the nikku for the child on her lap, onwards by way of the same child\u2019s eye contact with us viewers and from here up to the woman\u2019s lowered gaze and further up to the top of her hair. The line ties the subject, mother and children, together in an upward triangle. The triangular composition, the mother and child motif and the recurring use of blue bring to mind Christian motifs of the Virgin Mary with the Christ Child, and the image has a certain affinity with an icon, as if it were itself an icon celebrating motherhood.Bagom v\u00e6rket \u2013 Christine Deichmann,<\/em> Nuuk Kunstuseum, 2020, [accessed 10 October 2023:] https:\/\/www.nuukkunstmuseum.com\/da\/bagom-vaerket\/christine-deichmann-1869-1945\/<\/a>\">57<\/a><\/sup> The small child on the lap is dressed in a coat of a European cut, but it does not stand out particularly in the image; rather, it blends in with the other clothes in blues, greys and darker shades. Here, the artist\u2019s gaze seems to shift away from being an ethnographic record (of Greenlanders\/Inuit in the year 1900) to perhaps being primarily an artwork focusing on issues of form, space and body.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n In a drawing from 1904, Deichmann depicts a woman looking out of a window. In a somewhat atypical move for Deichmann, the woman is placed in a clearly delineated room. Leaning on a windowsill, the woman seems completely absorbed by what she can see out of the window: a view to which we as viewers do not have access. Deichmann appears to have focused on depicting the woman in the room; on capturing her facial expression, hair, hairstyle and clothing. The latter consists of a traditional anorak, sealskin trousers and kamiks, but her white cotton underwear can be seen peeping out between the anorak and trousers, which was the height of fashion at the time.58<\/a><\/sup> She seems not to notice Deichmann or us as observers. She possesses a distinctive quality of engrossed absorption which is a recurring trait in Deichmann\u2019s depictions of women and children. Deichmann captures a special mood in this space, but does this atmosphere also manifest a sense of standing on the outside? A yearning to feel like an insider instead, a part of something? Conversely, perhaps this is about maintaining a distance, the Dane versus the Greenlander, a gaze that sees the other as something foreign, something other than oneself? As asserted by the feminist writer and scholar Sara Ahmed, the stranger is not something outside, something one views from a distance. Rather, the stranger is defined precisely through the act of recognition and getting very close, entering a home or intimate space:<\/p>\n The stranger does not have to be recognised as \u2018beyond\u2019 or outside the \u2018we\u2019 in order to be fixed within the contours of a given form; indeed, it is the very gesture of getting closer to \u2018strangers\u2019 that allows the figure to take its shape.<\/em>Strange Encounters \u2013 Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality<\/em>, Routledge, 2000, p. 4\">59<\/a><\/sup><\/p><\/blockquote>\n In 1909, Deichmann painted a similar motif in watercolours. Here the woman is clearly posing for Deichmann, standing in a slightly stiff, seemingly not quite natural pose, with her hands resting on the only half-drawn windowsill. The space around her seems unfinished, almost as if it were in a state of disintegration \u2013 or of coming into being. Her teasing facial expression is a marked contrast to her slightly stiff and awkward pose, and her gaze reveals an awareness of being observed: she meets our gaze as we meet hers. As viewers, we must ask ourselves: do we have the right to be looking at her, scrutinising her on display in an empty room, being paraded for our gaze? What did Deichmann think of this gaze? What did the model think of Deichmann\u2019s gaze upon her? Was Deichmann aware of her dual role as observer and as the one being watched?<\/p>\n In a diary entry from 1914 published in a later article,Dagbladet K\u00f8benhavn<\/em>, 18 May 1921, p. 8], Royal Danish Library\">60<\/a><\/sup> Ellen Locher Thalbitzer addresses this dual gaze; the act of looking at the other while the other is also looking back at one. The drawing sketched by Locher Thalbitzer would become the basis for the later sculpture called Gertel\u00e9<\/em>, plaster versions of which can be found at the Danish Arctic Institute and at Skagens Kunstmuseer:<\/p>\n Little Gertel\u00e9, I wonder if any white woman back home in Europe is so completely at home in her country as you are here in yours \u2013 on the rock facing the blue fjord where I have positioned you in order to draw the lines of your maiden neck. […] What do you see out in the fjord, Gertel\u00e9? \u2013 Not the same as me. Perhaps you see, miles away, a seal\u2019s head emerging like a small dark dot on the shiny surface, hidden from the weak human eyes of the white visitors […]. But do you see the vastness of the mountain range that surrounds the fjord, how deep blue-black are the walls of the Amikittorq mountains in the shadows now that the sun is setting behind them? Do you see how bold, how wild with abandon and generosity was the imagination that laid out the lines of your mountains? […] You squint your brown, slanted Eskimo eyes and look at me sideways. […] You look at me with your big girlish eyes … You gaze upon me as I gaze upon you.<\/em>61<\/a><\/sup><\/p><\/blockquote>\n While the opening words are redolent of the kind of civilisation critique mentioned in the above, singing the praises of the Greenlander while levelling criticism of Europe \u2013 Gertel\u00e9 belongs in her country in a way that no white person belongs in theirs \u2013 there is also a dual gaze at play here, a kind of mirroring. This gaze begins with a sense of wonder towards Gertel\u00e9: Who are you? What do you see? Locher Thalbitzer asks if they see the same thing or something completely different, and finally turns Gertel\u00e9\u2019s gaze towards the artist herself as observer: You gaze upon me as I gaze upon you<\/em>. Gertel\u00e9 is not given a voice \u2013 we do not know what she is thinking, the words are all Ellen Locher Thalbitzer\u2019s own. The point, however, is that Locher Thalbitzer turns her gaze on herself. Just as Deichmann does with the 1909 drawing of the woman at the windowsill. We do not know what the woman is thinking or what her teasing gaze signifies. But with these double gazes, Locher Thalbitzer and Deichmann both reaffirm their own outlook and the position from which they see.<\/p>\n The feminist theorist Donna Haraway specifically writes about embodied vision, of how the gaze is connected to the body. Objective (notions of) knowledge, which collates the world in or from a single point of view, and social constructivist (notions of) knowledge, where everything is constructs and negotiations, both apply a gaze that promises an equal and full view of everywhere and from nowhere. Both positions also deny having a share in localisation, embodiment and partial perspective.Situeret viden – videnskabssp\u00f8rgsm\u00e5let i feminismen og det partielle perspektivs forrang<\/em>, Forlaget Mindspace, 2020 (Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective<\/em>, 1988)\">62<\/a><\/sup> The gaze or the eyes, Haraway writes, have also been used \u2018to signify a perverse capacity \u2013 honed to perfection in the history of science tied to militarism, capitalism, colonialism, and male supremacy \u2013 to distance the knowing subject from everybody and everything in the interests of unfettered power.\u2019<\/em>63<\/a><\/sup> With the concept of situatedness, Haraway seeks to find an embodied position where the gaze is situated in a body, a place, in a tradition and in a time:<\/p>\n I would like to insist on the embodied nature of all vision, and so reclaim the sensory system that has been used to signify a leap out of the marked body and into a conquering gaze from nowhere. This is the gaze that mythically inscribes all the marked bodies, that makes the unmarked category claim the power to see and not be seen, to represent while escaping representation.<\/em>64<\/a><\/sup><\/p><\/blockquote>\n The landscape paintings and depictions of folk life created by the Greenland Painters and expedition artists see <\/em>without being seen <\/em>themselves. Despite the critique of colonialism prevalent in their own day and even among themselves, they depicted Greenland and Greenlanders\/Inuit from a position of a total overview, one that might be described as looking from everywhere and nowhere all at once. This point of view is particularly accentuated when the works have been featured in ethnographic exhibitions. In Deichmann\u2019s works depicting the woman at the window and the mother with two children, we as viewers are being looked at in turn, confronted with our own gazes and our own embodied position and situatedness. The woman in the window casts a mischievous glance back at us, and the boy\u2019s gaze makes us aware that we have entered an intimate (and inaccessible) space that is not ours. Locher Thalbitzer also ties her gaze on the girl Gertel\u00e9 to a specific body, a specific place; she announces the position from which she sees. This double or mutual gaze has a parallel in Marchwinski\u2019s reading of L.A. Schou\u2019s ![\"JEC](\"https:\/\/www.perspectivejournal.dk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/09\/JEC-Rasmussen_Groenlaendere-pa\u030a-Sommerrejse_1878_Nuuk-Kunstmuseum.jpg\")
(Male) Danish artists in Greenland<\/h2>\n
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The forgotten Greenland journeys as a continuation of nineteenth-century travels<\/h2>\n
Christine Deichmann: Overlooked \u2018Modernity\u2019<\/h2>\n
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The artist Christine Deichmann<\/h2>\n
Accompanying wife<\/h2>\n
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Artist and woman<\/h2>\n
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A space of absorption<\/h2>\n
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Gazes embodied and disembodied<\/h2>\n