ABSTRACT
This chapter provides essential documentation of the Danes’ evolving aesthetic ideas, focuses on the emancipation of unhindered creativity from intellectual thought and societal conditioning through the process of art making as well as the work itself. There were several reasons the artists preferred to use the deceptively simple label of new realism. Purposefully straightforward, the term betrayed the predominant Danish tradition of consistently heralding experimental art as young or new, while also echoing Danish artists’ use of the word konkret, or tangible, to describe abstraction since the early 1930s. The words new realism also reflected this interest in the physical properties of color and medium, whether it was oil paint, different kinds of untreated wood, or roughly hewn stone, while signaling their strong attachment to international avant-gardes as well as certain Danish traditions. Most of all, the new realism was a play on Surrealism.
