Thousands of Pieces, Not One Sold - and none looked remotely Lutheran

 Foto: Niels Halds Fabelverden

There are fantastically gifted and fantastically  productive artists who never sell anything in their lifetime. This is usually considered a tragedy. We are not so sure.

On a recent visit to one of our oldest friends, we noticed some strange glazed creatures on her shelf - half mythology and half joke, lined up as if waiting for someone to ask.

She told us there were maybe a thousand more in a house and garden up in Thy, in northern Jutland. All made by her younger brother, Niels. And he never sold a single one.

Niels Hald started drawing almost as soon as he could hold a pencil, and his parents recognized the talent early and never once tried to talk him out of it.

He had no formal training, but was inspired by long stays in India, Nepal, and Central America, before he eventually settled in Thy - a stretch of Jutland known mostly for its wind, its emptiness, and its refusal to be picturesque about either.

Here he took over an old carpenter's workshop and got what he wanted: A home, a studio, and a great deal of wall.

He died in 2021 at sixty-six, having spend his years filling every single inch of it.

 

Our weeks right now are centered around Rita's mother, but with Niels' house now within driving distance, we took a road trip today with no plan beyond, perhaps, to peer through a fence.

What we found was a building covered in paint and a garden filled with wild sculptures. 

We stood there for a while trying to work out whether a shape on the outer wall was a fish or something with strong opinions about being a fish, when a man came cycling past, slowed down, and asked if we were lost.

We explained who we were and why we had come, which turned out to be exactly the right thing to say.

The man was Vagn Aage Jeppesen, who had known Niels since the 1970s, when Thy had a loose colony of artists who had ended up there for reasons nobody quite agreed on. He lives nearby and is now the owner of the place.

He unlocked the door without any particular ceremony - the way you might let someone into a kitchen rather than a museum.

 

Inside, there was no bare patch of wall left, no plain plaster anywhere in the house. The ceiling was done. The skirting boards were done.

A bottle on the windowsill had a face, and the face seemed rather pleased with itself.

There were sea creatures that looked faintly Hindu, angels that looked faintly Aztec, and absolutely nothing that looked Lutheran.

Things with rather too many eyes crowded the doors and the chair legs, in oil paint and glazed clay and the odd piece of mosaic - motifs borrowed from three continents and reassembled into something that answered to none of them.

 

As his sister had told us, Niels never sold any of it, not a painting, not a glazed bowl, not one of the small fabled creatures. 

This was not, as far as anyone could tell, due to a principled stand against commerce. He simply made things because he could not stop himself, in the same unbothered way some people garden or whistle. Selling the results would have meant the results were the point, not the making.

When  Niels died, the workshop and everything inside was put up for sale, but nobody wanted it. The place sat through the winter of 2021 into 2022, because an eccentric man's lifetime of unsaleable art is, in the end, exactly that.

And here, conveniently, is where a passing cyclist becomes load-bearing.

Vagn told us about a morning in early spring 2022 when he rode past and saw a van in the yard, with people carrying boxes out to it. He stopped, propped his bike against the fence, and asked what was happening.

The whole lot was going to the rubbish heap, someone told him.

Niels would probably have shrugged at the whole thing, but a man who shrugs at his own legacy leaves the worrying to someone else. That morning, that someone was Vagn.

He asked what it would cost to make the van turn around. The estate agent named a figure - a hundred thousand kroner - probably more out of habit than expectation, the way you name a number when you don't believe anyone is going to say yes to it.

Vagn didn't argue. He didn't ask for an inventory. He simply agreed to buy, and the van drove away empty.

 

The place now goes by the name Niels Halds Fabelverden, Niels Hald's Fable World, and although it is well hidden, with no signs to lead the way, it is open for the public, though only on some weekends.

We were lucky to be allowed in on a working day, and we left late in the afternoon still not entirely sure what we had seen, but Rita and I decided afterwards that it was probably the exact right condition in which to leave a place like that.

And all of this because of a man on a bicycle who heard the word rubbish and would not have it.