Bognemark

1930-1950

Bognemark

In 1935 Oluf Høst bought the smallholding Skovly which he renamed Bognemark after the purchase. The name possibly alludes to an old beacon place which lay nearby. He bought Bognemark under his artist colleague Niels Lergaard’s very nose. Høst never lived there himself, but only used the place as a workshop and subject.

The many paintings of Bognemark could be interpreted as symbolic pictures showing the painter’s own personal space. Especially the carriage passage like a little eye is directed towards the horizon and the big world. In a winter painting of Bognemark, Fresh Snow (1936), the passage appears like a closed eye.

Each individual picture reflects a little world in itself. These are all the same subject, but still the pictures have each their inner logical and individual expression.

Scrutinising the pictures of Bognemark, it is manifest how the farm’s wing, the roof and the carriage passage comprise a compositional framework. Høst knows the farm’s primary form, but paints it in several hundred variations. Today it has become synonymous with him. Like his predecessor Cézanne (1839-1906) Høst sought primary shapes to capture the basic structure of a picture. Subsequently he could paint many variations over the same basic structure. Høst was not a naturalist painter, but communicated his inner landscape.

In The Dying of a Winther´s Day (1943) a dark, stooping shadow moves across the farmyard. On the extreme right is a female figure, painted with light brushstrokes. The farm is cast in twilight, but the red and yellow colours of the evening sun shine through the carriage passage.

Høst was alive to contrasts. In the dusk the farm’s appearance is transformed into abstract surfaces of colour, with warm meeting cool and day meeting night. The combination of the figurative and the abstract, the warm and cold hues evoke an atmosphere of both security and deprivation, calm and unease.

The Dying of a Winther´s Day at the same time can be regarded in the light of the unease and despair that marked the Høst family in the early 1940s. Denmark was occupied by Nazi Germany, and the Høst family suffered the ignominy of seeing their oldest son Ole go to war for the Nazi cause in Waffen-SS. Ole died at the Eastern Front in Ukraine, only 28.