Peter Brandes. Meridian of Art

Peter Brandes is one of the most significant Danish visual artists alive today. His oeuvre is gigantic and enjoy an extraordinary degree of visibility. Brandes has taken part in uninterrupted dialogue with the most varied expressions of culture,he is an incomparable Kulturwanderer, an exemplar of cultural migration. Added to this his family history is stunningly interwoven into a larger history, namely, that of Denmark and Europe in the first half of the 20th century. Faced with such rich and varied material, I have chosen to pursue certain themes that cut across various periods of time, different artistic techniques, and the cultures with which Peter Brandes engages in dialogue. I have drawn certain lines in his works forming what I call the meridian of art. I have borrowed the concept “meridian” from the poet Paul Celan, the author to whom Peter Brandes has felt most closely tied. For Celan, the meridian is poetry’s invisible line, connecting the places where a poetic conversation takes place. The conversation with the other takes place in a concrete place; yet the line connecting these places is, according to Celan, a non-place, a u-topia, the utopia of poetry. Similarly, the line connecting the places in Peter Brandes’ cultural migration is a meridian, a line that at once appears impossible and ineradicable: the meridian of art. The book is the first monograph on the art of Peter Brandes.