Smørrebrød

 

Edvard Erichsen, Hans-Christian Andersen’s Little Mermaid, Copenhagen Harbor, 1913




"Danish open sandwiches which are national attractions for both the eye and the palate rest upon oral tradition.  No text-book exists in the preparation of open sandwiches.  Pupils have learned from their mentors and thus traditions have been passed on.  How old is this open sandwich tradition?  Not much is known on this point, either.  Nor why in the North, and most especially in Denmark, this dish should have attained such an importance that it has become one of the main daily meals.  Might it be something caused by our climate?  In the South the masses practically never butter their bread.  Up here in the North we need more fats, so we claim, but does that explain why bread + butter + a spread of some kind has become a staple food here?  It was not so in olden times.  Probably bread was just as important as now, but only in the homes of the wealthy classes butter, and even cheese or meat, was added.  Troels Lund explains that the eating of open sandwiches did not become general in Denmark before in about the year 1800.  Oddly enough, not a single cook-book from the nineteeth century contains any hint on open sandwiches.  Now, although we f. ex. take it for granted that a sandwich with boiled brisket of beef is bound almost servilely to shredded horseradish their union has not originated on any piece of paper, and still they are inseparable."

Asta Bang and Edith Rode, Open Sandwiches and Cold Lunches, An Introduction to Danish Culinary Art, Copenhagen, Jul. Gjellerups Forlag, 1953.

NOTE:  I’ve prepared this short post on Danish masterpiece smørrebrød cuisine because Jane is leaving for Denmark tomorrow on a Scandinavian tour with her handbells choir, the Baldwin Belles.  They are a superb ensemble and if you are anywhere near Copenhagen next week, please let me know and I’ll arrange backstage entry and hangout time with international handbells groups’ nearest equivalent to the Rolling Stones, ca. 1963, at the Crawdaddy Club, Richmond.

Troels Frederik Lund (1840-1921), historiographer-royal to the king of Denmark and Comptroller of the Order of the Dannebrog



Asta Bang’s and Edith Rode’s book, my principal smørrebrød source material, seems to have been the original cookbook on the subject and it is also a little masterpiece, a wonder to hold in the hand and to consume in the mind, eye and aspiring imagination.  The information contained in the book  serves readers a fascinating slice of Danish history, in part derived from the writings of the important  nineteeth century historian Troels Frederik Lund (link), son of the brother-in-law of the Danish philosopher 
Søren Kierkegaard and a leading source of supposedly amusing, but mostly quite unfunny, bitter-seeming anecdotes about the great Dane.

Poster from the Schumann Circus



My own first smørrebrød experience dates from a childhood visit to Copenhagen with my parents.  Highlights (there were many) included a   Schumann Circus (one ring only -- very, very great!) performance, seeing Erik Bruhn dance with the Royal Danish Ballet (ditto; amazing how highest-level artistry of any kind can reach and affect the youngest mind and heart), visiting "home base" of the legendary  Danish silversmith Georg Jensen, magical time spent touring and taking rides at Tivoli Gardens, and finally, eating many varieties of these casual-looking but meticulously conceived and composed sandwiches.

 

 

Decades years passed before I finally tried them again, but when I did, it was also very special.  Down Willow Street from our second Brooklyn Heights apartment stood the Dansk Somandskirke (Danish Seamans’ Church), which every year staged a splendid, traditional Christmas fair.  (At other times and at regular intervals during the year, Willow Street and Columbia Heights residents were also treated to viewings of our neighbor, famed American novelist Norman Mailer, jogging along slowly in gray sweatclothes, shadow-boxing, complete with the requisite grunting, nose-rubbing, etc., just like you've seen it done in old Hollywood movies.  The whole nine yards, as they say.  Weirdsville Squared Times Infinity.) 

Erik Bruhn, Premier Danseur noble

Diane Arbus,  Erik Bruhn and Rudolph Nureyev, South Kensington, London, 1963



The Dansksomandskirke fair was like taking a little trip to Denmark (it also had elements of the church fête that begins Graham Greeene’s The Ministry of Fear where Arthur Rowe guesses the weight of the cake) and the smørrebrød assortment, strong Carlsberg beer, Danish desserts, homemade ornaments for sale, and especially the omnipresent Danish speech and laughter always delivered a joyful early Christmas present.

The church still holds the fair and I definitely intend to return this December with Jane in tow.  She can’t drink beer, but she does know the word ("øl”) and she can order one for me along with any smørrebrød (and anything else) she desires. 


In the meantime, did you know that Danes consume 8.5 - 9 million slices of rye bread every single day?

The original caption read: “Brigitte Nielsen shopping for rye bread.”  I swear.

!!! Smørrebrød !!!

Dedicated to Jane Butler Roberts and the Baldwin Belles!

William Theophilus Brown: A Full Life

 

The Muscatine Diver, 1962-3

[1]  “At a time when in the hands of other many other artists, Philip Pearlstein or Tom Wesselman for example, the nude was presented as inert or ironically objectified, Brown celebrated the human body as lyrical, vital and ecstatic. 


As a student of Amedée Ozenfant in New York and Fernand Léger in Paris in the late forties, and later at the University of California, Berkeley, where he earned an M.A. in art in 1953, Brown was well trained in modernist abstraction, but he also has a deep sympathy for figuration.  Brown lived intermittently in New York City for six years before he settled in 1952 in the Bay Area, where he quickly became an integral part of the figurative movement and often participated in a drawing group that included Richard Diebenkorn, David Park and Elmer Bischoff.  The group, which first began meeting to draw from life in 1955, wished to reject academic poses for the models in favor of something more informal.  At the time, Brown was producing gestural paintings of football players and other athletes, derived from photographs in newspapers and magazines.  Talking about the sports paintings in 1957 with the art historian Paul Mills, but equally valid for the nudes, Brown announced, , “I wanted to do figure compositions, but I was tired of the classic kind with everybody just standing around, so I used photographs in sports magazines as a starting point.”

Self-Portrait, 1994



[2]  "William Theophilus Brown, an elegant and irreverent American painter and member of the venerated figurative movement who met and befriended some of history's great artists, from Pablo Picasso to Igor Stravinsky, died Wednesday at his home in San Francisco. He was 92.


Mr. Brown, who lived in the opulent San Francisco Towers, which he christened the "Versailles of retirement communities," was painting until the end, said his friend and gallerist Thomas Reynolds. He had a studio a few blocks from his home and continued to take drawing classes.


'Theophilus Brown was one of those rare artists who was successful at every stage of his career,' Reynolds said. 'And he was always at the center of the action - in France with Picasso, in New York with (Mark) Rothko and (Willem) de Kooning, in California with the Bay Area figurative painters.'


Reynolds added, 'He was everybody's favorite dinner companion - charming to the ladies and bawdy with the boys.'


Matt Gonzalez, the attorney, artist and former city supervisor, met Mr. Brown nearly a decade ago, and the two developed a close bond.

'We started working in his studio together,' Gonzalez said. 'Our routine was we'd get together on the weekend, start working at around noon, and at 4:30, we'd pack up and go eat oysters - and drink single malt whiskey'"

'I took him 36 oysters Saturday night and we shared dinner,' Gonzalez said. 'He had a good appetite and was in good spirits. But he couldn't leave the apartment, and he was clear that if he couldn't go to his studio and make art anymore, he didn't want to live. So it was time. He was comfortable with where he was. He was due to turn 93 in April, and lived a full life.'"

William Theophilus Brown

[3]  "Brown’s now famous joie de vivre was severely tested during the war years. He was drafted just two months after his college graduation, and would spend the next four and a half years in the middle of some of the most ferocious fighting of World War II, including the Battle of the Bulge. Admittedly, Brown was not a natural soldier. 'I hated it'” he says simply. 'I went from private to corporal in four and a half years. I don’t know anybody who rose so little. Being a graduate from a college like Yale was just poison for the old sergeants. They were not kind to me' But he endured, and along the way gained perspective he otherwise might never have found. 'I like what Norman Mailer said about the war,' says Brown about a period in his life he rarely talks about. 'Mailer spent two years in the army, and he said, ‘They were the worst years of my life, but the most important.’ That’s how I feel about it, too. It was a big corrective for me. I had lived a very privileged life. The war put things into perspective for me.'”

Self-Portrait, 1964





[4]  "Four months before his death, Brown gave an interview in which he fact-checked his Wikipedia entry. He found the entry accurate, on the whole, but termed his classification as an abstract expressionist "horseshit." 

 

Football Players Sketch, 1954

Note:   

Reading about the life of William Theophilus Brown yesterday -- his long career and devotion to painting, music and his friends; the careful, graceful way he lived as an outsider/insider  -- and reviewing the broad range of his work -- was engrossing, moving and amusing.  

David McCarthy's article cited below is well worth seeking out both for its account of aspects of life in the 1950s that few people think or write about any more, but mainly for its exploration of how Bill Brown, Wynn Chamberlain and Diane Arbus found their way forward with subject and form.  

I failed to find, as I hoped I would, something “quotable” to include here from Brown’s great friend Christopher Isherwood, so unless and until I do I think Brown's own words (especially his comment about his Wikipedia biography -- notwithstanding the good Football Players sketch above) --  and those of his other friends will suffice.

 

Citations:

[1]  David McCarthy, Social Nudism, Masculinity and the Male Nude in the Work of William Theo Brown and Wynn Chamberlain in the 1960s.  Archives of American Art Journal 38, nos. 1-2 (1998), 28-38.

[2]  Julian Guthrie, William Theophilus Brown, San Francisco Chronicle, Friday, February 10, 2012

[3]  B. Bamsey, William Theophilus Brown, Artworks Magazine, 4-7-10.

[4]  Wikipedia entry, “William Theophilus Brown.”