VIGGO MADSEN RETROSPECTIVE OPENS AT PHELPS

In 1998, the year Viggo Holm Madsen passed away, the search engine Google was founded, Bill Clinton was still president, and the movie Titanic broke box office records. Now, 18 years later, the prolific Long Island artist’s work will for the first time be displayed as a retrospective, at Binghamton’s Phelps Mansion, curated by his wife Lois, his son Kirk, and Kirk’s wife Theresa.

Viggo was a man who had the special combination of extraordinary discipline and unfaltering love for art. While he was primarily known as a printmaker, he produced in a huge variety of media: printing, watercolor, etchings, leatherwork, jewelry-making, photography and drawing. “Viggo Holm Madsen: A Life of Art: A Retrospective,” opening April 1st, will showcase the evolution of his work, from his early watercolors to his final works in fabric dying.

Viggo was born in Kaas, Denmark, where his father was apprentice carriage builder to the royal family. With this skill, his father earned himself a ticket to the United States to work for Fisher Body. “He built the original wooden station wagons – the ‘woodies,’ as they’re called,” tells Viggo’s son Kirk. “He took the job here - and he came here with nothing, with zero - and he had a piece of paper in his pocket that somebody had written out for him in English that said, ‘A cup of coffee and a ham sandwich, please.’ And for months he ate nothing but ham sandwiches and a cup of coffee.” He worked hard for two years to save enough money to bring over the rest of his family, and with that money and the sponsorship of missionaries of the Church of God, Viggo arrived with his mother and brother in Connecticut at the age of five.

Viggo began to seriously pursue art when he was 16, at the encouragement of an art teacher named Ms. Pratt. On the back of one of his pieces from that time, Viggo wrote down the story of Ms. Pratt warning him to “stay away from Truman Capote,” who was in his class. A copy of the story will be displayed in the gallery next to the original work.

Viggo was pulled in several directions in his early life. His religious parents pushed him to become a preacher, but he didn’t take to the idea. He was also a talented jazz trumpet player, and he played with a group for a while before deciding that the musician’s life wasn’t for him. With that, he chose to be an artist. He earned his BFA and MFA, both in Syracuse, and would later on study at the prestigious Instituto Allende in San Miguel de Allende in Mexico. He also returned to Denmark, where he learned batik, a technique of wax-resistant dying applied to cloth.

Viggo’s continual investigation of new media and techniques was due in part to necessity in his vocation as a teacher. He began teaching art in Marathon, New York, then at Roslyn High School on Long Island, and later at Nassau Community College. Kirk recalls: “He needed to stay on top of a lot of different things, and if a student expressed an interest in a different thing, he needed to know how to encourage them into doing it, give them some instruction.”

Kirk took an interest in art from a young age as well, which was undoubtedly fed by the wealth of it in his surroundings growing up. Viggo collected art, produced a continuous flow of his own, and took advantage of Long Island’s proximity to New York City to take his family to museums. “By the time I was ten years old, I’d been to every museum in New York City and all the major galleries. As a kid I got yelled at for running down the ramp at the Guggenheim,” Kirk says.

But he also remembers that the activities that other kids enjoyed with their fathers were different with his own. “He didn’t do things with his son; he took me to do things while he did art. So he would, for example, take me to a baseball game, and I would sit there and watch the baseball game and he would sit there and draw pictures of everybody around us. Or take me fishing, and I would fish and he would do watercolors. It was like whatever I did, I did by myself and then he was there, but he wasn’t there; he was lost in his world.”

It’s not that he was closed-off; Kirk remembers waking up one morning and hearing a bunch of men in his kitchen speaking Spanish. It turned out that a van had been parked in front of their house all night, and when Viggo found out, he went out and introduced himself. They turned out to be migrant farm workers on their way to a rally for Cesar Chavez, and he invited all eight of them inside for breakfast. Viggo was outgoing, just often preoccupied.

While his father’s relative absence stirred up a normal level of youthful resentment, Kirk was more envious than angry. “He was an artist and he knew he was an artist and he knew from the time he was 16 years old he was going be an artist; where I’m still trying to figure out what I want to be when I grow up. So to have that, to know that has got to be an amazing thing. I never had it. And I envied that even as a kid.”

But he reflects that the degree of his father’s passion was not worth its consequences in the end: “He did a lot of printmaking, and using solvents and acids, and he just did it and he didn’t wear masks, he didn’t have ventilators, and ultimately all those fumes and things killed him.”

Kirk flailed a bit more for his father before landing on a vocation. He quit art school after two years, having always had the feeling that he was stuck in his father’s shadow; all of his art teachers since 8th grade were friends of Viggo’s. “Every one of them was somebody who had come and eaten at our table. It was somebody that was like, Bob at home, and Mr. Carter in the classroom.”

When Kirk decided to go into the world of rock and roll, Viggo supported him wholeheartedly. Kirk worked behind the scenes for the likes of the Village People, the Beach Boys and the Kinks. After years of travelling between New York and London, he moved to Las Vegas, where he worked at the House of Blues while Theresa worked at the Riviera Hotel. Then, four years ago, they moved to Binghamton to be closer to Kirk’s mother, Lois. Here they manage Gallery 41 in Owego and involve themselves where they can in the local arts scene.

Kirk has come back to making his own art as well. He does batik and Japanese shibori dying among clothing and other work, often looking to his father’s work to try to learn his techniques. “Now I learn a lot from my father by looking at what he did, and I sit there and I go, alright dad, how the hell did you do this? It’s kind of like reverse engineering.”

Having showed in his lifetime over 200 solo exhibitions in the United States and Europe, Viggo never had a show which encompassed his life’s work from start to finish – or in this case, finish to start: it will be ordered backwards chronologically, for a sort of Benjamin Button-like effect on his work.

There is always an element of mystery when viewing the work of an artist who’s deceased, but with 18 years between his life and today, that mystery will be felt even by those who knew and were closest to him, his family and his many colleagues and friends. Says Kirk, “The frustrating thing is there’s so many times I look at his stuff and I read- he left like journals and all kinds of things, and I found poetry he wrote, and he made books from scratch, the paper the binding, he wrote in them, did illustrations in things. And I know him a lot better now than I knew him when he was alive.”

“Viggo Holm Madsen: A Life of Art: A Retrospective” will be shown at the Phelps Mansion from April 1st–14th, with a First Friday opening reception from 6-9pm. More info on Viggo and Kirk is available at madsenarts.com