DANISH SYMBOLIST ARTIST AND JEWELLER MOGENS BALLIN (1871-1914)
Mogens Ballin (1871-1914) was a Danish symbolist artist, member of the Pont-Aven school, silversmith and jeweler. He studied at private art schools in Copenhagen. He took private French lessons from Mette Gauguin from Frederiksberg, the wife of Paul Gauguin, through whom he met the master himself, having moved to Paris in 1889. In Paris, he met Jan Verkade and Paul Sérusier. Under Verkade’s influence, Ballin converted to Catholicism and was baptized in 1893 in Florence. In 1899, he opened a metalworking workshop in Tuborg, where he made jewelry. In 1907 he gave up the forge and spent the rest of his life serving the Catholic cause as head of the Catholic College in Copenhagen. He died of cancer in 1914.
Francesco Mogens Hendrik Ballin was born on March 20, 1871 in Copenhagen. Mogens was the only son of a wealthy Jewish family. His father, Hendrik Isidor Ballin (1835-1901), was a salesman and later a manufacturer, and his mother, Ida Hend Levy (1844-1920), was an Orthodox Jew. In 1886, after completing his studies with a basic examination in the 4th grade, Ballin received an education as an artist at the Carl von Schmidt-Viseldeck School and at the private painting school of Jens Jørgen Jensen Egeberg. Together with Carl Friedensberg, he was a student of Viggo Pedersen.
When Ballin was still very young, he painted his first landscapes on the island of Sealand, in northern Denmark. Mogens also took private French lessons from Mette Gauguin of Frederiksberg, the wife of Paul Gauguin, and thanks to the paintings of this charismatic Frenchman, Van Gogh and the works of other contemporary French artists that he saw in her house, he was able to understand the main trends of French impressionism and follow them. This was very important for his future. In fact, in 1889 he was able to go to Paris with a letter of introduction to Gauguin, signed by the artist’s wife.
On 26 January 1899, Ballin married the French-Danish Marguerite Eudoxie Frederique d’Auchamp (1872-1907) in the Sankt Andreas Kirke in Ordrup, daughter of the political candidate and later Chancellery Manager at the Ministry of Finance François Louis d’Auchamp and Eugénie Caroline Augusta, née Richard. Ballin had five children, but Marguerite died of the Spanish flu in 1907 at the age of 30. Ballin never fully overcame this, devoting himself less and less to art and more and more to the education of his children and the Catholic Church in Denmark.
Although Ballin did not produce many paintings, his work clearly played a role in the development of the Nabis tendencies with his use of pure colour, blue background tones, false perspective and high horizons in landscapes. His portraits, influenced by Charles Filiger, reveal his religious aspirations and hidden mysticism. They have the appearance of modern Byzantine icons. According to Paul Sérusier, “Ballin had an approach that is strange and serious, rich and fantastic.”
Mogens Ballin died on January 27, 1914, of cancer in Hellerup, a suburb of Copenhagen.
He is buried in Assistens Cemetery in Copenhagen.
