S_BilledeborgenKøbenhavnsRådhus_1905-2005

in which the capitals of the columns were not ornamented with heraldry and symbols of saints but rather with railway servants in uniform, slip points and railway engines. The sculptor Anders Bundgaard (1864-1937) applied to Nyrop for a job as a decorative artist. He was educated at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and had studied with the internationally oriented Norwegian sculptor Stephan Sinding, and after his first draft for a fountain of Gefion at Frederiksberg, he received a travel grant for among other destinations Egypt, where he admired the ancient sculptures of granite. On returning home he looked up Nyrop in the drawing office shack on the construction site of the City Hall. »The main style had been decided by the architect, and it was impossible to carve free naturalistic sculptures, but that was not really the main point for Bundgaard. All he wanted was to express himself in stone or metal, finding full scope for his creative and vivacious personality. Whenever he sculpted a figure, he always felt tempted to think first and foremost of the rock it was to be carved from. To him the material was what was uppermost in his mind. And the fact that the carved stones had to fit in somewhere particular in the vast mural expanse of a building could only be an advantage as there is life in that vast mural expanse. The correlation of the length, height and direction of the walls, of the holes entering or leaving the mural structures, is precisely the kind of energy a sculptor can work with in a manner which allows his creation to develop the weight and importance that Sinding believed he could achieve through a histrionic arrangement or some profound subject matter«, J.A. Bundgaard, the son of Anders Bundgaard, explained in a feature article in a newspaper after his father’s death. In 1931 Anders Bundgaard was asked at which point he realised that he wanted to be a sculptor. »As a child I had no idea whatsoever what a sculptor was, but I made drawings and cut out silhouettes, resulting in my having to leave home as I never chose to outline people’s most charming features, and my caricatures made the neighbours so furious that it became imperative for me to leave that part of the country. I was almost thrown out, I had to flee from the neighbours’ rage.« He began his career in Copenhagen as a marker and cut heads out of the square pieces of chalk, which were noticed by the architects and artists among the regulars in the café in Klosterstræde. Counting amounts to cutting and whittling, and »His father, smallholder Jens Christensen, was also a clog maker. In the evening, when tallowing the clogs, while his children were on the floor underneath the tallow chair, playing with the shavings, he would tell them fairy tales about trolls and stories about wars, and often he would sing to them«, Anders Bundgaard’s son J.A. Bundgaard also relates in the feature article from 1938. And: »The boy was deeply fascinated by the stories and tales, he saw every action and event so clearly that he had to draw them in chalk on the hand-carved bed fronts. Later, when herding sheep on the moor, he would virtually attack the field stones with a broken stove grate in an attempt to shape them according to his ideas.«

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