Carl Julius Salomonsen - a pmphlet from 1919.: "We stand, at this moment, before a movement in art which is psychopathic in character, and whose victorious journey through all countries is probably caused by the same spiritual disease that gave the older, religious spiritual epidemic such a powerful spread."

Carl Julius Salomonsen, New Forms of Art and Contagious Mental Illness, Trans. by Andrew Hodgson, New Documents, 2018. [1919.]




Over the years 1919–20, the celebrated medical scientist and doctor Carl Julius Salomonsen began giving public lectures and publishing pamphlets regarding a new "epidemic" that had begun to affect the European populace: the increasing ubiquity of modernist art. In a 1919 pamphlet titled New Forms of Art and Contagious Mental Illness, he wrote: "We stand, at this moment, before a movement in art which is psychopathic in character, and whose victorious journey through all countries is probably caused by the same spiritual disease that gave the older, religious spiritual epidemic such a powerful spread." This pamphlet and the accompanying talks were countered by a retaliatory pamphlet published by the Copenhagen modernist painters group, to which Salomonsen responded with a further pamphlet. Translated into English for the first time, the entire altercation is gathered in this volume, documenting one of the earliest rejections of modernist art.