Jørgen Haugen Sørensen and the tube sculptures made at the Rabekke factory, 1959-60

The sculpture Thank you for the coffee was a gift to the factory as a thank you for their helpfulness.
After the factory closed, the sculpture was acquired by the Bornholm Art Museum.
Right Photo Simon Lautrop
Jørgen Haugen Sørensen
Jørgen Haugen Sørensen with the ceramists Peder Rasmussen and Hans Christian Wagner
The ceramist Peder Rasmussen
The ceramist Hans Christian Wagner (1935 – 1989).
Wagner was born in Germany, but already appears as a 5-year-old in a census as living in Nyhavn. He had a workshop in Copenhagen at least until 1967, when the ceramist Bodil Hummel was employed by him, and where he exhibited and sold at the Permanente, but already in 1957 and until 1976 he appeared as a designer for Björkshult Glasverk in Sweden. At Rabækken, Wagner executed a series of large totem-like sculptures, which have apparently all been lost.

PART 1

In 1959, Jørgen went to Bornholm with two ceramic friends. They had been offered unlimited amounts of clay and workshop facilities by the Rabække factory in Rønne. One of the friends was the very talented ceramist Peder Rasmussen (1929–1964), and the other, the ceramist Hans Christian Wagner (1935–1989).

Jørgen told, they rented a small house in Rønne, and the plan was for the Art dealer Børge Birch to pay the rent, as Jørgen’s tube sculptures were to be exhibited in his newly opened gallery the following year. But each time the poor man came to collect the rent, no money had come from Birch. “How stupid of me,” the poor man blamed himself each time: “How stupid of me”. When Jørgen told the story, he assimilated the Bornholm dialect, and the “u” in “stupid” sounded punishing and vulnerable at the same time, which is why I remember the story so well. Jørgen was a fantastic, lively, and funny storyteller.

The continuation of the story was even worse, as it ended very sadly for Jorgen’s friends, many of whom died in unfortunate ways. One of them, had a wife who was far too beautiful for him. And as expected, she was soon taken by another man, which left the potter very unhappy.

They all slept in the workshop, and Jørgen said that one night he heard a scream, just as the lights were turned off. “Oh well,” Jørgen thought, “it’s one of those who scream at night – maybe he’s afraid of the dark…” and Jørgen went back to sleep.

But one evening, when they came home from the factory, they found their friend strangely oiled, a weird detail, which they in their youthful ignorance, didn’t investigate further. Instead, they started to open beers they had brought and they were full of laughter and having fun. Their friend seemed to forget his dreadful idea and the gasoline he had poured over himself was never ignited.
It wasn’t until later the unhappy potter eventually chose to take his own life. How it happened, I can’t recall and none of them are left to ask.
A few years later in 1964, Peder Rasmussen’s clothes were found neatly folded by the shoreline. It isn’t known how he died, it could have been an accident, but Jørgen believed that he had drowned himself.

At that time Jorgen was living and working in Paris, but it seemed as though Jørgen was still mourning his loss when he told the story. Even all those years later, when he told me the story – the idea that he could have prevented his friend’s decisions, stayed in his head.

It was strange to me, that Jorgen always remembered how the many people, he had known through a lifetime had died, or which diseases they had suffered from. Meticulously he recalled last endurances of so many friends, as if it was crucially important to remember the cause of their death.

Eli Benveniste