Franziska Paula Konstante Rasmussen née Duden (1907–1994) was a German-born
textile artist and painter who moved to Denmark in 1930. Initially influenced by the minimalist
Bauhaus
The Staatliches Bauhaus (), commonly known as the Bauhaus (), was a German art school operational from 1919 to 1933 that combined crafts and the fine arts.Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 4th edn., 200 ...
style, she soon developed her own distinctive
Structuralist approach to weaving, becoming one of Denmark's most important contributors to
tapestry
Tapestry is a form of textile art, traditionally woven by hand on a loom. Tapestry is weft-faced weaving, in which all the warp threads are hidden in the completed work, unlike most woven textiles, where both the warp and the weft threads may ...
. In 1935, she joined the Danish School of Arts and Crafts (''Kunsthåndværkerskole'') where she remained for over 40 years, teaching painting and composition, increasingly with an emphasis on textile art.
Biography
Born on 20 March 1907 in
Frankfurt am Main
Frankfurt, officially Frankfurt am Main (; Hessian: , "Frank ford on the Main"), is the most populous city in the German state of Hesse. Its 791,000 inhabitants as of 2022 make it the fifth-most populous city in Germany. Located on its na ...
, Germany, Franziska Paula Konstante Duden was the daughter of the German business executive Paul Duden (1868–1954) and his wife Johanne Bertha Nebe (died 1935). The youngest of five children, she was brought up in a well-to-do family; her father, a member of the executive board of the chemical firm
Hoechst Hoechst, Hochst, or Höchst may refer to:
* Hoechst AG, a former German life-sciences company
* Hoechst stain, one of a family of fluorescent DNA-binding compounds
* Höchst (Frankfurt am Main), a city district of Frankfurt am Main, Germany
** Fra ...
, was an amateur painter, while her mother came from a family of academics. Her grandfather Konrad Duden was a linguist and founder of the well-known German language dictionary bearing his name. After attending courses in painting, Franka Duden studied at the ''Kunstgewerbeschule'' (School of Arts and Crafts) in Frankfurt (1928–29), where she met her future husband, the painter Peter Christian Rasmussen (1897–1935). They married in 1930.
After Paul Rasmussen had accepted a position at the newly established ''
Kunsthåndværkerskole'' (Arts and Crafts School) in
Copenhagen
Copenhagen ( or .; da, København ) is the capital and most populous city of Denmark, with a proper population of around 815.000 in the last quarter of 2022; and some 1.370,000 in the urban area; and the wider Copenhagen metropolitan ar ...
, the couple moved to Denmark. While her husband was teaching, Franka created paintings and textiles in her studio. Initially she adopted the simplistic Bauhaus idiom but soon began to develop her own artistic style. After her husband's premature death in 1935, Rasmussen began to teach herself, obtaining a permanent position at the Arts and Crafts School in 1940. She turned out to be an excellent pedagogue, constantly encouraging her students to develop their own artistic styles.
[
Assisted by her colleague Gunilla Lagerbjelke, Rasmussen's work became increasingly based on textiles. Her earlier tapestries and woven creations were inspired by nature but they evolved towards experimental, structuralistically formatted designs, often made of coarse yarns.]
She held solo exhibitions from 1954 and was one of the few Danes to be represented at the Textile Biennale in Lausanne
, neighboring_municipalities= Bottens, Bretigny-sur-Morrens, Chavannes-près-Renens, Cheseaux-sur-Lausanne, Crissier, Cugy, Écublens, Épalinges, Évian-les-Bains (FR-74), Froideville, Jouxtens-Mézery, Le Mont-sur-Lausanne, Lugrin (FR-74), ...
in 1967.[
Franka Rasmussen died in Copenhagen on 14 December 1994.][
]
Awards
In addition to a number of grants and scholarships, Rasmussen received the Eckersberg Medal in 1982.[
]
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Rasmussen, Franka
1907 births
1994 deaths
Artists from Frankfurt
Danish textile artists
Danish textile designers
Danmarks Designskole faculty
Danish women artists
German emigrants to Denmark
Recipients of the Eckersberg Medal
Women textile artists
German textile artists