Egill Jacobsen

Egill Jacobsen was born on 16 December 1910 in Copenhagen, Denmark, and died there on 21 April 1998, at the age of 87. He trained first at Carl Schwenn's private painting school beginning in 1930, then studied briefly, by some accounts for a single semester, at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen around 1932 to 1933. No source documents a completed degree.

He made his exhibiting debut at the Artists' Autumn Exhibition (Kunstnernes Efterårsudstilling) in Copenhagen in 1932. A trip to Paris in the 1930s, where he is said to have met Pablo Picasso, pushed his work toward the mask and totemic-figure motifs that would define his career; these first appeared publicly around 1936 to 1937, including in a showing with the Linien group. In 1945 the Kunstforeningen in Copenhagen mounted his first retrospective. He is widely described as a founding member of CoBrA in 1948 and took part in the group's exhibitions through 1951, alongside artists including Asger Jorn, Karel Appel, and Pierre Alechinsky.

His first solo exhibition at Galerie Birch in Copenhagen in 1952 was a critical and commercial success, and reviewers of the period dubbed him the "Master of the Masks." He served as professor of painting at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts from 1959 to 1973 (one source gives 1962 to 1972), a post Danish sources describe him as the first abstract artist to hold. He received the Eckersberg Medal in 1959 and the Thorvaldsen Medal in 1969, was made an honorary member of the Academy in 1981, and received the Prince Eugen Medal in 1984. Retrospectives followed in Paris in 1961, in Warsaw and Krakow in 1965, and at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk in 1970.

Jacobsen's reputation rests on his mask paintings, which critics writing around his 1952 Galerie Birch exhibition already described as the work of a "Master of the Masks." His historical standing has been anchored by CoBrA scholarship; the movement's leading historian, Willemijn Stokvis, has identified his mask and vegetal-figure paintings as a consistent stylistic line running from his 1939 breakthrough onward. Danish institutional accounts frame him as a bridge between prewar Danish surrealism and the international CoBrA avant-garde, and credit him as the first abstract painter to hold a professorship at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. No fully verifiable, exact-wording quotation from a named critic in a dated major outlet could be confirmed for this profile.

Jacobsen's auction market is small and denominated mainly in Danish kroner and euros. His documented auction record is EUR 110,000 (about USD 116,545), paid for the 1948 painting Komposition i blaat (Composition in Blue) at Bruun Rasmussen in Copenhagen on 30 November 2016; the auction house described the result as a world record for the artist. A separate sale of the 1938 painting Objektspaltning at Bruun Rasmussen reached DKK 560,000, reported by the house as the most expensive modern painting in that particular sale, though its exact date could not be confirmed. No confirmed sale above the 2016 record has been identified through mid-2026. Below record level, secondary-market sources describe typical auction estimates for his paintings in the range of roughly EUR 5,000 to 15,000, depending on size and period, with individual gallery asking prices sometimes higher.

Jacobsen's market is thin, largely Danish and euro-denominated, and priced at the lower end of the CoBrA spectrum compared with figures like Asger Jorn. No catalogue raisonne has been identified, and no current gallery or estate representation could be confirmed; Galerie Birch's Copenhagen page is a historical artist profile rather than confirmed evidence of active representation. Provenance for auction-consigned works is best checked against Bruun Rasmussen's sale records, the house that handled the current auction record. Because so few of his paintings reach public sale, any single result, including the 2016 record, should be read as a data point rather than a stable price trend.