Full size, 33K

Plaster, 1910. Size 290 x 255 x 245 cm. Inv. no. 151. Donated to the museum by Niels Hansen Jacobsen.

Exhibitions

The Free Sculptors' Exhibition, 1910.

A review of the sculpture in 1910

Niels Hansen Jacobsen's colossal plaster work, "Time and Man," first and foremost deserves our attention. It philosophizes on existence. The mother is sitting watching her children at play. The father grasps the handle of the shovel and his eyes look anxiously into the future. And over this family group hovers Time on enormous wings, rushing onward. A profound and serious concept permeates this great work of art.

Kolding Avis, March 29, 1910

Man's brief life

The sculpture's figures are naturalistically modeled, but are part of a symbolic narrative. The different periods of life are represented. All are subject to Time and the physical world that surrounds them. The work deals with an existential problem, like many others by Niels Hansen Jacobsen. The same method was used to create the symbolic pictorial narrative of "In the Desert of the City".

The sculpture's checkered existence

Posterity has not been as kind to the work. Niels Th. Mortensen wrote in 1945 in his biography of Niels Hansen Jacobsen:

Never - either before or since - did Niels Hansen Jacobsen create such theatrically gesticulating figures and such a feebly amateurish form. Only the gestures of the little boy with the building blocks seem natural. His advisors should have made it clear to him that the group should never have been cast in plaster.

Nearly 20 years later, the sculpture was sawn in pieces and stored in the cellar under the museum. Not until 1996 was it brought out again, making it possible to evaluate it in the context of Niels Hansen Jacobsen's other works.