[Rudolph Tegner: The blind from Marrakech (1949-1950)]

The Danish sculptor and painter Rudolph Tegner (1873-1950) has built his own Museum in Dronningmolle, where his sculptures enrich the unique landscape. His last and incomplete plaster on a simple, raw wooden scaffold sculpture The Blind from Marrakech (Fig. 1) show five persons moan about, carrying a dead body. All persons are missing their arms. Tegner had a number of years earlier been in Marrakech and had watched a funeral procession, where blind beggars had carried a dead old woman raised high above the bearers on a kind of pall. In a small version of the statue cast, later in bronze from 1963, showed 15 bearers, on both sides of the bier (Fig. 2 & 3). Nine and 15 bearers are looking up, two right in front, and the rest are looking down. Totally blind people can not see the light but can see up to the divine Heaven. Some blind have kept the gleam. The confusion with the eye direction shows that they really are blind. However 10 of the 15 blind people had hollow in the eye (excenteratio orbitae) in contrast to the dead woman. The dead woman had been the blinds' mistress. The last work The Blind in Marrakech may also be the despair of the artist.