Worn Out

http://viaf.org/viaf/38065432 · 1889

The Funen painter H.A. Brendekilde’s masterpiece “Worn Out” is just the thing for a tragic cover story. A day-labourer has collapsed in his field. Next to him a woman is screaming of helplessness. The picture was exhibited at the Exposition Universelle of 1889 and also at The World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. The bourgeois press, on the other hand, considered it melodramatic and overly political. At the end of the nineteenth century Brendekilde painted several acerbic social-realist works. At other times he depicted the everyday life of poor people without critical undertones. Brendekilde grew up in the countryside and had felt social inequality close to home.