Joergen Nash, scourge of mermaids, RIP

Joergen Nash, artist who sawed head off Copenhagen’s Little Mermaid, dead at 84
By Jan M. Olsen
COPENHAGEN, Denmark (AP) — Joergen Nash, the provocative artist who claimed responsibility for cutting the head off Copenhagen’s statue of the Little Mermaid in 1963, has died at age 84.
A provocative artist whose paintings were exhibited worldwide, Nash drew the biggest comments of his career when he claimed that under cover of darkness and armed with a hacksaw, he decapitated the pining lover’s bronze head on April 24, 1963, and tossed it into a Copenhagen lake.
Nash, who died Monday, never said why he did it and was never arrested. The cause of his death was not disclosed by his family.
The decapitation of the girl-sized bronze statue, erected in 1913 in honour of Hans Christian Andersen who wrote the fairy tale about her, drew global media attention and shocked Danes.
In his memoirs, and several times later in newspaper and television interviews, the self-appointed “mermaid killer” always took responsibility for the act.
Police never arrested anyone for the beheading. Since then, the statue has been splashed with paint, damaged by explosives and even had its head cut off again in 1998.
Danish newspapers have claimed the real culprit was the late painter Henrik Bruun, who was protesting against established art. Bruun never said if he did it or not.
Nash’s art was renowned for disrupting the commonplace and for drawing attention to the artist.
In the 1960s Nash and fellow eccentric artist, Jens Joergen Thorsen, interrupted parliament by blowing on tin whistles. During a meeting of the Danish Literature Academy, they unleashed almost a dozen of white mice. During a performance of Madame Butterfly at the Copenhagen Royal Theatre, they tossed firecrackers on stage.
Born Joergen Joergensen, Nash said he changed his last name to distance himself from his brother, painter Asger Jorn, who founded the COBRA group with Eigill Jacobsen, Christian Dotremont of Belgium and Karel Appel of the Netherlands. The acronym stands for Copenhagen, Brussels and Amsterdam.
Nash, who wrote 42 books, became an honorary member of the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Art in 1963.