Self taught, Carl-Henning Pedersen was a Danish painter who was one of the founders of the Cobra Art Movement a group of post-war artists named for their native cities of Brussels, Copenhagen and Amsterdam. Their goal was rebellian against conservatism in the arts and their shared style was violent-seeming brushwork and saturated color.

At age 25, he had traveled from his native Copenhagen to Paris where he saw an exhibition of Nazi "Degenerate Art" by artists whose work had been banned during the Hitler regime. From that time, Pedersen was an admirer of Marc Chagall and Paul Klee, painters whose abstract modernist work was in the exhibition.

Pedersen's expression became increasingly abstract during Wor...