107 FIG. 3 (below): Detail of the Kjersmeiers’ living room showing a number of the dance crests they collected. Photo: private collection. The third dance crest in the top row is also reproduced in fi gure 8, and the fourth in the bottom row is fi gure 4. The rest have been identifi ed by the author in the collection of the Nationalmuseet in Copenhagen. FIG. 4 (right): Dance crest, sogoni koun. Bamana, Burkina Faso. Before 1932. Wood. H: 52.5 cm. Collected in situ, Sulubua, 1932. Ex Kjersmeier Collection. Nationalmuseet, Copenhagen, Denmark, inv. G8048. Photo © Nationalmuseet, Copenhagen. which he graduated in 1915. The Copenhagen politiets registerblade (police registration forms) indicates that in 1906 he lived on the fi rst fl oor of a building located at Svendsgade 1 in Copenhagen, apparently as a tenant of a single room in his capacity as a student.4 The following year he published his fi rst personal collection of poems as a twenty-four-page booklet titled Nuancer.5 Kjersmeier’s early interest in poetry included older Asian, Near Eastern, and African poems, which he translated from French or German into Danish. Doubtless this background inspired him to collect various objects from China, Japan, and Persia in the years before WWI. In the spring of 1917, Kjersmeier married Amalie Edelsten. She was born and raised in Copenhagen. They met at law school, since they attended the same university. She shared his interest in African art, and shortly after their marriage the couple moved into what was to be their permanent home, a four-room apartment in the same building at 1 Svendsgade that Kjersmeier had lived in when he fi rst arrived in Copenhagen, but this time on the fourth fl oor. This apartment overlooked a square, and its lighting in the evening reminded him of Paris. From 1919 to 1945, Kjersmeier was employed by the Copenhagen City Court as a lawyer and district court clerk. In 1945 he retired, and for the rest of his life immersed himself in his interest in and work with African art and poetry.6
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