Bob Dylan, The Incident, 2010, Acrylic on canvas.

"The Brazil Series" -- 40 acrylic paintings and eight drawings of Brazil Bob Dylan created in the last 18 months to be the major fall show at The National Gallery of Denmark -- runs through Jan. 30 in Copenhagen.

Critics give thumbs down to new Dylan paintings in Denmark AFP:

Train Tracks

Art critics dismissed Bob Dylan as an amateur painter and said his work had no place in Denmark's largest museum, after the American music icon's new painting collection opened in Copenhagen.

"When we talk about music, Bob Dylan is one of the great Picassos of the 20th century, but this is not the case for his painting," said the daily Berlingske Tidende after "The Brazil Series" opened on Saturday.

"Bob Dylan paints like any other amateur, using a rather oafish figurative style," said the art history professor Peter Brix Soendergaard, interviewed by the daily Information. "He is what we used to call a Sunday painter."

Man On A Bridge

The financial newspaper Boersen turned its criticism to the the Statens Museum for Kunst's management, which it said "put financial interest ahead of artistic judgement", knowing that the Dylan name "would bring in a big public".

Why Denmark, why Brazil?

The museum quotes Dylan: "I've been to the National Gallery of Denmark and it definitely is an impressive art museum. It was more than a little surprising when I was asked to create works specifically for this museum. It was an honor to be asked and a thrilling challenge. I chose Brazil as a subject, because I have been there many times and I like the atmosphere."

Bob Dylan, Rainforest, 2010, Acrylic on canvas

I rather like these, others less so. "Oafish" like Matisse, perhaps. (Dismissiveness in the art world flows easily from its history as a closed, bleeding-edge conversation among a select group of critics, academics and currently favored painters.) Dylan's paintings, like his voice, are raspy and don't aim to please. Something else is happening here.

Clue: Via Reuters (Bob Dylan's paintings on show in Danish gallery), museum curator Kasper Monrad:

Kasper Monrad: Exhibit curator Video

"The paintings are not illustrations of the songs," he said.

"We don't see Shakespeare in the alley and so forth," he said, alluding to the song "Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again" from Dylan's 1966 Blonde on Blonde album.

In conversations with the gallery, Dylan said that if he could have expressed in song what he has now painted, he would have written a song instead, Monrad said.

A few years ago in a TV interview Dylan said he didn't know how he wrote some of the stuff he wrote. "I can't do the things I did back then. I can do other things, but I can't do that any more."

Rose on a Hillside

There's a book coming October 20: Bob Dylan: The Brazil Series.

Bonus: Free Dylan mp3s

BOB DYLAN: The Great White Wonder, 1969. The first bootleg.

BOB DYLAN: Pat & Billy, Bob & Sam. Outtakes from Sam Peckinpah's 1973 movie Pat Garrett And Billy The Kid.

BOB DYLAN: Atlantic City 2007