Visual Arts
Since the early Middle Ages, Danish art has been inspired by foreign influence, partly through the import of art, partly through the work of foreign artists in Denmark and partly, indirectly, through the travel activities of Danish artists. Danish national art did not appear until the Danish Golden Age in the early 19th century.
Bjørn Nørgaard:Recent Members of the House of Glücksborg. Tapestry featuring subjects from 20th century history. 1990-2000.
Foreign Influence in Early Christian Art
The large Jelling stone from the late 10th century was the first work on Danish soil to convey a Christian message, in an idiom rooted in the pagan Viking age. Subsequently, the subject matter of art became increasingly Christian, while at the same time foreign contacts intensified. From around 1100, the Byzantine style reached Romanesque art, though the channels are not known. The same uncertainty applies to the stylistic preconditions of Danish Gothic style, which dominated religious art from around 1250 until the early 16th century. The most extensive artistic legacy of the period consists in the murals, decorating walls and ceilings in Danish village churches. The murals are anonymous, but images and patterns sometimes reappear in North German altarpieces and block books. Imported German art does not have a distinctive character until the high altar of Arhus Cathedral, completed in 1479 by the Lubeck sculptor Bernt Notke. In the early 16th century, two other wood carvers from the German-speaking area were active in Denmark: Hans Bruggeman, who mainly worked in the duchies Schleswig and Holstein, and Claus Berg, whose principal work is the altarpiece in Odense Cathedral, 1515-1525.
Renaissance and Baroque
The draftsman and engraver Melchior Lorck (d. after 1588) was the first major artist born within the kingdom of Denmark, but his career mainly flourished abroad. He lived in Istanbul from 1555 to 1559 and there created, among other things, a series of rare pictures of the Turks and their culture.
Danish art continued to draw on foreign influence after the Reformation in 1536, when princely and royal power succeeded the Church as the main artistic patron. The Antwerp painter Hans Kneiper (d.1587), who was summoned to Denmark by Frederik II around 1577, depicted the history of the Danish kings in 40 woven tapestries for Kronborg castle in Elsinore. There are other similar examples of foreign artists serving the Danish royal house, particularly the art-loving Christian IV. Abraham Wuchters (1608-1682) and Karel van Mander III (1609-1670), who worked as portrait painters under Christian IV and his successor Frederik III, were both from the Netherlands.
Gradually, other European countries also left their mark on Danish culture. C.G. Pilo (1711-1793), who is remembered for his late Baroque portraits of Frederik V, came to Denmark from Sweden, while the French sculptor J.F.J. Saly (1717-1776) became the first director of the newly-founded Academy of Fine Arts (1754). Saly also created Absolutism‘s principal equestrian statue, Frederik V on Amalienborg Palace Square (unveiled 1771).
Important Danish Art Collectors and Patrons and their Museums
- Brewer Carl Jacobsen (1842-1914) – The Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek
- Tobacco manufacturer Heinrich Hirschsprung (1836-1908) – The Hirschsprung Collection
- Wholesaler, director Knud W. Jensen (1916-2000) – Louisiana, Museum of Modern Art
- Landowner, politician Johannes Hage (1842-1923) – The Picture Gallery of Nivaagaard
- Insurance director Wilhelm Hansen (1868-1936) – The Ordrupgaard Collection
Neo-Classicism
Danish-born artists did not really come to the fore until the last third of the 18th century. Jens Juel (1745-1802) became the most sought-after portrait painter between the periods of Rococo and Neo-Classicism, while the literary-orientated N.A. Abildgaard (1743-1809) is the period’s major painter of historical and mythological subjects. Among Abildgaard’s students at the Academy of Fine Arts the sculptor, Bertel Thorvaldsen (1770-1844), was the first to attract international attention to Danish art. However, Thorvaldsen created all his Neo-Classical major works in Rome, where he lived and worked from 1797 to 1838. His importance as a model for other Danish artists of the time was enormous, and he was the first Danish artist to get his own museum, by Christiansborg Castle, in 1848.
In Rome,Thorvaldsen was painted in 1814 by C.W. Eckersberg (1783-1853), while the latter was visiting Italy. Previously, Eckersberg had studied Neo-Classical historical painting with the French painter J.L. David in Paris, but when he became Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in 1818, after his return to Denmark, he soon turned to a more naturalistic style, and his teaching of perspective laid the basis for poetic Naturalism known as Golden Age painting.
Golden Age and National Romanticism
Despite major economic and political difficulties, intellectual life in the years up to 1850 became formative for Denmark’s national identity. The high artistic standing of the Golden Age was due mainly to the colour-sensitive Christen Købke (1810-1848), who in paintings of the quiet Copenhagen of his time, offered a penetrating portrait of Danish intimacy. Other artists also characterised the period, including Wilhelm Marstrand (1810-1873), who, with his popular satire, naturalised the history painting started by Abildgaard. Moreover, the portrayal of Denmark emerged through the work of J.Th. Lundbye (1818-1848) and P.C. Skovgaard (1817-1875), the leading landscape painters of the dawning National Romanticism.
Previously, artists had gone to Italy to find suitable subjects, but in the 1840s the art historian, N.L. Høyen (1798-1870), made it a condition of the popularisation of art that the artist choose Danish landscapes, monuments, and street life, etc. as his subject. These ideas provided fertile soil for National Romantic genre painting, which was most popularly represented by Christen Dalsgaard (1824-1907), Frederik Vermehren (1823-1910) and Julius Exner (1825-1910).
The Danish-German War of 1848-1851 caused an estrangement from German art for the next hundred years. The defeat by Germany in 1864 and the ceding of the duchies Schleswig and Holstein was followed by a national regeneration period, in which Danish culture found inspiration in its own values.
J.Th. Lundbye: A Danish Shore: Motif from Kitnæs by the Isefjord. 1842. Statens Museum for Kunst/Dowic Fotografi.
Realism
However, the reception of Danish art at the 1878 World Exhibition in Paris was very negative, and a new generation, led by the art historian Julius Lange, acknowledged that this was due to the national isolation of the previous decades. The genre painters, who had rarely travelled further than Jutland, were succeeded by a generation of ambitious artists who usually crowned their years at the Academy of Fine Arts with a study trip abroad, mostly to France. Thus, both P.S. Krøyer (1851-1909) and Lauritz Tuxen (1853-1927) continued their studies at painting schools in Paris. However, neither of them understood that Realism was now on the wane. That is why the art cultivated in the 1880s by the artists’ colony in Skagen although plein air painting with subjects attributing new importance to the artist, his friends and milieu, did not break radically with the past as an artistic style. The brilliantly gifted Krøyer and the solid portrayer of the fishermen’s heroic deeds, Michael Ancher (1849-1927), each marked the culmination of a period. Only the Skagenborn Anna Ancher (1859-1935), who married Michael Ancher in 1880, reached towards Impressionism with her sensitivity to the unique light at Skagen. So did the landscape painter Th. Philipsen (1840-1929), who in his youth had contact with the Frenchman Paul Gauguin during Gauguin’s stay in Copenhagen, and who later found his luminous and colour-vibrant subjects among the cattle on the island of Saltholm, near Copenhagen.
The main figures between Realism and Symbolism were L.A. Ring (1854-1933), Vilhelm Hammershøi (1864-1916) and J.F. Willumsen (1863-1958). Ring’s preferred subject matter was the smallholders, whose social position was aggravated by industrialisation, but his paintings of the Danish landscape and peasantry also encapsulated a new awareness of death. Something similar applies to Hammershøi, whose atmospheric, grey-tone depictions of city architecture dramatised isolation. The same sense of loss and loneliness was the theme of his carefully constructed interiors from the Christianhavn flats he inhabited.
Early Modernism
The versatile Willumsen became the first exponent of the supreme artistic self-esteem of Modernism. He introduced Symbolism to Denmark and in 1891 was a co-founder of The Free Exhibition (Den Frie Udstilling), which was established as a counterblast to the censored Charlottenborg exhibitions. It was the first of many associations, where like-minded artists joined together to exhibit regularly.
The Free Exhibition also became the home of, among others, Peter Hansen (1868-1928), Johannes Larsen (1867-1961) and Fritz Syberg (1862-1939). These painters from the island of Funen came to represent an artistic liberation, developed from realistic nature painting. Many of them were students of Kristian Zahrtmann (1843-1917), an inspiring artist, in whose historical paintings colour plays a strikingly strong and independent role. This earthy, popular Realism contrasted with literary, refined Neo-Romantic paintings, which took inspiration from the Rennaissance. The conflict between the so-called Funen painters and historically inspired artists, such as the married couple, Agnes Slott-Møller (1862-1937) and Harald Slott-Møller (1864-1937), was violent and culminated in the ’peasant painter feud’ of 1907.
Vilhelm Hammershøi: Interior with Young Woman Seen from Behind. 1903-1904. Randers Kunstmuseum.
Cubism, Realism and Expressionism
During the 20th century, Danish art experienced further scandals and breaks with tradition. It began in 1918 when Vilhelm Lundstrøm, with his packing case paintings, introduced French Cubism in Denmark. Although Lundstrøm, in his later development as a painter and decorative artist, turned towards a Neo-Classical celebration of the female body related to that represented in sculpture by Kai Nielsen (1882-1924) and Gerhard Henning (1880-1967), he had paved the way for abstract art. During the first third of the century, artists such as Edvard Weie (1879-1943) and Harald Giersing (1881-1927) continued to cultivate a style which valued the pure, colour intensity of the painting above considerations of resemblance to nature.
This French-influenced style contrasted with a more regionally-inspired Expressionism. Oluf Høst from Bornholm (1884-1966), Jens Søndergaard from North Jutland (1895-1957) and Erik Hoppe from Copenhagen (1896-1968) combined liberation of colour with the wish to retain personally experienced subject-matter. Astrid Noack (1888-1954) represented a similar intimacy within sculpture.
Surrealism and Abstract Art
The second major break with tradition followed with Surrealism in the early 1930s. Although avant-garde artists had typically been in opposition to the establishment, the reaction to Wilhelm Freddie (1909-1995) was nonetheless unusually violent: at an exhibition in 1937 the artist was arrested and his confiscated works placed in the Copenhagen Crime Museum, where they remained until 1963. Apart from Freddie, the main figures of Danish Surrealism are Vilhelm Bjerke-Petersen (1909-1957), a well-informed conveyer of the ideas of Modernism, the colour sensitive Ejler Bille (b.1910) and the intellectually bold Richard Mortensen (1910-1993), all among the pioneers of abstract art in Denmark.
After the Second World War
The artistic movement Cobra, the most important of the new departures after the War, was a reaction to the isolation which many young people had felt during the German occupation of 1940-1945. Immediately after the allied victory, the artists went to Paris to orientate themselves internationally and make contacts. During its intense lifetime (1948-1951) Cobra attracted a motley circle of mainly Danish, Belgian and Dutch artists. Asger Jorn (1914-1973), the greatest Danish painter of the time, initiated Cobra and made considerable personal and financial sacrifices to keep it going. As an artistic phenomenon, Cobra continued to flourish for many decades after the dissolution of the group. Danish Cobra-artists include the painter Henry Heerup (1907-1993), the married couple Carl-Henning Pedersen (b.1913) and Else Alfelt (1910-1974), Egill Jacobsen (1910-1997), and to some extent Ejler Bille and the sculptor Erik Thommesen (b.1916).
The alternative to Cobra was concrete, non-figurative art. This movement centred around two dominant figures, who both worked in France in the post-war period: the sculptor Robert Jacobsen (1912-1993) and the painter Richard Mortensen (1910-1993). The lyrical painter Mogens Andersen (1916-2003), who also lived in France for many years, and the painter Preben Hornung (1919-1989) chose a personal third course – midway between cool, constructivist Concretism and spontaneous, intuitive Expressionism.
The final main current of the 1950s was a figurative Expressionism focusing on human existence, seen in the light of the destructive forces of modern civilisation. The main figures of this national and more traditional movement were the painter and sculptor Svend Wiig Hansen (1922-1997) and the graphic artist Palle Nielsen (1920-2000). Later the painter Arne Haugen Sørensen (b.1932) has continued and renewed this view of man.
Asger Jorn: Dead Drunk Danes. 1960. Louisiana.
Anti-authoritarian and Experimental Art
The 1960s were dominated by the revolt against established values and institutions. It was a German-born artist and gallery owner, Arthur Köpcke (1928-1977), who reopened the door to German art and introduced a number of experimental trends. The Ex School, established in 1961 as a critical alternative to the teaching at the Academy of Fine Arts, brought together leading rebels such as Per Kirkeby (b.1938), Bjørn Nørgaard (b.1947) and Poul Gernes (1925-1996). Kirkeby is the Danish artist with the strongest international profile since Jorn, having participated in, for instance, Documenta and produced a varied oeuvre ranging from painting and sculpture to graphics. However differently its members have developed, the Ex School represented socially aware, anti-elitist and anti-authoritarian art. Bjørn Nørgaard’s Horse Sacrifice of 1970 became the most discussed of a series of critical events. Nørgaard’s prolific activity as a decorative artist took an unexpected turn when in 1990-2000, he created the cartoons for the 17 tapestries with motifs from Danish history, which now adorn the Banqueting Hall of Christianborg Castle as a present from a group of donors to Queen Margrethe II and later the Danish people.
Edward Weie: A Road through a Wood. 1932. Aarhus Kunstmuseum/Thomas and Poul Pedersen.
Postmodernism
After Paris set the artistic agenda for Denmark for many years, the leading role went to New York after 1960. Super-Realism was most strongly represented by Niels Strøbek (b.1944), while Stig Brøgger (b.1941), Hein Heinsen (b.1935) and Mogens Møller (b.1934) were exponents of Minimalism and conceptual art. As teachers, all three played a part in the change of the Academy of Fine Arts into a centre of philosophy and cognitive theory in the 1980s. Sculptors such as Morten Stræde (b.1956), Elisabeth Toubro (b. 1956) and Henrik B. Andersen (b.1958) have contributed to this development. As a sculptor Heinsen has created a series of faceted, weighty works with rich references to contemporary thought. This direction contrasts with a sculptor such as Jørgen Haugen Sørensen (b.1934), whose strong, surreal sculptures insist on the connection with the body.
The breakthrough of the new socalled ’Wild Young’ artists demonstrates the increasing importance of contemporary international art. Two of the participants, Claus Carstensen (b.1957) and Peter Bonde (b.1958), later became professors at the Academy of Fine Arts, and current developments show that German art must again be regarded as one of the main trend-setters of the Danish art scene. Neo-Geo, Neo-Pop, appropriation art and video art have also made their mark, just as art photography has been accepted as an independent art form, particularly with Krass Clement (b.1946) and Per Bak Jensen (b.1949). Danish artists continuously engage in a strong and close exchange of ideas with the international art scene.
Peter Michael Hornung
Author, mag.art.
Further Information
The Danish National Gallery
Sølvgade 48-50
DK-1307 Copenhagen K
(+45) 3374 8494
www.smk.dk
smk@smk.dk
Louisiana, Museum of Modern Art
Gl. Strandvej 13
DK-3050 Humlebæk
(+45) 4919 0719
www.louisiana.dk
curatorial@louisiana.dk
Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek
Dantes Plads 7
DK-1556 Copenhagen V
(+45) 3341 8141
www.glyptoteket.dk
ARKEN, Museum of Modern Art
Skovvej 100
DK-2635 Ishøj
(+45) 4354 0222
www.arken.dk
reception@arken.dk
Skagens Museum
Brøndumsvej 4
DK-9990 Skagen
(+45) 9844 6444
www.skagensmuseum.dk
museum@skagensmuseum.dk
Aarhus Museum of Art
Vennelystparken
DK-8000 Århus C
(+45) 8613 5255
www.aarhuskunstmuseum.dk
mks@aarhuskunstmuseum.dk
North Jutland Museum of Fine Arts
Kong Christians Allé 50
DK-9000 Aalborg
(+45) 9813 8088
www.nordjyllandskunstmuseum.dk
nord-kunst@aalborg.dk
Thorvaldsens Museum
Bertel Thorvaldsens Plads 2
DK-1213 Copenhagen K
(+45) 3332 1532
www.thorvaldsensmuseum.dk
thm@thorvaldsensmuseum.dk
The Ordrupgaard Collection
Vilvordevej 110
DK-2920 Charlottenlund
(+45) 3964 1183
www.ordrupgaard.dk
ordrupgaard@ordrupgaard.dk
The Hirschsprung Collection
Stockholmsgade 20
DK-2100 Copenhagen Ø
(+45) 3542 0336
www.hirschsprung.dk
dhs@hirschsprung.dk
The Picture Gallery of Nivaagaard
Gammel Strandvej 2
DK-2990 Nivå
(+45) 4914 1017
www.nivaagaard.dk
museum@nivaagaard.dk
Ministry of Culture
Nybrogade 2
DK-1015 Copenhagen K
(+45) 3392 3370
www.kum.dk
kum@kum.dk
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