Academic literature on the topic 'Painters – Denmark'

The history of collecting in Denmark and Norway in the 19th century is intimately connected with the history of the painters and sculptors active during that period. Only in Copenhagen were the Royal and private collections accessible to the artists, for whom copying paintings by Old Masters formed an important part of their curriculum. Major collectors of the Age were Prince Christian Frederik (later King Christian VIII of Denmark), who mainly acquired paintings and sculptures by contemporary artists, and the portrait painter Christian Albrecht Jensen, whose preference was to buy and sell the works of Old Masters. In Copenhagen, the collections of the Counts Moltke, which mainly consisted of works by Dutch painters, was open to the public, while the Royal Collection (today a part of Statens Museum for Kunst) could only be visited from 1827 onwards. None of the three collections dealt with in the present article have survived until today, while the works of art and the antiques belonging to the sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen are at present housed in the museum bearing his name.

During the first part of the nineteenth century, geologists developed a history of the earth so different from that accepted in previous centuries that it encouraged a rethinking of the relationship between man and nature. In this article I will argue that painters followed these changes closely and that some of them let the narratives and images of geology inform the way they depicted nature. In arguing my point, I will focus on images and descriptions of the chalk cliffs on the Danish island of Møn by both geologists and painters. I will follow the scientific advances in geology by referring to the texts and images of Søren Abildgaard, Henrich Steffens, Johan Georg Forchhammer, and Christopher Puggaard, and discuss how their changing theories correspond with paintings of the cliffs by four artists: Christopher Wilhelm Eckersberg, Frederik Sødring, Louis Gurlitt, and Peter Christian Skovgaard.

The Nordic achievements in the visual arts in the age of romanticism were first and foremost accomplished by Danish artists. The great initiator was C. W. Eckersberg, who observed reality with great scrutiny and demanded of himself a faithful rendering of all the details. However, at the same time, he stuck to the classical principles of composition and omitted all accidental and ugly aspects of the motif that did not fit into his concept of an ideal picture. The principles he laid down in his art in around 1815 formed the basis of Danish (and Norwegian) painting until 1850. He introduced open-air painting as part of the tuition at the Royal Academy of Copenhagen and was, in this respect, a pioneer in a European context. During the 1820s and 30s almost all the young Danish painters were pupils of Eckersberg, and he also influenced the Norwegian J. C. Dahl. The subjects of the Danish paintings are very down-to-earth – they are first and foremost taken from everyday life. In the first decades of nineteenth century, Copenhagen had the status as the most important art centre in Northern Europe, and the art academy attracted many German artists. However, around 1840, a growing nationalism separated the Danish and German artists, and many Danish landscape painters devoted their art to the praise of Denmark. The nationalist artists, however, still stuck to the reality they had actually seen.

In the last decade of the 18th century, the Danish state experienced a period of prosperity, which was characterized by a German-Danish cultural transfer in all intellectual fields. The first clouds were cast by the rise of an artistic self-confidence. Asmus Jacob Carstens from Schleswig and Ernst Meyer from Altona, who felt disadvantaged in the awarding of medals and protested vehemently, were expelled from the art academy in Copenhagen in 1781 and 1821. Nevertheless, the Copenhagen Art Academy had a strong attraction for numerous artists from northern Germany. In this respect, Caspar David Friedrich, Philipp Otto Runge and Georg Friedrich Kersting are primarily worthy of mention. The Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen was a strong link between the Germans and Scandinavians living in Rome throughout his life. The first cracks in the good bilateral relationship came with the strengthening of the national liberal movements. In 1842, the influential teacher at the Copenhagen Art Academy, N.L. Høyen, drew up a program aimed at repressing influences from abroad, especially from Germany. Not all artists heeded Høyens call for a return to national themes of history, folk life, and nature, so that two groups confronted each other in Denmark: the nationalists and the Europeans. With the German-Danish War of 1848/51 there was a rift, and with the war of 1864 the final break. Only after twenty years did the academies of Copenhagen and Berlin resume contact. From 1883 onwards, there were reciprocal visits, which led to Danish artists once again taking part in representative exhibitions in Berlin or Munich. Conversely, however, German artists were denied participation in exhibitions in Copenhagen, an exception being the International Art Exhibition on the inauguration of the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen in 1897. A spirit freed from all academic constraints also emanated from the artist colonies in Europe. In particular, the works of the Skagen painters were enthusiastically celebrated at exhibitions in Munich and Berlin, which led to some German painters traveling to the Danish artists' colony, where they were received without prejudice. However, at no time was there a balance in the official acceptance and appreciation of the art of the respective neighbouring country. While painters such as Michael Ancher and Peder Severin Krøyer sold works to renowned collectors and museums in Germany, no Danish Museum acquired the work of a German artist during the period under study. The Berlin painter Walter Leistikow, who was married to a Danish woman, worked hard to stimulate a German-Danish art transfer and succeeded in getting the leading Danish gallery owner Valdemar Kleis to offer German painters the opportunity to exhibit in Copenhagen for the first time in 1894, most of whom belonged to the group Die XI, a precursor of the Berlin Secession. The appreciation of the Skagen painters was replaced at the turn of the century by admiration works by F.J. Willumsen and Vilhelm Hammershøj. Hammershøj filled a room of his own at the Great Berlin Art Exhibition in 1900 with 14 works, and the Schulte Gallery in Berli While German admiration for Danish art peaked between 1890 and 1900, people in Denmark continued to look past the German art scene. This was also experienced by the artists' group Die Brücke, which sought foreign members soon after its founding. When Kleis presented works by the Brücke artists in Copenhagen in 1908, they too received only negative reviews. In March 1910, the time seemed ripe for a change of mood. The Berlin gallery owner Herwarth Walden strove to make his Sturm-Galerie a rallying point for the European modernist art movements. In July 1912, he rented the exhibition building of the secessionist group Den Frie in Copenhagen and held an exhibition of Italian Futurists there. When Walden was celebrated by the Danish press as a cosmopolitan who had brought modernism to Copenhagen, he showed works by the French Henri le Fauconier and Raoul Dufy, as well as the painters Marianne von Werefkin and Gabriele Münter, but the tenor of the press was again dominated by anti-German resentment. After the outbreak of World War I, Walden allowed himself to be abused by the German propaganda department of the German Secret and Intelligence Service, which strove to correct the image of Germans abroad as cultural barbarians. Walden showed works by Kandinsky, Klee, Kokoschka, Marc, and again Gabriele Münter at the Copenhagen artists’ cabaret Edderkoppen in the fall of 1917. He also planned an exhibition of Danish avant-garde in his Sturm Gallery in Berlin, but the artists had become suspicious in the face of German propaganda, which was celebrating a last military success. The exhibition was canceled. This did not prevent Walden from organizing an exhibition at Kleis’ art shop in Copenhagen shortly before the end of the war, under the guise of internationalism. This was Walden's largest and most ambitious project in Scandinavia. Of the 133 works exhibited, almost half came from Germany. The attempt to convince the Danes of the excellence of German art failed miserably, because the basic conviction was still: Everything that comes from Germany is bad. The opening took place on November 28 and ended on December 16, 1918, by which time the war was already over.

Abstract On 31 May 199 5 the European Court of Justice delivered its judgment in a case between the Danish Union of Semi-Skilled Workers (Special-arbejderforbundet i Danmark) and the Confederation of Danish Industry (Dansk lndustri) acting for Denmark’s leading porcelain manufacturer, the Royal Copenhagen company .1 About 70 per cent of the 1,150 workers employed in the production process were paid on a piecework basis. However, the rates for one group of employees, the ‘blue-pattern painters’, entrusted with the decoration of the porcelain and consisting almost entirely of women (155 out of 156), were substantially lower than, in particular, those of their fellow-workers employed in the exclusively male group of automaticmachine operators, i.e. ‘throwers’. In the union’s opinion this was a blatant infringement of the equal pay principle, an assumption rejected by Royal Copenhagen mainly, in view of the fact that the rates had been fixed by collective agreement.