A Danish Invasion in Greenwich

GREENWICH, CONN.

:"Danish Paintings of the Nineteenth Century from the Collection of Ambassador John L. Loeb Jr" at the Bruce Museum of Arts and Science runs from March 19 through June 19 and features 34 Danish paintings from a collection acclaimed as the most extensive of its kind outside of Denmark.

Mr Loeb served as ambassador to the Kingdom of Denmark from 1981 to 1983 and began collecting Nineteenth Century Danish art during his tenure there. The exhibition includes examples of Danish interiors, land and cityscapes, portraiture, still life, floral and genre paintings. The works tell a story about an artistic culture, offering insights into the dynamics of smaller European nations in an era of emerging nationalism and industrialization.

In the period under consideration in this exhibition, Denmark's desire for national identity is reflected in the art of the Nineteenth Century, which in turn shaped successive communities of artists who felt deeply about expressing a clear image of this identity. Many of the artists included in the Loeb collection were members of groups committed to this broad-based Danish movement.

The most prominent of these artists studied at the Royal Academy of Art in Copenhagen, which was founded in 1754. Several artists trained within the academy proved to be exemplary teachers and leaders who helped initiate the great Danish traditions of the Nineteenth Century. Some also studied Roman antiquity directly, honing their skills in the most prestigious academic studios throughout Europe. These artists introduced to the Danish artistic community a revised and highly rigorous set of visual and compositional values, exhibiting a mastery of anatomy, light effects and pictorial geometry.

One such master was Nikolai Abildgaard (1743-1809) who, in 1772, was awarded a five-year fellowship to study in Rome. There he joined an international group of artists, including fellow countryman Jens Juel (1745-1802). Upon his return to Copenhagen in 1778, Abildgaard was appointed professor of the Art Academy, where he served as a temperamental and brilliant teacher and was recognized as Denmark's first important history painter. His painting "Alexander and Diogenes" is on exhibit.

The painter Juel, one of Denmark's greatest portraitists, was equally influential. He traveled to Hamburg, Dresden, Rome and Paris, following his training at the Art Academy in Copenhagen and used this cosmopolitan experience to forge a significant Danish academic manner. Upon his return from Rome, he was appointed court painter and member of the academy, which he in turn directed in the 1790s. Juel's "Seated Chinese Man," on view in this show, is characteristic of the artist's mastery of light effects and the precision of his touch. Yet despite his almost hyperattentive tactility, he accords his sitter a sense of psychological presence.

During the Nineteenth Century, Danish artists increasingly began to focus not on formal, urban views and grand narratives, but on rural themes, reinterpreting the classical tradition to ennoble local topography and cultural life. One of the most widely traveled painters in Denmark was Vilhelm Kyhn (1819-1903), who asserted a national vision in his insistence on painting rural views of Denmark. As in his painting "The Parsonage at Greve," 1877, his works meticulously record seemingly unremarkable settings, articulating the local architecture and topographic elements of rural landscapes.

As early as the 1840s, small groups of painters, some of them quite notable and influential within Denmark, began to visit the nearly inaccessible fishing village of Skagen. This northernmost town in Denmark became a magnet for members of Denmark's emerging avant-garde and by the mid-1880s was a well established artists' colony. Skagen attracted an international coterie of artists and virtually all of the members of Denmark's new group of internationally oriented open-air painters, including Peter Severin Kroyer (1859-1909), who became one of the most internationally admired Danish artists of this generation. Kroyer's "Self-Portrait, Sitting by the Easel at Skagen Beach," 1902, shows the artist at the height of his career.

The city many of the artists left each summer, Copenhagen, had, like many other European capitols, grown exponentially. From a population of around 100,000 in 1802, Copenhagen swelled to nearly 375,000 in 1890, representing nearly 20 percent of Denmark's overall inhabitants. A corresponding decline in the rural rate of growth between 1870 and 1900 suggested, as elsewhere in Europe, both the promise of modernity and a threat to the accustomed rural rhythms and practices of historical Denmark.

In its style and subject, Otto Bache's "Flag Day in Copenhagen on a Summer Day, in Vimmelskaftet," after 1892, articulates such a transformation. The painting's relatively high viewing angle, expansive entry into the street in the foreground, and telescoping perspective, recall urban views of Paris first recorded by documentary photographers and Impressionist artists during and after Paris's radical transformation.

Copenhagen's modernization and transformation is narrated in a different manner by Vilhelm Hammershoi (1864-1916), one of Denmark's most celebrated artists. Four of his works are on display in the exhibition. His "Courtyard Interior at Strandgade 30" represents the small open space at the center of the apartment that the artist shared with his wife as seen through the lens of his preservationist temperament. The painting's monochromatic palette and its articulation of the subtly warped windows and the half-timbered framing displacing the aging plaster, testify to a veneration of the past.

The Bruce Museum of Arts and Science is at 1 Museum Drive. For information, 203-869-0376.