Beyond the Light: Identity and Place in Nineteenth-Century Danish Art
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, through April 16
If the dry-sounding title makes this show seem skippable, reconsider, said Sebastian Smee in The Washington Post. “A lot of terrific art emerges from national trauma,” and this exhibition, which moves to the Getty Center in Los Angeles next month, demonstrates how drawn-out the renaissance can be under certain circumstances. The 1803–15 Napoleonic Wars were catastrophic for Denmark. The once-mighty country endured the bombardment of Copenhagen by Britain and the loss of most of its merchant and naval fleet. It then made an alliance with France, triggering an economic collapse that forced it to cede Norway to Sweden. “Often, when a nation loses its self-esteem, it looks to its artists to alleviate the shame,” and Danish artists responded in the first half of the century with much work that’s “quietly poetic” but too often feels “spiritually vacant.” Only after the passing of this so-called golden age did some Danish artists strike off in rewarding directions.
Most of the 90 drawings and paintings in this show are modest and reserved—
“subdued with a vengeance,” said Lance Esplund in The Wall Street Journal. Many Danish artists of the early 19th century, encouraged by their mentor Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg, rushed outdoors to capture Denmark’s landscape and people through direct observation and fealty to realism. Though the lesser works gathered for this show “err toward the persnickety and polite,” the best “achieve a transcendent idealism” and are “as welcome and soothing as a cool breeze.” In other countries, artists have responded to war and devastation by lashing out, but the Danes “became more introverted and contemplative.” Perhaps that explains why the first image visitors see is an excellent 1826 Wilhelm Bendz painting that shows his artist friend Ditlev Blunck looking in a mirror as he works in a cramped studio on a small painting of his own.
All the work here is worth seeing, said Holland Cotter in The New York Times. “From the moment you enter the galleries, you’re in for an experience of slow-down, move-close looking and thinking,” and Eckersberg’s own work deserves some of the credit. The instigator of the Danish golden age believed that by applying precisely calculated linear perspective, he could achieve a marriage of science and art. A “spectacular” Copenhagen panorama here suggests he was right. Many younger artists struggled to fully embrace his faith in the power of pure line, and it wouldn’t be until Vilhelm Hammershoi arrived in the 1880s that Denmark produced an artist who struck a balance between programmatic optimism and existential gloom. But many of Eckersberg’s followers were wonderful draftsmen. Christen Kobke, for one, was a marvel: “What a hand! And what a pair of alert, tender eyes.”