news release The Metropolitan Museum of Art Fot Release: Contact: January 19, 1994 Harold Holzer Deborah L. Roldah EXHIBITION OF GOLDEN AGE OF DANISH PAINTING OPENS AT METROPOLITAN MUSEUM Exhibition dates: February 13 - April 24, 1994 Exhibition location: European Paintings Galleries, second floor Press preview: Thursday, February 10, 10:00 a.m.-noon The first exhibition in the United States devoted to Denmark's "Golden Age" - a period of great artistic productivity that spanned the years 1780 to 1850 — opens at The Metropolitan Museum of Art on February 13, 1994. The Golden Age of Danish Painting features more than 100 paintings, most of them never before seen in this country. A total of 17 artists are represented with an emphasis placed on the works of Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg and his famous pupil, Christen Kobke. The exhibition includes landscapes, marine views, cityscapes, portraits, and genre scenes by such artists as Jens Juel, Constantine Hansen, Martinus Rorbye, Johan Thomas Lundbye, and K0bke. This exhibition was organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and The Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was made possible in part through grants generously provided by the Danish Ministry of Culture, the National Endowment for the Arts, Danfoss Inc., The Augustinus Foundation, Fris Vodka Skandia, The American-Scandinavian Foundation, New York, The Scandinavian American Arts Foundation of Los Angeles, and Maersk, Inc. An indemnity has been granted by the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities. Philippe de Montebello, Director of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, says of the exhibition: "More than eighty percent of the paintings in this exhibition travel here from the rich cultural patrimony of Copenhagen's museums, allowing us a glimpse of a particularly prolific period of art history seldom encountered outside of Denmark itself. The understated beauty of these paintings, little known in America, is revealed to new viewers who will appreciate —just as Danish scholars did at the turn of the 19th century — the verdant naturalism and wonderful 'northern light' that these works embody." (more) Communications Department 1000 Fifth Avenue. New York. NY 10028-0198 212-570-3951 Fny 212-472-2764. GOLDEN AGE OF DANISH PAINTTNGS AT MMA PAGE 2 In the late 18th to early 19th century, Denmark experienced a period of cultural flowering. In 1754, Frederik V founded the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen to assist in the development of Denmark's own artists. Though staffed mainly by artists from abroad when it first opened, by 1780 nearly all of the Academy professors were Danes. By 1820 the school was acknowledged as one of the major artistic centers of Europe. It served not only as a center of education but of interchange, as it was also a place at which to meet artists from abroad. German painters in particular frequented the Academy, and the artists Caspar David Friedrich, Philipp Otto Runge and Georg Friedrich Kersting all made visits. The Academy's annual exhibition of paintings at Charlottenborg Palace also exerted a substantial influence on its young artists, allowing them to see not only the contemporaneous works of fellow Danes but paintings from Norway and Germany, among other countries. Through its auspices, Danish painting evolved from the idealistic mythological and historical works of the mid-18th century to more personal, luminous cabinet pictures. The late paintings of Jens Juel (1745-1802) and Nicolai Abraham Abildgaard (1743-1809) signal this change. Works such as Juel's A Running Boy (1802, Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen) exhibit a realism and an appreciation of nature that heralded the new style. The ensuing Golden Age of Danish painting, however, can be credited to the art and influence of one man, Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg (1783-1853), who assumed a professorship at the Academy in 1818. Eckersberg joined the Academy as a student in 1803 and studied under Abildgaard. After winning a medal in 1809, Eckersberg was one of the very few Danish artists to travel to Paris. There he worked with the great Neoclassical painter Jacques-Louis David for a year and then traveled on to Rome, where he stayed from 1813 to 1816. Eckersberg's years in Rome were to be extremely formative and influential. His Italian paintings View of the Garden of the Villa Borghese in Rome (ca. 1814, Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen) and View through Three of the Northwestern Arches of the Third Story of the Colosseum (1815 or 1816, Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen) were a continual source of inspiration. They also illustrate his first attempts and successes at rendering light in a more natural manner. The exhibition features a wide-range of Eckersberg's works, from the early paintings executed in Paris and Italy to the marine paintings that became his preferred genre in the 1820s and 1830s. Among the portrait paintings seen are his Portrait ofBertel Thorvaldsen (1814, Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen), the renowned sculptor, and Mendel Levin (more) GOLDEN AGE OF DANISH PAINTINGS AT MMA PAGE 3 Natanson's Elder Daughters, Bella andHanna (1820, Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen). The former was painted in Rome, where Thorvaldsen was working, and was sent by Eckersberg to Copenhagen where it met with immediate success. Also included are the beautifully composed paintings of the nude, among them Woman Standing in Front of a Mirror (1837?, Den Hirschsprungske Samling, Copenhagen). As a professor, Eckersberg's revolutionary classes in plein-air painting inspired Denmark's artists to use nature as their subject. A renewed spirit of nationalism — marked by the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1814, Denmark's subsequent economic depression, and the tensions created when two of the kingdom's northern duchies asserted their allegiances to Germany — aided Eckersberg in these new representations. The influence he exerted over artists who studied painting with him was perhaps his greatest contribution to the Golden Age. Among Eckersberg's students could be counted Wilhelm Bendz, Constantin Hansen, Christen Kobke, Wilhelm Marstrand, Jen-gen Roed, and Martinus Rorbye — a new generation of painters who manifested their talents in more romantic and personal representations of both urban and rural landscape, genre, and the figure. Another influential figure was the landscapist Johan Christian Dahl (1788-1857). The impact of his studies with Jens Juel and his friendship with Caspar David Friedrich are evidenced in the romantic drama of such landscapes as The Bridge over the River Tryggevalde (ca. 1815, Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen). Dahl's paintings were also a source of inspiration for the landscapes of Johann Thomas Lundbye (1818-1848), Dankvart Dreyer (1816- 1852), and Peter Christian Skovgaard (1817-1875). Christian Albrecht Jensen (1792-1870) eclipsed Eckersberg as Denmark's leading portrait painter by about 1826, and was highly sought after by the emerging upper middle class. Among his paintings is his well-known Portrait of Hans Christian Andersen (1836, H. C. Andersen Museet, Odense). Also a beneficiary of Denmark's growing prosperity was Wilhelm Bendz (1804-1852), who specialized in genre paintings. Artists at work in their studios became a favorite theme for Bendz as did the depiction of family groups and friends, as evidenced in A Young Artist (Ditlev Blunck) Examining a Sketch in a Mirror (1826, Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen), unusual for the preponderance of symbols which allude to the function of art, and Interior at Amaliegade with the Artist's Brothers (ca. 1830, Der Hirschsprungske Samling, Copenhagen), a peaceful composition that belies a scene of melancholy reflection. The work of Constantine Hansen (1804-1880), like that of his teacher Eckersberg, (more) GOLDEN AGE OF DANISH PAINTINGS AT MMA PAGE 4 includes a number of Italian vistas painted during his eight years in Rome, among them The Temple of Athena in Paestum (1838, Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen). Other works such as Kronborg Castle (1834, Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen), which reveal his life­ long interest in architecture, and Portrait of a Little Girl, Elise Kabke, with a Cup in Front of Her (1850, Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen), an example of the somber portraits that he executed in his later years. Also of interest in the exhibition are oil studies by Hansen and Kerbke of the same male model painted in a life class at the Academy under the guidance of their teacher Eckersberg. Most famous of Eckersberg's students was Christen Kobke (1810-1848). Regarded as the most important painter of the Golden Age, Kebke created highly original works that combine sophisticated color effects with an unsurpassed attention to detail, brushwork, and composition. Among the 23 paintings by Kobke seen in the exhibition are early works such as The View of the Plaster Cast Collection at Charlottenborg Palace (1830, Den Hirschsprungske Samling, Copenhagen) and View from a Grain Loft in the Citadel (1831, Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen), both of which reveal his interest in carefully harmonized colors and the play of light, and his early masterwork Portrait of Frederik Sodring (1832, Den Hirschsprungske Samling, Copenhagen), which epitomizes the frank naturalism found in Danish painting of the 1830s. At that time, Kobke and Sodring, a landscape painter, shared a studio and the painting reflects their camaraderie. The exhibition also features two of the romantic urban views that Sedring painted during these years. Also on view are a number of the suburban landscapes that Kefoke executed in the 1830s including the study and final version of One of the Small Towers on Frederiksborg Castle (ca. 1833, The David Collection, Copenhagen and ca. 1834-35, Det Danske Kunstindustrimuseum, Copenhagen), and Frederiksborg Castle in the Evening Light (1835, Den Hirschsprungske Samling, Copenhagen). In A View of One of the Lakes in Copenhagen (1838, Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen), Kobke's manipulation of color and light reach a peak and exemplify the soft illumination of "northern light" for which Kabke was so well known.