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Denmark - Culture - Visual ArtsDenmark [Main menu] - [Previous paragraph] - [Next paragraph] 4.4.1 Early History National Romanticism [top]By the mid-19th century a turning point had been reached in artistic developments in Denmark. In the 1850s, the Golden Age was replaced by a period of stagnation that over the next two decades actually turned into a period of decline. In sculpture it was principally Bissen who took up the Classical legacy after Thorvaldsen and added to it certain qualities from the National Romantic tendencies of the time; his famous war memorial to the Danish soldier, Landsoldaten, (1850-1858) in Fredericia is the example par excellence of his late fusing of these two - originally separate - main tendencies in the sculptural art of the Golden Age. J.A. Jerichau, too, started out from Thorvaldsen, but Classicism's idealised treatment of form here gave way to some extent to dramatic and psychological forms of expression which conflicted with Thorvaldsen's principles. In painting, the Golden Age tradition was maintained in the bourgeois classicism of the Eckersberg school, which mingled the French inheritance from J.-L. David with impulses from German Biedermeier and a powerful admixture of Danish National Romanticism. The principal figures in this period include Constantin Hansen, Jørgen Roed, Wilhelm Marstrand, Frederik Vermehren and Julius Exner. The national traditions of the 1840s in landscape painting were in succeeding decades continued in particular by P.C. Skovgaard and Vilhelm Kyhn. For the remainder of the century, this tradition lived on with remarkable tenacity, especially in Kyhn's many younger admirers. By the 1860s, the bourgeois-national art tradition was already marked by a visibly growing lack of drive: The treatment of form was weakened by an increasingly meticulous tendency to break down the overall effect into an infinite number of details and nuances together with a corresponding predilection for subsuming the colours of the picture into a brownish overall tone known as galleritone. There were isolated attempts to break out of this decadence. Most remarkable was the so-called "Neo-Baroque" movement, the most important exponent of which was Carl Bloch. In boldly conceived, dramatic figure compositions, with roots in the Italian, Spanish and Northern European Baroque realisms of the 17th century, he sought to recreate a monumental and powerful historical painting; a typical example is Samson in the Philistine Treadmill (1863, Statens Museum for Kunst). Other approaches to an invigorating confrontation with the conservatism of the national school are seen at the time. Otto Bache went to Paris as early as the 1860s to seek new inspiration in the French naturalism of the day. This reinvigorating tendency really only took off in earnest in the following decade when a large number of young Danish painters felt the need to free themselves from Danish self-sufficiency and seek new impulses abroad. Laurits Tuxen, Theodor Philipsen, P.S. Krøyer and many others went to Paris in the 1870s, where they attended the private art school of the Realist Léon Bonnat. National conservatism suffered an ignominious defeat in 1878 on account of the severe criticisms which the international press levelled at Danish art in the World Exhibition in Paris. This really gave impetus to the young avant garde. In opposition to the Academy of Fine Arts, the stronghold of national self-sufficiency, the Artists' Free Study Schools were founded at the beginning of the 1880s, with Tuxen and Krøyer among those teaching on the basis of their contacts with contemporary French art. Realism and Naturalism [top]The 1880s were to be the decade of Realism and Naturalism. The closely related aims of the two currents mingled with each other and were not clearly distinguishable from each other in most of the young artists of the time. This applied in particular to the Skagen painters, who combined realistic figure painting and depictions of the life of the ordinary people with a naturalistic open-air study of light, colour and atmosphere. In addition to Krøyer, Anna and Michael Ancher together with Viggo Johansen were the main figures in this colony of Scandinavian artists. Among the other Danish pioneers for new trends in the art of the 1880s mention must be made here of Hans Smidth and L.A. Ring, who both went in the direction of distinct social realism, seeking their motifs among farmers and farm workers. In 1882, Kristian Zahrtmann took over the tuition in the free study schools, and his powerful colourism together with his strong sense of form was of great importance to several generations of pupils, including especially the Funen artists Johannes Larsen, Fritz Syberg and Peter Hansen as well as Poul S. Christiansen and Niels Larsen Stevns. A special position in the pioneering Naturalist art of the 1880s is occupied by the "cattle painter" Theodor Philipsen, who through personal contact with Paul Gauguin developed into the sole Danish Impressionist of his generation. The picture Autumn in the Deer Park from 1886 (Statens Museum for Kunst) is an epoch-making work in this context. Among the younger artists for whom Philipsen was of significance as an inspiration were Albert Gottschalk and several of the Funen artists. Alongside these tendencies, historical painting underwent a new period of growth. After Frederiksborg Castle had been ravaged by fire in 1859 and rebuilt between 1860 and 1875, it was fitted out to house a collection of national historical paintings, and this provided new tasks for the historical painters. It was the art-loving brewer Carl Jacobsen who financed the establishment of this generous forum for artists wishing to depict the history of their country. Sculpture did not undergo a rapid development like that seen in painting. Only a single artist, August Saabye, emerges as a memorable naturalistic pioneer in the sculpture of the period. In 1891, The Free Exhibition was established as a counterblast to the conservative annual exhibition at the Charlottenborg Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen. The decade was particularly marked by a new generation's search for style and an urge for intellectual engagement as a reaction to the sensual naturalism of the 1880s. The new driving forces in this kind of painting included Joakim and Niels Skovgaard, Vilhelm Hammershøi, Johan Rohde, Agnes and Harald Slott-Møller, J.F. Willumsen and Ejnar Nielsen. One particular feature of the new search for a style was often a historicising cult of monumental decorative painting; the main achievement of the period was Joakim Skovgaard's gigantic fresco in Viborg Cathedral, executed between 1901 and 1906 with the assistance among others of Larsen Stevns, who later undertook several tasks of a similar kind. Symbolist forms of expression were now seen, and a new stylised treatment of form and surface was introduced, related to the international Art Nouveau movement. In sculpture, the Skovgaard brothers and Willumsen made important contributions to a renewal of a related kind, and in addition Symbolism found its most original representative in Niels Hansen Jacobsen. Finn Terman Frederiksen
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