Rarely Seen Danish Works From the Largest Private Collection Outside the Country, to be Exhibited in Danish Paintings of the 19th Century from the Collection of Ambassador John L. Loeb, Jr., September 30 through December 18, 2005 at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center

Visit the FLLAC website for exhibit information

POUGHKEEPSIE, NY – Numerous nineteenth-century Danish artists reflected their country’s desire for national identity, in turn shaping successive communities of domestic artists who felt deeply about expressing a clear image of this identity. For a new exhibition, thirty-four paintings of the era, many reflecting this broad-based movement, have been selected from the most extensive private collection of Danish art beyond the country’s borders — they tell a story about an artistic culture, offering insights into the dynamics of smaller European nations in an era of emerging nationalism and industrialization.

Danish Paintings of the 19th Century from the Collection of Ambassador John L. Loeb, Jr., includes Danish interiors, land and cityscapes, portraiture, still life, floral and genre paintings, first assembled during the collector’s tenure as U.S. Ambassador to the Kingdom of Denmark. Organized by the Bruce Museum of Arts and Science in Greenwich, Connecticut, the exhibition will be shown by the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, from September 30 through December 18, 2005.

Ambassador Loeb has long had an interest in the arts, serving on the International Committee of the Museum of Modern Art since 1962. He serves as Chairman of both the Winston Churchill Foundation of the United States and the John L. Loeb, Jr. Foundation. He has received honors from both Queen Elizabeth II of England and Queen Margrethe II of Denmark. A Westchester County resident, Mr. Loeb is currently Chairman of John L. Loeb, Jr. Associates, Inc., investment counselors.

The most prominent of the artists featured in the exhibition studied at the Royal Academy of Art in Copenhagen, 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 19th 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 who, in 1772, was awarded a 5-year fellowship to study in Rome. There he joined an international group of artists, including fellow countryman Jens Juel. 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 Jens 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 hyper-attentive tactility, he accords his sitter a sense of psychological presence.

During the 19th 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, who asserted a national vision in his insistence on painting rural views of Denmark. As in his painting The Parsonage at Greve 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 Krøyer, who became one of the most internationally admired Danish artists of this generation. Krøyer's Self-Portrait, Sitting by the Easel at Skagen Beach shows the artist at the height of his career.

The city many of the artists left each summer, Copenhagen, had, like many other European capitals, grown exponentially. From a population of around 100,000 in 1801, Copenhagen swelled to nearly 375,000 in 1890, representing nearly twenty 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 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 Hammershøi, 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 artist's home was located in an old Baroque section of Copenhagen whose architecture hearkens back to Denmark's alliance with Holland in the 17th century. In his rigorous ordering of this space and in his finely nuanced observation of filtered light, Hammershøi expressed his affinity for the art of the Dutch master Johannes Vermeer.

Hammershøi's Landscape from Virum near Frederiksdal near Frederiksdal, with its emphasis on austere pictorial geometry and tranquil tonal effects, exemplifies Hammershøi's highly personal mature work. Yet, in its meticulous depiction of light effects and topography, and even in its unconventional composition, Landscape from Virum also embodies the objectives and tensions of much 19th-century painting in Denmark. It is at once a near-ethnographic depiction of the local stuccoed, hip-roofed buildings, and an exercise in advanced, continental art - the assertion of an elite artist's subjective vision over the physical facts of nature. These tensions - between the indigenous and the international, nature and imagination, history and the present - shaped the development of Danish painting between 1800 and the early 20th century.

About the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center

The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, with collections of more than 15,000 works, charts the history of art from antiquity to the present. The 34,000 square foot Art Center, designed by Cesar Pelli and opened in 1993, features approximately 350 works at any given time in its Permanent Collection Galleries. Notable holdings include the Warburg Collection of Old Master prints, an important group of Hudson River School paintings, and a wide range of works by major European and American painters of the twentieth century. The Art Center is the successor to the Vassar College Art Gallery, which was begun in 1864, making Vassar the first college founded with a permanent art collection and gallery.

Admission to the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center is free. The Art Center is open to the public Tuesday-Saturday, 10:00 a.m.-5:00 p.m., and Sunday. 1:00-5:00 p.m. Located at the entrance to the historic Vassar College campus, the Art Center can be reached within minutes from other Mid-Hudson cultural attractions, such as Dia:Beacon, the Franklin Roosevelt and Eleanor Roosevelt national historic sites and homes, and the Vanderbilt mansion. The Art Center is wheelchair accessible. For more information, the public may call 845.437.5632 or visit the FLLAC web site.

Individuals with disabilities requiring accommodations or information on accessibility should contact Campus Activities Office at (845) 437-5370. Without sufficient notice, appropriate space and/or assistance may not be available.

Vassar College is a highly selective, coeducational, independent, residential liberal arts college founded in 1861.

This article was posted on Saturday, July 23rd, 2005.