Drawn from the distinguished private collection of Ambassador John L. Loeb Jr., Danish Paintings from the Golden Age to the Modern Breakthrough: Selections from the Collection of Ambassador John L. Loeb Jr. traces the developments in Danish art from the early 19th through the early 20th centuries—a period that saw the emergence of a distinctive national approach to painting in Denmark.
Composed of 37 paintings and drawings, the exhibition features the work of a range of artists, including Nicolai Abildgaard, the first history painter of note to be trained at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts; the “Danish Golden Age” artists Christen Købke, L.A. Smith, and Vilhelm Kyhn; and the modern painters Berthe Wegmann, Anna and Michael Ancher, P.S. Krøyer, and his pupils Harald Slott-Møller and the internationally-renowned Vilhelm Hammershøi.
The Loeb Danish Art Collection is considered to be the finest collection of Danish painting outside of Scandinavia. It had its genesis during Ambassador Loeb’s tenure as Ambassador to the Kingdom of Denmark in the early 1980s and has grown into an encyclopedic group.
Organized by The American-Scandinavian Foundation (ASF), Danish Paintings from the Golden Age to the Modern Breakthrough is co-curated by the distinguished scholar and curator Dr. Patricia G. Berman, Theodora L. and Stanley H. Feldberg Professor of Art and Chair of the Art Department at Wellesley College and Dr. Thor J. Mednick, Assistant Professor of Art at the University of Toledo.
Dr. Berman is a former Fellow of ASF who received support for dissertation research in Norway; Dr. Mednick is a former Fellow of ASF and the Ambassador John L. Loeb Jr. Foundation, who received support for dissertation research in Denmark.
An emerging scholar of the modern period and a specialist on Scandinavian art, Dr. Mednick contributed to the Luminous Modernism exhibition at Scandinavia House (2011-12). A leading specialist in early modern Scandinavian art, Dr. Berman is the author of numerous important scholarly publications in the field, including In Another Light: Danish Painting in the Nineteenth Century (2007). She worked closely with the late Kirk Varnedoe on the memorable exhibition Northern Light: Realism and Symbolism in Scandinavian Painting, 1880–1910, which toured the United States in 1982–83.
Read Ken Johnson’s review in The New York Times Weekend Arts section from Friday, December 6, 2013 here.
Read The New York Times’ “Weekend Miser” write-up on the exhibition from October 10, 2013 here.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully-illustrated catalogue with scholarly précis on each of the works and biographical essays on the artists represented.
The publication also includes an introduction by Dr. Berman and essays by Dr. Mednick, on Copenhagen as an international artistic center during the 19th and early 20th centuries, and by Charlotte Linvald, on the contributions of women artists to 19th-century Danish painting