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Collections of Danish Golden-Age art are quite rare outside of Scandinavia, especially when it comes to those developed in accordance with a well-thought-out strategy established through the international cooperation of scholars. An important exception is the large group of Danish drawings, oil sketches, and artists’ correspondence found in the Fondation Custodia – Collection Frits Lugt in Paris, gathered by art historian and longtime museum director Carlos van Hasselt (1929–2009). As director, van Hasselt provided an interesting model of collecting, as his pursuit was not motivated by a particular investment strategy. His collection may, in a sense, be viewed as the material result of a network, one which he established and which brought together Danish researchers and museologists, as well as international art dealers. The aim of this article is therefore to investigate how a network may inform and help determine a particular collection practice, to trace how van Hasselt became an agent of the Danish art establishment, and to provide a critical overview of this collection, which became a satellite representation of the canon of 19th-century Danish art in Paris. Analysis of Carlos van Hasselt’s archive will provide critical reflections on the ways in which the collection was built and developed, and how it may serve as an example of the international dissemination of canons.

Collections of Danish Golden-Age art are quite rare outside of Scandinavia, especially when it comes to those developed in accordance with a well-thought-out strategy established through the international cooperation of scholars. An important exception is the large group of Danish drawings, oil sketches, and artists’ correspondence found in the Fondation Custodia – Collection Frits Lugt in Paris, gathered by art historian and longtime museum director Carlos van Hasselt (1929–2009). As director, van Hasselt provided an interesting model of collecting, as his pursuit was not motivated by a particular investment strategy. His collection may, in a sense, be viewed as the material result of a network, one which he established and which brought together Danish researchers and museologists, as well as international art dealers. The aim of this article is therefore to investigate how a network may inform and help determine a particular collection practice, to trace how van Hasselt became an agent of the Danish art establishment, and to provide a critical overview of this collection, which became a satellite representation of the canon of 19th-century Danish art in Paris. Analysis of Carlos van Hasselt’s archive will provide critical reflections on the ways in which the collection was built and developed, and how it may serve as an example of the international dissemination of canons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The subject of this work is Christen Købke, who gained fame with his paintings in Denmark's Golden Age and acquired the identity of Denmark's national artist. The Golden Age covers the period from the early 1800s to 1850s in Denmark's cultural life, and art and culture gain importance in this period. Traditionally it is linked to the Danish Golden Age, painter Eckersberg and landscape painting. Historically, the Danish Golden Age, during the Napoleonic wars, with the British bombardment of Copenhagen in 1807.In the artistic context, it begins with the innovative views of Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg in 1815. Art has developed based on concepts such as poverty and war in daily life. The artists have created irresistible images that invite the viewer to dream but are impressed by details that seem almost unreal.In this study, the prominent pictures of Christen Købke were selected and analyzed iconographically. The visual culture of the Danish Golden Age is addressed with a focus on Christen Købke's works. In order to fully define this period in European history, the place of Købke's works in the visual culture of the Danish Golden Age and its interaction with the European painting art of the 19th century were emphasized in our study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There remains a tendency to see Nordic art as either peculiarly local or else a belated response to 'mainstream' European trends. The purpose of this special issue of "Art History" is to reverse that perspective, to see art from Denmark, a nation with a long and varied imperial history. Thus, one of our aims is to explore how Danish art functioned through pan‐European and, eventually, global networks. However, this is not simply about adding Denmark to the map of world art. Instead, it serves as a case study for thinking more broadly about the discipline of art history and its conceptions of place and time: not art "in" Denmark but rather art "through" Denmark. Beyond that, it is about what it means to do art history through Denmark. First, we set out the notion of art "through" Denmark in two brief case studies: Albert Eckhout's "African Woman and Child"; and Aka Høegh's sculpture project "Stone and Man" (1993–94). Second, we explore the methodological basis of such 'connected art histories', and consider how we might think about global art history through Denmark, and Danish art history through the global. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the 2000s, postcolonial critique effectively changed the agendas of contemporary art and art history, not least in Denmark where several artists began to engage with the local history of colonialism, the question of Denmark's share in the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans and chattel slavery, and the continued effects of colonialism on contemporary societies. After outlining such activities on the Danish art scene, this essay focuses on Jeannette Ehlers and Nanna Debois Buhl, two Copenhagen‐based artists who have made the history of the Danish West Indies (now the US Virgin Islands) the topic of several video works. I propose that their perceptions of Danish colonialism and its effects on the islands are very different. Therefore, their works need to be analysed within different frameworks: in Buhl's case, a combined postcolonial and critical whiteness studies perspective; in Ehlers's case, a combined decolonial and postcolonial perspective. Furthermore, a postmigrant perspective is introduced to provide a frame for understanding how closely the critique of (Danish) colonialism ties in with pluralization processes in society at large. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Charlotte Grum is a transdisciplinary Danish artist, consciously undertaking an artistic dialogue with the theoretical foundations of posthumanism. In 2015, as part of the collective exhibition "Descendants", she made site specific performances entitled "Becoming Sheep." Five hours a day, five days in each of the five weeks of the campaign, Grum spent her time, connected with a harness to a live sheep, walking along the Danish moors, establishing a close relationship with the animal and the surroundings. Performance chosen as a form of artistic expression emphasized the processual aspect of the project, its openness to external factors, modifications. The starting point for her artistic practice has become the concept of intra-action by Karen Barad, a continuous relationality of action, constituted by interdependent entities, both human and nonhuman, animals and things. In this way, Grum "wanted to explore the discursive and material effects of the interaction of human and nonhuman animals in order to challenge the gender and anthropocentric reading of history . . . " On the basis of posthuman research, Rosi Braidotti used the term "zoe-egalitarian turn" to encourage us to establish more just relationships with animals. It was the search for an empathetic pattern of building new human / animal relationships that inspired Charlotte Grum in the "Becoming Sheep" project. In the proposed paper, the theoretical foundations of post-antropocentrism in the writings of Karen Barad, Rosi Braidotti, will be tools for analysing the artistic activity of Charlotte Grum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1889, Vilhelm Hammershøi (1864-1916) exhibited for the first time outside Scandinavia, contributing four of the 190 oil paintings that Denmark sent to the Exposition Universelle in Paris, where he was awarded a bronze medal. There has been some confusion, with five extant paintings being proposed for the four pictures that were catalogued and exhibited. These five pictures are: Portrait of a Young Woman. The Artist's Sister, Anna Hammershøi, 1885, Hirschsprung Collection, Copenhagen. This picture was not exhibited in Paris, but was entered for the Neuhaus prize in Denmark, where its lack of success caused an outcry, and was instrumental in provoking the foundation of Den Frie Udstilling in 1891. In contrast to scholarship that suggests works by Christen Købke as a likely role model, I propose an earlier Portrait of the Artist's Sister (1847) by Julius Exner. Étude: A Baker's Shop (En Bagerbutik), 1888, Vejen Kunstmuseum. Catalogue number 44 at the 1889 Exposition Universelle. Evidence is provided to confirm that the work exhibited in Paris as Étude is A Baker's Shop. Its radical nature is discussed, and proposes links to modern artists like Mondrian, Rothko and Malevich, as well as Gerhard ter Borch and Caspar David Friedrich. Vielle Femme: An Old Woman (En Gammel Kone), 1886, Hirschsprung Collection, Copenhagen. Catalogue number 45 at the 1889 Exposition Universelle. The removal of all extraneous narrative elements by Hammershøi is analysed, as are the strong links to 17th- century Dutch art, particularly Gerhard ter Borch. Jeune Fille: Young Girl Sewing. Anna Hammershøi, the Artist's Sister, 1887 Ordrupgaard, Copenhagen. Catalogue number 46 at the 1889 Exposition Universelle. Links to Dutch art, and its regular motif of depictions of women sewing. Discusses Hammershøi's viewing of significant works by Vermeer in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts and Nicolas Maes in Rotterdam. Job, 1888, Hirschsprung Collection, Copenhagen. Catalogue number 47 at the 1889 Exposition Universelle. Discusses the reasons for the non-exhibition of this picture since 1889. Dismisses direct links to other versions of Job and instead proposes a link with a statue of the Egyptian god Anubis that is now housed in the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the series of the Seven Planets, a bronze sculpture by 16th century Netherlandish sculptor Jacques Jonghelinck for the Habsburg court of Philip II from about 1566 to 1574. The precedents for this subject at the court of Queen Mary of Hungary at Binche, Netherlands are noted. The ways in which the bronze figures were made are described. Also detailed are the technical features in the bronzes sent to Spain.

The article presents a reprint of the article "All Art Ought to be Folkelig" by Henry Heerup, which appeared in the March 1941 issue of "Helhesten." The modern art and important epochs of ancient art history are highlighted. The Danish art which has blossomed with a new introspective turn to national tradition which has been absent in the interwar years is also cited.

The tragedies of World War II are often viewed as having sundered post-war European culture from the pre-war avant-gardes. Yet, as this article on Helhesten (The Hell-Horse) will demonstrate, the war years proved to be instrumental in reconfiguring German Expressionism and French Surrealism into countercultural movements of the 1950s and 1960s. An artists’ collective and journal, Helhesten (1941–1944) drew from the ranks of leading Danish modernists of the period, including Egill Jacobsen, Asger Jorn, and Carl-Henning Pedersen, while also engaging anthropologists, archeologists, and scientists to spearhead cultural resistance in Nazi-occupied Denmark. The group’s transformation of so-called ‘degenerate’ art styles developed the redemptive possibilities of gestural abstraction during the war. Helhesten’s singular model of cultural resistance adroitly engaged with both Danish social democratic and German traditions to challenge Nazi propaganda. It is this model, moreover, that would ultimately pave the way for international countercultural art movements of the post-war period such as CoBrA and the Situationist International. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The Poems of Ossian were instrumental in putting the North in Europe into a new and elevated cultural perspective. The first part of this essay examines how the general aesthetic development in the North of Europe was in many ways determined by the paradigm shift ushered in by the poems, despite latter-day denials. Two case studies are briefly presented: the first is the modern denial of Ossianic influence on Danish arts, literature, music and visual art; the second the actual reception in Iceland, the country which, for some, represented the Northern 'counter example' to Ossian, with the manuscripts of Eddas and Sagas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the years between 1912 and 1916, the Danish artist and graphic designer Gerhard Heilmann published a series of articles in the journal of the Danish Ornithological Society. From the outset, Heilmann's work aroused international interest, and in 1926 it was published in English as The origin of birds, setting the international agenda for research in bird evolution for the next 40 years. In Denmark, however, Heilmann's highly original work was generally ignored or even ridiculed by zoologists. This article demonstrates how Heilmann's artistic abilities played an important role in securing him international renown as a palaeontologist, while at the same time his lack of scientific credentials led to his complete isolation from the Danish zoological establishment. And it suggests that Heilmann's unyielding efforts to solve the riddle of bird evolution in the borderland between art and science, reflected a deeply felt emotional and spiritual need to counteract the religious dogmatism that had permeated his childhood and early youth, leaving memories and experiences that remained vividly painful throughout his life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

New, experimental educational settings such as 'art laboratories', 'digital workshops' and 'theme-based tours' are important to the processes of change towards more inclusive practices, which have been initiated in many Danish art galleries. While traditional gallery education was constructed in order to stimulate the 'disciplined eye' or the 'aesthetic eye' of the visitors, this article aims to discuss the practices of looking encouraged by contemporary and experimental educational projects. The first part of the article develops a theoretical perspective on educational settings conceived as visual events, and it discusses how 'the desiring eye' of some constructivist approaches, along with traditional practices of looking, have contributed to the formation of the modern, autonomous individual. The second part of the article analyses two cases from Danish art galleries and, inspired by Mieke Bal, proposes the 'friendly eye' as a possible dialogical and collective practice of looking that can be stimulated in educational settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During and after what became known as 'the cartoon crisis' in the early months of 2006, many observers noted how the crisis should be understood as an expression of a growing Islamophobic tendency in Danish society. While such an interpretation undoubtedly is correct it fails to explain how both this Islamophobic tendency and the crisis must be seen as contemporary expressions of a long-lasting estrangement in Danish society between forces respectively sympathetic and adverse to modernity. In this article it is argued that Muslims in the Danish context today have become signifiers of current modernity, in the shape of globalization. This perspective provides a clearer understanding of the dynamics of the crisis in the Danish context as it explains why publishing the cartoons made sense to many groups in Denmark who came out both for and against this act. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The American press began to take notice of the Danish cartoons after they began to circulate outside of Europe. The press primarily framed the events as a single problem of global interaction: an issue of 'freedom of speech' opposed to 'religious sensitivity.' Much of the coverage permitted, within limits, a plurality of voices. Drawing on a case study of stories about the 'cartoon controversy' in the Boston Globe, I argue that U.S. journalism is organized by a logic of objectivity that seeks to produce a 'perspectiveless perspective on all perspectives' (Bourdieu, On television. New York: The New Press, 1998), showing voices on 'both sides,' simultaneously masked and contributed to the press's reifying a series of events into a single global 'event,' one that reflected a clash of Western and Islamic values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Muslim liberals, moderates, and radical "jihadists," together with the Indonesian government, condemned Danish caricatures of Prophet Muhammad as insulting and hateful. However, the form of protest of these diverse segments of Indonesian Muslims was shaped by their ideological frameworks and political agendas. The "mainstream" of Indonesia's increasingly radical "moderate" Muslim community, as represented by Nahdlatul Ulama, Muhammadiyah, and the Justice and Prosperity Party (PKS), squarely condemned the images within their particular perspectives, while distancing themselves from the "anarchist" radical demonstrators. The Liberal Islam Network (JIL), dedicated to fighting against "fundamentalists," pointed out the role of detrimental fundamentalisms around the world. Several small radical groups, MMI, FPI and HTI actively staged street demonstrations fitting this case into their ideological framework of jihad, defending Islam, and/or striving for an Islamic state. These varied responses are better understood as integral to ongoing processes of radicalization, liberalization, and cultural and politico-jural Islamization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article attempts to shed light on the issue of a possible link between the loss of ‘rich’ subject-verb agreement and the loss of verb raising in embedded clauses in earlier stages of the Mainland Scandinavian languages. Different versions of this so-called ‘Rich Agreement Hypothesis’ are compared in light of new diachronic data from the history of Danish. Examples of word order variation with and without verb raising over sentential adverbials were collected from a corpus of twelve sets of texts written in the Early Modern Danish period (ca. 1500–1700). Empirical results indicate that distinctions in person agreement in the verbal inflectional paradigm disappeared nearly 250 years before a significant decline in the frequency of verb raising. In order to explain a possible trigger for this change, the article closely examines the impact of structurally ambiguous word order and syntactic – not morphological – clues during acquisition. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article aims to account for the extraordinary prominence in Danish homes and public institutions of tables with a 'super-elliptical' shape designed by Piet Hein, despite the scant attention paid to them in Danish design criticism. It explores the origin and meaning of the super-elliptical table with regard to its design, mediation and consumption as a Danish design classic and as a table. Particular attention is paid to the three processes by which the table has been appropriated as a representation of contemporary Danish 'good taste' which involve a complex interplay between marketing, journalism, public education, design and consumer agency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses Danish classicism in Athens. In the middle of the eighteenth century, Europeans discovered sites that proved the Greek antiquity. Antiquities of Athens are described in this article discussed by some art historians. Travelers were fascinated by the classical Greece and the oriental customs of the people.

The article offers the author's reflection on the folk schools in Denmark. The author describes and analyze the uses of the spoken word in the Danish Folk School based on his four-month visit in the nation. He also offers a brief overview about the nature of the institutions and their major contributions to Danish welfare.