Not So Great Danes

Danish Paintings from the Nineteenth Century from the Collection of Ambassador John L. Loeb Jr.

at the Busch-Reisinger Museum through April 24

For many, Danish culture reached its breath-taking zenith in the perfection of a starchy breakfast snack with a tangy fruit-flavored filling. And there's always Carlsberg. While the company's marketing division assesses Carlsberg as "probably the best lager in the World," and danishes are unquestionably the finest starchy breakfast snacks money can buy, having seen the exhibition of Danish painting at the Fogg, I don't plan to throw out my Goyas, Cezannes, and Van Goghs to make room for their Danish contemporaries. If you've never heard of any Danish painters, don't panic. The collection of Danish paintings currently on display, while interesting, serves mainly to indicate how little you've been missing over the years.

Even if it doesn't force you to overturn all you prior convictions about art and the universe, the Fogg show does illustrate the development of a small national artistic community through one of the most tumultuous epochs in the history of European painting. The assembled works provide an overview of the transition that was taking place across the Western world from traditional eighteenth century portraiture, through a school of the national landscape, to proto-Impressionsim. Kobke's Copy of Eckersberg's Portrait of Thorvaldsen (1828) boasts an intense dramatic tone, vaguely reminiscent of David or other French portraitists of the era. Kyhn's landscapes suggest the influence of Corot. To complete the simultaneous development, Kroyer's blurry seascape in Self-Potrait Painting on Skagen Beach (1907) has overtones of similar works by Monet.

The considerable charm of the show lies not in the half-baked reiteration of wider European themes and styles, but in its uniquely Danish elements. Khyn's View from the Rectory Garden in Greve with the Churchtower (1877) evokes a typically Danish village idyll. The lively interplay between light and shadow, clear sky and clouds, and buildings and vegetation lends the work an engaging dynamic element. The works of Vilhelm Hammershoi are the jewel in Loeb's crown. At first glance, his interiors appear simple a serene; close inspection reveals a sparse and tense atmosphere. Hammershoi relentlessly emphasizes doors, windowframes, skirting boards and architectural form to create a rigid geometry to his compositions, yet renders those visual lines slightly warped. This combination generates intriguingly ambiguous canvases, with an air of pregnant expectation and strain: the very arms of the subject in Interior with Woman Standing at a Table (1899) reach and clutch with sinuous tension.

The quality of the collection varies a great deal. Next to these delightful works hang the frumpy Still Life with Pineapple (1833) by Jensen, a hackneyed anecdotal painting by Marstand, and the slightly pat impressionism of the Anchers. These uninspiring works do not undermine the exhibition, because it aims precisely to illustrate the tenor of Danish art in the nineteenth century, even through its less inspirational phases. However, such an aim does not provide sufficient focus for an exhibit, even on a relatively modest scale. The collection appears electric, a higgledy-piggledy romp through an era of artistic flux and diversity. The viewer does not find Danish painting surprisingly good or bad; he gleans no insight into the Danish national character; he observes no quintessentially Danish traits--in short, he detects no common thread uniting the canvases beyond the passports of the authors.

Part of the responsibility for this failing must fall on Ambassador Loeb, who has assembled an amateur, private collection rather than definitive scholarly statement on Danish painting. But Peter Nisbet, the curator of the Busch-Reisinger, should have made a more coherent selection from Loeb's collection. With some nobel exceptions, nineteenth century Danish painting cannot sustain an exhibition on aesthetic genius alone.