Tuesday 3 September 2013 at 15:40
CURATOR’S CHOICE #3: HENRIK HOLM FROM THE NATIONAL GALLERY OF DENMARK Henrik Holm, curator at the National Gallery of Denmark, looks at the making of the Danish painting canon and its relation to the construction of a national identity. The selection of Danish artworks that the Statens Museum for Kunst, the National Gallery of Denmark, has released for free download in high resolution (under a CCBY-license) offers a good case for taking a critical look at how national identity is constructed. One of the images in this collection is the painting often claimed by Danish art historians to represent the birth of a truly Danish kind of art – A View through Three of the Northwestern Arches of the Third Storey of the Colosseum in Rome. It was created by Christopher Wilhelm Eckersberg, the artist known as “The Father of Danish Painting”, inspiring as he did the so-called Golden Age of Danish painting. At the heart of Eckersberg’s work, and this Golden Age he inspired, was the practise of making sketches out in the open, en plein air, a practice made popular by the Parisian school of painter and revolutionary Jacques-Louis David, of which Eckersberg was a pupil, and later […]
Source: http://publicdomainreview.org/2013/09/03/visual-nation-making-and-forgetting/