At the end of 2017, I visited a traveling exhibition at the Denver Art Museum called Her Paris: women artists in the era of impressionismfeaturing works by 37 artists from various countries who lived and worked in Paris in the second half of the 19th century (little with a link with impressionism, I could add). For me, the greatest revelation of the show was not that women artists of the 19th century had done an important and under-recognized job in France, but that many of them were from Nordic countries. Some are better known today, notably the Norwegian painter Harriet Backer, the subject of a traveling retrospective recently at the Orsay Museum; Finnish artist Helene Schjerfbeck, subject of a 2019 to show to the Royal Academy in London; and the Danish artist Anna Ancher, including retrospective At the National Gallery of Denmark closed in 2021. Nordic modernist women have a deserved moment.
This moment includes the new book Female artists in Denmark 1880-1910 – Companion of a recent exhibition At the Hirschsprung collection in Copenhagen. It is an excellent introduction to a story under known to modern art, which the authors affirm convincingly seem often very different from what we could expect. “It is not because women have come late for modernity, in particular in terms of stylistic expression of art”, explains Unget Lise Mogensen Bech in his chapter essay, “Punchy Women: Art and Satire 1880-1910”, “But because the modernity for which they fought have become so obvious today that the contemporary eye can find it difficult to notice radicalism, Look, a length of hair, a dress, an internship, an intervention, for example, a look, a look, a length of hair, a dress, a boarding school, a boarding school, a boarding school, a boarding school, a boarding school, a boarding school, a boarding school, a boarding school, a boarding school, a boarding school. These subtle gestures and modes are completely explored; You will never watch a glove again in the same way.
The fantastic “portrait of the Swedish painter by Bertha Wegmann, Jeanna Bauck” (1887), is all about the artist's gaze and the place where he persists, from the lips to her lover with a significant look offered by the goalkeeper, looking at the romantic partner who paints her. Deceptant Bauck locked in black from the neck, with his gloved left hand and the naked right (I said what I said), by grabbing this just glove, the portrait is strangely more sexy than we could expect from the average age of the 19th century, no matter how modern. Female artists in Denmark 1880-1910 offers many surprising pleasures.
With the work of 23 Danish artists as well as newly unearthed paintings of private collections, Female artists in Denmark 1880-1910 is an example of a manual of how the vigorous stock market can shed light on new ways to see the history of art and understand what we are looking at. More specifically, the authors demonstrate how a pioneer generation of women was an integral part of the creation of modern art “during what is known as modern breakthrough in Scandinavian art.
For fear that the book and its subjects seem esoteric at a first glance, envisage this frightening sentence of the preface by Karina Lykke Grand and Lise Jeppesen: “In Western society today, where International Women's Day is a recurring annual event, and where women are the right of women, and to vote, to their own bodies, to those of men, Autonomy on their own bodies is self-event, to those of men, and to autonomy on their own bodies is self-event, to those of men, and to autonomous to remind that these privileges are far from being guaranteed. For my American compatriots in particular, such a feeling is too obvious.
It is also obvious that these women were a lot like us – difficult to live in art, to live as they wanted, to love who they wanted, to control their reproductive life and to have a voice in the political sphere. In many cases, they also knew each other. Anna Petersen's painting “An evening with a friend. By lamp lamp ”. (1891) represents three visual artists of the so-called “Scandinavian click” in Paris, with Bauck and Wegmann returned from each other, touching bodies, on the sofa, and Marie Krøyer seated nearby, while the Danish violinist Frida Schytte stands in front of them, playing music. Petersen herself is present through his own paintings hanging on the wall. It is a self -sufficient community of women artists. The gaze and the means are all their own.
Women artists in Denmark 1880-1910: looking for modern (2025), edited by Inge Lise Mogensen Bech and lene Bøgh Rønberg, is published by Yale University Press and is available online and via independent booksellers.
