One Fine Show: ‘Beyond the Light’ at the Getty Center

Welcome to One Fine Show, where Observer highlights a recently opened show at a museum outside of New York City—a place we know and love that already receives plenty of attention.

At this point we can probably all agree that realism is overrated. The past decade saw the reign of Instagram and the resurgence of the photograph as a predominant means of communication, leading to a great deal of time spent cropping and filtering. Now we’re past all that and back into surrealism, the theme of last year’s Venice Biennale.

But Beyond the Light: Identity and Place in 19th-Century Danish Art, which just opened at the Getty Center in Los Angeles, makes a compelling case for returning to the study of the world as it is. Featuring the work of artists such as Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg, Christen Købke, Constantin Hansen, Martinus Rørbye and Vilhelm Hammershøi, as well as lesser-known figures like Anton Melbye, Johan Thomas Lundbye, Peter Christian Skovgaard and Heinrich Gustav Ferdinand Holm, this show demonstrates the value not only of looking but also of understanding how we see.

SEE ALSO: Katherine Fleming On the Getty’s Role in the 21st Century

Because isn’t the internal landscape as important as the external? It’s hard not to think of the recent Edward Hopper show at the Whitney when you consider Rørbye’s View from the Citadel Ramparts in Copenhagen by Moonlight (1893), which shows a soldier and two sailors gazing out at the bay on an otherwise lonely evening. German Romantic painters were a strong influence here, but these aren’t northern knock-offs. The drawings especially come into their own. Thorald Læssøe’s A Sunny Street at Tivoli (1846) really captures that sun-smothered feeling of the Mediterranean at noon.

The Royal Danish Academy would finance such trips abroad, and you can tell the effort the artists put into capturing the grandiosity of the built environments they visited, whether Italy, Turkey or Greece. This proves a contrast with the Germans, who of course loved nature and all its melodrama. Another winner here is The Hall of Antiquities at Charlottenborg Palace Copenhagen (1830) by Adam August Müller, which shows a mushy custodian in a grandiose greatcoat, lost among planes of antiquity. But he is well lit.

The works in this show are traditionally classified as part of the “Golden Age” of Danish art, but let’s turn to the introduction for the catalogue produced by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where the show debuted:

The idea of a radiant ‘northern light’ was developed by critics and scholars of the late nineteenth century, who transformed the discussion into an excursus about a metaphorical “Golden Age,” elevating Danish art above its everyday context and turning it into one of enlightenment and progress. The so-called Golden Age of Danish art was actually a retrospective label coined in 1890 by the literary critic Valdemar Vedel, whose glowing appraisal of Danish achievements in the arts and sciences between 1814 and 1848 belies the adversity of the times, which were neither idyllic nor optimistic for most of its nation’s citizenry, and certainly not for enslaved peoples in the Danish West Indies. The artist Constantin Hansen, for one, mocked the concept, claiming that his “pockets [had] never seen any Golden Age,” and scientist Hans Christian Ørsted thought the idea was a “stupid conceit.”

Any gold found in this show would be hand worked and maybe even a little tarnished. The best thing about the works in the exhibition is just how grounded and humble they are. They don’t try to outshine our world; instead, they showcase the luminescence that is already there.

Beyond the Light: Identity and Place in 19th-Century Danish Art is on view at the Getty Center through August 20.