Part II: how to succeed in Copenhagen - modern art movement in Denmark - Report from Denmark

Art in America, Dec, 1996 by Richard Vine

Long the financial beneficiaries--and critical victims--of a protectionist cultural policy, Danish artists have now begun a bid for international recognition.

Until recently, contemporary art production in Denmark was a parochial--though, by U.S. standards, economically comfortable affair. After World War II, few commercial galleries had international reach. Major museums focused almost exclusively on the past: the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek on ancient Mediterranean art and 19th-century figurative sculpture from Denmark and France, the Statens Museum for Kunst on an encyclopedic collection of mostly premodern work, the Ordrupgaard on Impressionism and the Danish Golden Age, the Thorvaldsen Museum on the works of the Neo-Classical sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen (1768-1844). Only in 1957, with Knud W. Jensen's founding of the Louisiana Museum in Humlebaek [see A.i.A., Oct. '96], did the country acquire a significant institutional venue for modern art and design. Of course, every modern movement, from Cubism to Op art, had its Danish manifestation, but none with the possible exception of the neoexpressionist Cobra group-achieved independent historical status. Most artists tended either to emigrate to livelier environments (principally in France, Germany, Italy or the United States) or else to follow a well-worn path to local respectability.

Under a paradigm established in 1754 when King Frederick V decided to sponsor domestically trained "national" artists to replace the country's previous foreign-born monopoly, professional success still begins with selection as one of the 30-or-so students admitted each year for government-subsidized study at the Royal Academy of Art. The school, housed in the old Charlottenborg palace in the center of Copenhagen, gives no grades, relying instead on occasional professorial critiques. (Charlottenborg also hosts important traveling shows, such as the Magdalena Abakanowicz retrospective on view there last spring.) Rather than charging tuition, the academy supplies its students with a small monthly stipend and with financial support for a 6- to 12-month residency abroad. Young artists in this milieu soon learn the importance of the personal bonds--with faculty, government officials and fellow artists--that will largely determine their professional fate in this country of only 5.25 million citizens. (At present, under such influential younger teachers as Claus Carstensen, a former adherent of the 1980s "Wild Painters" movement, frequent all-night carousel through a prescribed circuit of music bars seems to be a de rigueur sign of career seriousness.)

Graduation brings project-specific access to state-funded facilities such as Copenhagen's Statens Vaerksteder (State Workshops), a dockside warehouse converted to large, clean, fully equipped studios for photography, printmaking, weaving, metalcraft, architecture and woodworking. The national system of health care and social services, complemented by myriad grants, prizes, materials subsidies, housing discounts, teaching positions and rotating bureaucratic posts, culminating for some in no-strings-attached lifetime incomes, make it possible for artists to live and work without basic-living concerns, free from market dictates or self-censorship (since all grants are content-neutral). For many, sales are generated primarily through artist associations--groups of like-minded practitioners who rent exhibition space once or twice a year and sell directly to the public.

But aggressive younger artists have come to disdain these old-style artist associations, which they consider deadeningly respectful of seniority and overly accommodating to established tastes. They prefer to work instead with renegade groups attuned to au courant critical discourse and with a handful of savvy dealers plugged into the global art market.

This more independent generation emerged about 10 years ago (at the peak of the art-star '80s), spurred in part by international programming in the country's 45 art museums. The impressive number of provincial institutions, representing the world's highest per capita ratio, is by and large a result of local initiatives. Since the turn of the century, in virtually every town of 30,000 or more inhabitants, prominent citizens have banded together to form a kunstforening (art club). Over fume, the club typically accumulates a small collection through member gifts. Then, if the donated works are of sufficient quality, and if the institution agrees to meet national standards for collecting, research, education and curating, the state confers museum status and grants yearly financial support.

The ministry of culture currently dispenses about $507 million per year, or 1 percent of the national budget. Of that figure, it spends about 8 percent, or $41 million, on the visual arts. Lately, the government has made vigorous efforts to bring visual arts funding up to date, as seen in its enormous expenditures for Copenhagen 96 (the city's tenure as "culture capital of Europe for 1996" under the aegis of the European Union); its increased support for the modern division of the Statens Museum; its recent establishment of the Danish Foundation for Contemporary Art; its partnership in the commercial DCA (Danish Contemporary Art) Gallery in New York; and its embrace of the locally initiated, architecturally daring Arken Museum for Moderne Kunst in Ishoj, 10 miles south of Copenhagen.