Denmark at the Getty
Christen Købke, Portrait of Professor Christian Sibbern , 1833. SMK—The National Gallery of Denmark, Copenhagen "Danish Art" would be a tough Jeopardy! category. Most Americans' knowledge begins and ends with The Little Mermaid, Edvard Eriksen's 1913 bronze sculpture in Copenhagen harbor, sharing a name with a Disney remake of a Hans Christian Anderson fairy tale. Eriksen's place in art history is slight, but an earlier school of Danish art gets a well-deserved survey in the Getty's new exhibition, "Beyond the Light: Identity and Place in 19th-Century Danish Art." Organized with the Metropolitan Museum and the National Gallery of Denmark, it brings together drawings, sketchbooks, oil sketches, and paintings from the first half of the 19th century, Denmark's "Golden Age." The period was scarcely known to Americans prior to a 1993 exhibition at LACMA and the Met. That led to new scholarship and a spate of U.S. museum acquisitions, e
