ECKERSBERG

ECKERSBERG. FASCINATION WITH REALITY. The Golden Age of Danish Painting |
Feb 11th - May 16th 2016 | special exhibition
catalogue for special exhibition  | 304 pages | c. 300 illustrations | hardcover | Imhof Verlag | german edition

With an encompassing retrospective on Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg (1783–1853), presented for the first time outside of Denmark in Europe, the Hamburger Kunsthalle is paying tribute to the most prominent Danish painter of the first half of the 19th century.
On 9 May 1814 Eckersberg had bought a portable paintbox and a folding chair in order to paint(11)in the Eternal City and in the Roman Campagna. He thus established the Danish tradition of outdoor painting in Rome. Innovations regarding the direct study of nature alongside geometry and perspective made up the principal components of his teachings at the Copenhagen Academy, where he was engaged as a professor for almost 40 years. Through his progressive approach of combining tradition with innovation, and classism with realism, Eckersberg not only became the most distinguished Danish painter of the first half of the 19th century, but also one of the defining figures for the European development of art during this period. 
Eckerberg’s pictorial worlds blend the apparently coincidental and calculated construction, sobriety and magic. Appearing as moments solidified in an image or instants frozen in time, his works are capable of fascinating observers of today, while challenging their viewing habits. In their immediacy and compositional radicalism, Eckersberg’s artworks may strike us as the anticipation of the photographical view. 
Exceptional in its scope, we find the full range of genres represented in Eckerberg’s oeuvre: portraits that bear witness to the sophisticated style of French art just as to the Danish striving for objectivity; historical paintings, whose protagonists are unable to deny their origin from the nude studio, and genre scenes which, in their exaggerated momentary nature, appear somehow to have fallen out of time. Not to forget his landscapes: Whether he presents the topography of Rome as a coincidentally chosen detail, whether he documents water, the phenomena of skies and light on his marine pictures or renders homage to the Danish nature in its sheer simplicity - all of Eckersberg’s paintings reflect his consistent commitment to reality. 
The exhibition Eckersberg – Fascination with Reality comprises around 90 paintings and about 40 drawings and prints from all creative periods, including all of the artist’s major works. Awaiting the visitor are highlights of art history, such as the group painting of The Nathanson Family or A View through Three Arches of the Third Storey of the Colosseum in Rome.