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The Great Beyond
John Haberin New York City
Beyond the Light: Danish Romanticism
Francisco Oller in Europe
When I think of Romanticism in art, I think first of loose hair and wild gestures, of men on rearing horses and men on a raft about to die. When I think, though, of Northern Romanticism, I think of something dark, chilly, and austere, of a man standing alone at the sea and lovers contemplating the moon.
Could that describe nineteenth-century Danish art? For the Met, one would do better to look beyond the light. A survey, including loans from the National Gallery of Denmark, or SMK, sees instead a nation proud of its past and uncertain way of its future. Could it find its due place in a newly drawn Europe? The artists might themselves be asking, but do not be too sure. They might be more concerned with toning down the rhetoric and moving into the light. 
Had you forgotten that Camille Pissarro was born in the New World? Have you ever thought about what he left behind? Apparently he did. In 1858, he invited a rising star in San Juan to Paris. They had in common their outsider status (doubly so for Pissarro, a Jew from Saint Thomas), their skill, their love of sunlight, and an Old Testament beard, but did they truly become Impressionists? Francisco Oller came to France to exhibit and to learn, only to keep his eye on home.
Intimacy and sunlight
Did Denmark truly embrace Romanticism, in darkness or in light? Do not be surprised if Johan Christian Dahl painted Copenhagen's harbor by moonlight, its descending rays cutting the water and cutting under clouds. Do not be surprised, too, if Martinus Rørbye ascends to its ramparts for dark silhouettes and a very full moon. On the long walls just outside, an entire city unfolds as dark presences along the bay, with barely a glimpse of the sea. The Met has enlarged a drawing by Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg, whose panorama of sailing ships and coastlines, castles and churches, gardens and mills could stand for the entire show. But were artists, in the words of the exhibition's title, looking "Beyond the Light"?
Moonlight becomes them, but just wait till you find your bearings inside. Eckersberg's drawing appears for real on paper, on five sheets brought together as a scroll, as if a proper tale of the city could slowly unfold but never end. He works in pencil and ink, with a combination of precision and washes that set a standard for other artists as well. Yet he also works in broad daylight. The Met has transformed paper into wallpaper with a photographic negative's reversal. Nearly everything to come is careful, calm, collected, and bathed in sunlight, too.
To be sure, I began with the greatest hits of French Neoclassicism and Romanticism—from Napoleon on horseback by Jacques-Louis David to Raft of the Medusa by Théodore Géricault. And I contrasted them with Caspar David Friedrich in Germany, who has his share of loose hair and wild eyes in portraiture as well. But then they all aimed for something more down to earth after the Rococo. They introduced a crisp light and telling details that lead directly to Pre-Impressionism. Denmark has only a small place in art history. Yet it plays its part in the same story.
To be sure, too, harbor views are not the last one sees of dusk, drama, and darkness. Johan Thomas Lundbye paints the piled boulders of a Stone Age monument at sunset—and the interior of a mausoleum. A friend within might have been seeking a passage to the next world. Still, the grave passage lets in plenty of light, and his friend is basking in it. He looks at rest and at ease as well. If two words can sum up the show, they are intimacy and sunlight.
Eckersberg insists on both with two young women at a window. His brings them close to the viewer, even as they look out to the city beyond in flawless perspective. But then most portraits in the show are one-on-one encounters with mentors and friends, Eckersberg among them. These are artist and philosophers, not princes and kings, with pronounced foreheads and features that speak of intelligence and energy. The one group portrait, by Constantin Hansen, is of artists at ease together as well—along with a dog, who looks rather intelligent, too. Wilhelm Bendz paints an artist leaning into a mirror, the better to examine the drawing on which he works, but it looks more like a conspiratorial glance between two.
Sunlight, quiet, and pleasure continue in the many views of Copenhagen. Christen Købke enters the transept of a cathedral for its wide aisle and tall arches, not for rituals and monuments. The rest stick to well-lit exteriors, in all their familiarity and symmetry. They add up to a tour of Denmark's history, in palaces and fortifications, but with an active role in the budding republic. The country was reinventing itself from the ruins of Napoleonic wars. The city even got a new museum.
Reinvention as a necessity
Artists took advantage of peacetime by traveling, but with the same eye on the present and sense of home. They find a bit of drama in off-kilter views of the Danish countryside, dense in trees, and a German valley. When they come to Paris, though, they prefer rooftops, bridges, and pedestrian traffic. Even Roman ruins, always in sunlight, look like the house or palace next door. The people exploring them look as if they were out doing their shopping, and the people in Constantinople for Rørbye really are. When the artists returned home, they were ready to reinvent themselves in much the same way.
As curators, Freyda Spira with Robert L. Solley of Yale University Art Gallery, Stephanie Schrader of the Getty Center, and Thomas Lederballe of SMK see a greater grandeur and melancholy. A powerful kingdom had become "a small, somewhat marginalized country at the edge of Europe." They see the emphasis on Copenhagen's landmarks as part of a nationalist agenda. They see the travelers as seeking a place at the very center of Europe. They see in the dockyards a determination to rebuild a navy decimated by war. Reinvention was a necessity.
The show's subtitle, "Identity and Place," makes sense in art history for today, which looks to personal identity and public or private self-interest rather than pure form. But is it true to art? Decimated it was, Denmark was little more than a bit player in a continental war. (Think of how the United States in the War of 1812 nearly became a casualty of war between England and France.) Reinvention, in turn, could mean not nativism and civic pride but care for the future. Who says that a mighty ship under construction was destined for war rather than commerce?
One may never know, because the artists are too busy looking toward the light. One may never know, too, because the textbooks are silent. The show includes near unknowns along with such leading figures as Eckersberg and Købke, but they, too, may fall by the wayside of art history. You may not recognize a single name, but enjoy. The show itself hangs by subject matter, without regard for chronology, and you can enter at either end—starting with portraits or the harbor. It occupies the galleries for works on paper, but the paintings look terrific, too.
Above all, they look sublime. As with the Hudson River School in the United States, the Romantic sublime is invested in awe—up to a point. For Denmark, it is invested just as much in lowering the volume and bringing in the light. When it comes to Italy, it coincides with Camille Corot trading awe for the crisp light of day. And even there it trades his hillsides and panoramas for intimacy and shared spaces. They cannot restore the monarchy as it was, but they can return to normal.
As for night, it has one last foreboding. While most work precedes 1840, Vilhelm Hammershøi carries the story to 1912. Moonlight for him sheds little light on a dark canvas in an empty studio, and darkness has its geometric outlines near to abstraction. It is not all that big a step to Edvard Munch or Symbolism in modern art. Is it still Romanticism? It is still refusing to look beyond the scene in front of it or the light.
Sugar, sugar
"Impressionism and the Caribbean" could easily be called how the Caribbean and Impressionism avoided each other at all costs. Of course, at twenty-five Francisco Oller was impressionable, but the movement was barely getting underway. Camille Pissarro did, after all, invite him to exhibit in the official Salon. And his most ambitious work is bright, colorful, solid, and an idealized vision of home. Completed in 1893, El Velorio shows a wake as a happy occasion, drenched in sunshine even indoors. Its more than a dozen characters, both black and white, cavort in a relatively shallow space near the picture plane.
Its pulse and lightness look ahead, almost to the next century, much as a preparatory study in watercolor sets a woman quickly and directly on paper. Yet its hard edges and role as a public showpiece look back, to a firmer and more settled world. So do Oller's portraits, which present artists and political actors alike as figures of authority. So, too, do his still lifes, which insist on native fruit but with the acrid greens and precision of the late Baroque. He might have seen something like them in Madrid, where he stopped on his way to France to study at the Royal Academy. The Brooklyn Museum hangs the still lifes together, and they hardly change in style from his first efforts to the end of his life.
El Velorio could not travel from Puerto Rico except in reproduction, but the show is all about traveling. Subtitled "Francisco Oller and His Transatlantic World," it wants to place him in context, and that context covers more than three countries and at least a hundred years. Enter to one side of a partition, and one sees a retrospective of just forty paintings, beginning with the still lifes. Enter to the other side, and one has a small survey of Caribbean encounters with European and American art. It corresponds to a country on its path from Spanish colony to U.S. territory and commonwealth. Oller himself, the show points out, was a Spanish citizen.
The earliest painters here, José Campeche and Luis Paret y Alcázar, have the stiff brushwork of portraits in the Met's American wing. Benjamin West himself ventures south, his sitter holding a map of the plantations he will exploit. Oller later gives President McKinley a rolled-up map in hand as guide to conquests in the Spanish-American war. The nineteenth century brings Frederic Edwin Church from the Hudson River School to Jamaica, but Emile Goury has already brought grandeur and Romanticism to the blue hills of Guadeloupe. Context includes, too, Puerto Rico's slow path from slaveholding to free. Oller himself championed the abolition of slavery, but he is not above African American stereotypes, and he happily documents his nation's sugar mills. On a second trip to Spain, he takes its side in war, with a cavalry scene, and serves as court painter to the king.
Last, context means Paris, to which he returned twice. He befriended Paul Cézanne, whom he depicts painting outdoors, although in muddy shadow. The curators, Brooklyn's Richard Aste and Edward J. Sullivan of NYU, conclude with the museum's holdings of French artists, Winslow Homer, and his American stories, paired with Oller to show what he could do. Even at the end, it was not quite Impressionism. Compared to Claude Monet, he never dissolves sunlight into individual brushstrokes and colors—and indeed he shines with a nocturne in Puerto Rico. Compared to Cézanne's landscapes, with areas unpainted and thought itself always in progress, his are always finished.
That first trip abroad really was decisive. Oller would have seen not just the Prado and the Salon, but the earthy realism of Gustave Courbet, the sharp contrasts of early Corot, and the sunlight and shimmer of the Barbizon painters. He contrasts lush greenery with pale earth shot through with light. He shows black labor heroically isolated in a field, much like a peasant for Jean-François Millet. He never could give up playing by the rules, just as he called his course back in Puerto Rico "Drawing and Practical Geometric Perspective." The boy peeking out from behind a portrait of a mathematician, finger to his lips, could be adding an impish touch—or reminding the class to pay attention and to shut up.
"Beyond the Light" ran at The Metropolitan Museum of Art through April 16, 2023. "Impressionism and the Caribbean: Francisco Oller and His Transatlantic World" ran at The Brooklyn Museum through January 3, 2016.