Art review: Christen Købke, Danish Master of Light

Published on Thursday 8 July 2010 15:56

THERE'S something discomfiting about the discovery or rediscovery of national heroes, those obscure figures that drift out of historical view for good reason, until a bit of nationalist barrel-scraping brings them blinking into the limelight.

When it comes to artists it's all too common to find that a second rate figure remodelled as a national treasure belongs to the former category and not the latter.

So what to make of an artist like Christen Kbke, well known as amongst the greatest painters of his native Denmark and barely heard of over here? Well the initial signs don't sound great. A painter of the Danish "Golden Age" he died in 1848 a few months before his 38th birthday. His career fell apart before it truly began when, despite having trained there, he was rejected for membership of the Danish Royal Academy. The traditional artistic trip he made to Italy in the late 1830's has long been held by art historians to be an unmitigated creative disaster.

At a time of national crisis and Europe-wide romanticism and revolution, he spent much of his life painting and working within a few miles of his Copenhagen home. And contrary to the spirit of an age of scientific inquiry and grand philosophical quest, he lived a quiet life "a man of few words, uncertain direction, little introspection and even less reading", he was a pious Christian given to occasional, gentle doubt. The closest thing he came to the romantic temperament was his persistent indigestion.

And yet, this wonderful boutique show in the lower galleries on the Mound demonstrates that Kbke had in spades the artistic temperament we can understand as quintessentially modern, a kind of detached coolness, quiet persistence, an apparent frankness (though as we'll find out, he had a rather panglossian attitude to his surroundings, turning the squalid environment he painted to a lovely light-tinged wonderland) and no fear of repetition.

Notably almost all of his work is diminutive, the shock of seeing so much of it all together instead of dispersed among his peers is how little space it takes up both literally and metaphorically. Kbke was a painter of tiny worlds, not for him the grand ambitions, the moralising or classical storytelling of the era. In an age of great painters, he was a limited man, but he worked so well, so consistently within his limitations that the 48 paintings on show together provide the kind of sedate rhythmic pleasure you find within a single work.

Many of the best works are of the area where the artist grew up and where his father was a master baker.

The Citadel was a military garrison on the fringes of Copenhagen which would have been a foetid, rather claustrophobic place, a military target in times of conflict and no doubt a messy troublesome place in times of peace, home as it was to a convict labour force.

Out of this unpromising material Kbke crafted a world not unfamiliar to student of Dutch and Flemish art (of which the artist himself was undoubtedly one), a place of simple pleasures, enclosed, quiet, and self-referential. A place where boys idly fish, women move through enclosed spaces absorbed in simple activities, where everything is bathed in a distinctive luminosity. All this might be saccharine idealisation were it not for the careful mathematic construction of these works, something that makes them seem not so much precise as rather precisely off-kilter.

The wonderful View From The Loft Of The Grain Store At The Bakery In The Citadel is a case in point. This glimpse of Kbke's sister Grethe knitting is not the traditional glimpse of a woman inside the home engaged in domestic labour.

Instead she is knitting and walking as we look out on her from the dark enclosed space of the loft and she traverses the picture plane by climbing a ramp towards us. There is a frame within a frame, the loft door but its symmetrical edge is itself bisected by a diagonal beam at one side. At the foot of the ramp, two children play, these three figures echoed in a different formation by three stern drying poles in the distance. The question of just what is out and what is in is blurred by the dark leafy canopy of a mature tree outside and the penetration of warm sunlight into the interior space.

That ramp, a bridge between two worlds would have been a natural motif for the artist, living as he did in a gated community surrounded by water and approached by drawbridges. The sense of seclusion and otherness that many artists tried to achieve was just the everyday condition in his hermetic home world, the sense of transition from one world to the next, his daily experience as he crossed into the city to study or work.

That sympathetic otherness also comes through strongly in his early portrait works, many of which are of his family and were carried out for no or little renumeration. Far from the dense and symbolic portraiture of many of his peers, these works are character studies or types, in which the visual world - the texture of his father's ageing skin, the taut cloth across his cousin's recklessly unbuttoned fly - is given a kind of psychic intensity by the stripped back setting and frankness of his subjects gaze. The small pleasures here are the best, and in his later more romantic landscape works your eye is drawn as much to the weeds and wildflowers as the big skies or national monuments.

These days in Denmark the painter is a national monument himself.

This show demonstrates, that despite his obscure status in much of the world, it's with good reason that Kbke has finally come to light.

Christen Kbke, Danish Master of Light

National Gallery Complex, Edinburgh

Until 3 October bc