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Tuesday, July 5, 2011

ALAN HOLLINGHURST IN COPENHAGEN



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Denmark’s oldest museum is all about a single artist. Alan Hollinghurst, author of “The Line of Beauty”, revisits a temple of idiosyncrasy ...
From INTELLIGENT LIFE Magazine, Summer 2011
 
I’d had no more than a quarter of an hour there, five years before, but it had left me with strong and peculiar memories. The works themselves, the hundreds of sculptures in plaster and marble, had been impressive, but the building that housed them was what stayed in my mind. I’d seen nothing else like it: a massive free-standing Egyptian temple, painted a bright ochre; figures moving in frescoed procession around its outer walls, cream and ochre and plum against black backgrounds; a glazed inner cloister, in which statuary gleamed or hid in stripes of sunlight and shadow; and running round it, red, green or purple rooms in enfilade, like cells or stalls, each holding a white marble hero or goddess. The inspired colour scheme of these rooms, faded and subtilised by time, was unusually striking. It continued in the long central courtyard, frescoed with soaring palm trees, where the great Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen himself was buried, as if in a northern dream of the south.
 
I’d been in Copenhagen for a book fair, and my Danish publisher, knowing I was interested in buildings, had urged me at least to have a glance at this “most singular” museum before catching my plane home. At the time I had barely heard of Thorvaldsen. The museum’s collection was evidence of a major artistic figure, if not exactly of a major artistic personality. The neoclassical idiom of his work, with its idealising reliance on antiquity, lacked the kind of expressive individuality that I felt I most prized.
 
Thorvaldsen (1770-1844) was the son of a poor Icelandic woodcarver and a Danish mother. He was sent as a boy to the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen, where he won prizes at every stage, culminating in the Great Gold Medal, which came with a travelling scholarship. So in 1797 he went to Rome to learn carving in marble (not readily available in Denmark), rapidly developed a successful practice and ended up staying there for the next 40 years. I had seen him likened to Keats as a humble-born genius who had mastered the educated repertory of classical allusion, but I had seen nothing of the teeming individuality of Keats, the intimacy or originality. I wasn’t sure I knew how to look at Thorvaldsen. Could I even tell him apart from Canova, the great contemporary whose death in 1822 left him the most celebrated and sought-after sculptor in Europe? 
The city itself, with its wonderful walkable network of old streets and squares and its many towers outdoing each other in fantasy and strangeness, had been turned into a hell of hoardings, barriers, Portakabins, pile-driving and excavations. A new metro was being installed, traffic was diverted, and in the cold early morning the streets were possessed by thousands of cyclists, red-faced in the wind, yelping at any incautious pedestrian who strayed into their lanes. On my way to the museum I warmed up (not quite the right word) at Vor Frue, the cathedral of Copenhagen, designed by the severely neoclassical court architect C.F. Hansen and completed in 1829. The great bare barrel-vaulted nave is lined with Thorvaldsen’s monumental figures of the Apostles, but the eye goes at once to the high altar, dominated by his immense bearded Christ, standing with hands stretched out and down to show the stigmata. It still leaves me cold, but I see that the trick of it is to draw the viewer forwards, so as to meet Christ’s downcast gaze. Noble and impersonal, it has lent itself to endless reproduction: copies of it adorn Temple Square in Salt Lake City and other Mormon churches across America.  
 
Seen after Hansen’s fine but chilly work, the architecture of the Thorvaldsens Museum seems all the more exhilarating. The building trumpets its own idiosyncrasy. Its 39-year-old architect, M.G. Bindesbøll, had only one previous work to his name, a grain drier in Norway. Somehow, in competition with far more established figures, for what was to be the first museum in Denmark and a celebration of a national hero, his vibrant novelty won out. The times were changing, and Bindesbøll seems to have been ahead of them. Absolute monarchy in Denmark was to end in 1848, the year the museum opened, and the academic classicism associated with the old order was subverted and reinterpreted in a colourful, eclectic and newly democratic light. Bindesbøll had travelled widely in Greece and Turkey, and his liberated delight in coloured decoration is shown in the drawings he made there, which fed into the vivid decor of the museum.
 
The temple-like front is as powerful as I remembered, with five huge splayed doorways, outlined in white against ochre, and tall, pleasingly trapezium-shaped brown doors—a shape repeated in the articulation of all four façades. It is what gives the exterior of this Greco-Roman building its Egyptian look. The magical feature, though, is the two sequences of frescoes by the artist Jørgen Sonne, which run round three sides of the building. They tell the story of the museum itself. In the first strand we see Thorvaldsen’s return to Denmark in 1838. Excited crowds gather and wave; in one panel a woman has fallen into the water and is helped back into a boat. Thorvaldsen himself steps ashore in the final panel, to be greeted by various dignitaries and friends, while behind him the mauve-shirted, white-hatted rowers raise their slanting yellow oars in the air. The drawing is lively and clear, and the faces of the unnamed figures typically more strong than handsome, but this side of caricature. The action, all round, unfolds against a black sky, and the boldness of the colour scheme is, oddly, both powerful and charming.
 
On his return to Copenhagen, the elderly Thorvaldsen announced that he would leave the contents of his Roman studio as well as his own large collections of antiquities and paintings to the nation if a museum were specially built to house them. Around the other two sides we see the arrival of these numerous objects, with the frigate that brought them, anchored along one corner of the building. From it emerge, first of all on rowing boats, and then on primitive wagons and litters, the accumulated spoils of Thorvaldsen’s immensely productive career. There are echoes of a Roman triumph, but here the labouring townspeople who are pushing and heaving the trophies are themselves the victors, or at least the beneficiaries, barefoot in accordance with classical precedent, but otherwise in modern breeches, waistcoats and rolled-up sleeves. The Phrygian cap of the kneeling marble Ganymede bobs along beside the red peaked cap of the foreman supervising his transport. The pensively inspired Lord Byron, perched on a broken Grecian column, pen raised to chin, is tended by five men earnestly involved in their own practical task (a sheet caught in a wheel of the truck threatens to be a problem). Noble artworks are shown in the care of the common man. His appreciation of them remains a matter of conjecture: an element of latent comedy coexists with the expression of a tribute. One group of men rest and mop their brows from the effort of pushing Copernicus. Another man with a bust under each arm has a profile to rival either of them. It is hard to convey the simultaneously workaday but momentous, festive but solemn nature of this frieze, which also forms an unusual advertisement for the contents of the museum, “like a sign for a menagerie”, as Bindesbøll said, depicting highlights of the show inside.
 
In the upstairs picture galleries there’s a painting by Friedrich Nerly that shows the transportation involved at an earlier stage of the artistic process. A gigantic block of marble, with “Thorvaldsen Roma” marked on it, is dragged along a road from the quarry by a team of six exhausted and collapsing buffaloes. We sense that something superhuman will in due course take place. In another painting we see Pope Leo XII visiting Thorvaldsen’s studio, a tiny figure in pink dwarfed by the congregation of immense white sculptures. (The artist appears to be introducing the pope to Jesus Christ.) Thorvaldsen and his team of assistants worked often on a colossal scale. Yet all the largest works in the museum are plaster—usually the original plasters that served as models for the marble, or occasionally bronze, final works, and so fresher and closer to the artist’s original vision for all their ambiguous air of being merely copies, or plaster casts. But, being plaster, they have discoloured over their nearly two centuries of existence, from the stove and candle smoke of their days in the Roman studio and from the different pollutants of modern life; they show varying degrees of grubbiness, and many of the smaller busts look as if blackened by incessant handling, though really it seems only by the air. It takes a bit of getting used to, and is shown up all the more by juxtaposition with the sculptures in flawless white marble.
 
Those giant works call for giant rooms, of which there are two, one of them a church-like space containing the original plasters of “Christ and the Twelve Apostles” where groups of young schoolchildren tend to gather. The other, larger hall was originally the entrance, running the width of the building behind the five great doors, and with its high barrel vault and attic windows it reminds me just a little of the concourse of some very grand neoclassical railway station.
I guessed that the essential thing, with work of such restraint, was to have plenty of time for it; and this spring I returned for a whole day, starting with a privileged hour before the public was admitted. I would be able to dwell on the sculptures, and return to them in changing aspects, as the shafts of sunlight steepened and slid across them. For nearly a century after its opening in 1848 the Thorvaldsens Museum was lit only by natural light; in the depths of the northern winter it must have been a most mysterious and sepulchral place, the works emerging from the shadows only for a few hours each day. On a dazzling March morning it promised to come to life.
It is dominated at either end by two equestrian figures that seem all the more stunning for their size, each over 15 feet high, and further raised on substantial plinths. On the left Prince Josef Poniatowski rides forward in classical dress, like a supersized Marcus Aurelius, but flourishing a sword rather than the open hand of command. Facing him, Maximilian I, elector of Bavaria, sword sheathed but right hand pointing forward and up, bears down on us magnificently. Poniatowski was designed for Warsaw, Maximilian for Munich. Between them, along the walls, are the seated Copernicus, for Warsaw, and Pope Pius VII, for his tomb monument in St Peter’s. It is like some ad hoc Pantheon. Thorvaldsen seems to have been unconcerned by the ideology of his subjects or patrons, though the commissioning of a Danish Protestant to do a papal tomb was evidently controversial. The Poniatowski monument suffered repeated vicissitudes, at the hands of Tsar Nicholas I, who wanted it destroyed, and of the Nazis, who blew it to bits when they evacuated Warsaw in 1944. It seems to me both powerful and elusive, because of Thorvaldsen’s characteristic way of sublimating the thrilling drama of his subject’s end (riding his horse into the River Elster to avoid capture during the Napoleonic retreat) to some more timeless and impersonal image of noble leadership. The original commission had been for Poniatowski to appear in Polish cavalry uniform, the horse rearing before its final jump. Thorvaldsen’s quite different conception is impressive and even inspiring, but not a bit dramatic.  
 
It helps to know the stories behind the works, and part of their remoteness to me is due to a patchy classical education. In the long sequences of smaller rooms I am more struck by this distance, and by the rewards of overcoming it. There is a famous “Mercury”, perched on a tree-stump: a fine youthful figure with the perfection of feature and worryingly tiny penis one expects from a neoclassical artist. He has been playing panpipes, now held away from his lips, while his other hand, behind him, has begun to pull his sword from its sheath. I need to be told that he has just charmed Argus to sleep, and is about to kill him. Then the graceful young man in his winged helmet becomes more than picturesque, and I see that Thorvaldsen has chosen a moment, not of drama, but of tense equipoise between two actions. I need, too, to come close and, as with the heroic Christ, meet the downward gaze of the now rather terrifying blank eyes.
  
The question of how these works were viewed when they were most prized is an interesting one. When the museum first opened, children under confirmation age were not admitted alone for fear of the nudity. In a nearby room there is the superb “Jason with the Golden Fleece”, naked but for sandals and helmet. Eyeing it from across the room is the bust of the wealthy Anglo-Dutch art collector Thomas Hope, who commissioned it, and thus enabled the young Thorvaldsen to stay on in Rome. Thorvaldsen took 25 years to produce the marble figure, which is both a spectacular showpiece and a kind of emblem of his Roman career. Nearby are Hope’s wife and his two sons. Like many other subjects of busts, Hope tests Thorvaldsen’s neoclassical code; what we see of him is conventionally naked (great men, like Byron and Frederick VI, may have togas or sword belts across bare chests) but portraiture still requires a likeness, in this case involving exuberant Regency sideburns. The relationship between Jason and his owner, and his owner’s wife and children, has an historical piquancy and even a faint comedy of a kind Thorvaldsen generally prefers us not to see.
 
Upstairs there are half a dozen portraits of Thorvaldsen himself, which cumulatively show what a lion he was, and prove, rather as pictures of Liszt do, that here was an irresistible subject. He had (the one thing his own sculpted self-portrait cannot convey) the most mesmerising grey eyes, so persistent in portraits from youth to old age that the emphasis on them cannot be mere romantic exaggeration. Indeed, they tend to be rendered with a virtuosic lifelikeness that seems conscious of the distinct responsibilities of paint as opposed to marble. They are the eyes, one realises, as one wanders on from room to room among the things he made and the things he collected, that are the occasion and sine qua non of this whole extraordinary place.  
 
Thorvaldsens Museum  Bertel Thorvaldsens Plads, DK-1213 Copenhagen K, Denmark; +45 33 32 15 32; www.thorvaldsensmuseum.dk. Open Tuesday to Sunday, 10am to 5pm; closed Mondays, and December 24th, 25th, 31st and January 1st. Admission DKr40 (approx €5.40/£4.70), under-18s and art-history students free; everyone free on Wednesdays 

Alan Hollinghurst won the Booker prize in 2004 for his novel "The Line of Beauty". His latest book, "The Stranger's Child", is out now. Picture credit: Mikkel Ostergaard 
 

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