Copenhagen, Thorvaldsen's Museum

During my time in Stockholm in June 2016 I did not get to look at art as much as I would have liked. The State Museum was closed and a temporary exhibition of work from the museum was poor, as described in a previous blog post. So I decided to take a day trip back down to Copenhagen, the previous stop on my travel itinerary, to revisit a museum I had explored briefly.

The travel itself sounded interesting. I had not taken any long-distance train trips when I was in Europe, since I was able to book cheap and fast air travel from city to city, so I thought it would be fun to see what a European train trip would be like.

It was a long day of travel, starting with a bus ride from the apartment to the train station at around 5 a.m. Since it was midsummer it had already been light for a couple of hours. The sun was not visible in the sky yet, but as I waited for the bus everything was lit with the weird, reflected, sourceless light that is prominent in my memory of Stockholm. 

The train to Copenhagen was fast. It had gotten quite sunny by the time the train set out, bright sunlight through the train window making dizzying, rapidly changing geometric patterns of light and shadow on the seat back in front of me. It took all the concentration I could muster to control a rapidly escalating motion sickness.

My destination in Copenhagen was Thorvaldsen's Museum, a place I had only seen briefly when I had been in the city a week or so before.

It had turned out to be a real scheduling mistake that I had only booked five days for my initial visit to Copenhagen. I spent most of my limited time there at the State Art Museum and the Hirschsprung Collection, studying the vibrant, accomplished paintings by Krøyer and other excellent, little-known late 19th century Danish painters.

On my last full day in Copenhagen I made it over to two other museums, the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, and Thorvaldsen's, shortly before the latter was closing for the day. Both museums feature neoclassical sculpture, presented in a rich, perhaps theatrical way. Walls are painted in surprisingly deep, rich colors, and clear, cool natural light from large windows illuminates calm, classical sculptural forms.

Bertel Thorvaldsen (1770-1844) was a prominent neoclassical sculptor of the day, who rose from humble beginnings to international fame. The museum built in his honor is next to the royal palace. The building has remained basically unchanged since its completion in 1848, and is extremely well preserved, with richly painted wall and ceiling decoration and patterned tile floors complementing Thorvaldsen’s three dimensional works.

Being there was, for me, a distillation of an aspect of my European experience that I value highly. In the museum, as in the cities I visited, the distant past seemed to coexist in a seamless continuum with the present. Design elements recall antiquity, but channel a vital current of human consciousness and creativity. The overall effect was actually, I found, futuristic. I felt that I was in direct conversation with intelligent, hard working people from hundreds and thousands of years ago, connected to a thread of valuable insight into human existence that could help guide our future, if we examine the data imaginatively, thoughtfully, and carefully. 

History points out critical flaws in all past and present cultures, European and otherwise. But maybe we can exercise our creative imagination, and learn from great models, and not destroy them.

Thorvaldsen's Museum was an extraordinary experience, one that I hope to revisit for a longer stay.