From left: HRH Crown Princess Mary of Denmark, President of the American Scandinavian Foundation, Edward P Gallagher; HM King Harald of Norway, HM Queen Sonja of Norway, HM King Carl Gustaf of Sweden, HM Queen Silvia of Sweden, Curator Patricia G. Berman, and President of Finland, Tarja Halonen. Photo: Christine ButlerLuminous Modernism Opening
Last updated: 10/21/2011 //
Their Majesties King Harald V and Queen Sonja were present at the opening of Luminous Modernism, a Centennial of the the American-Scandinavian Foundation exhibition at Scandinavia House, on Thursday October 20th. Also present were the Heads of State from Sweden, Finland, Iceland, and H.M The Crown Princess of Denmark.
Luminous Modernism: Scandinavian Art Comes to America, 1912, an international loan exhibition of paintings by Edvard Munch, Vilhelm Hammershøi, Anders Zorn, and other Scandinavian pioneers of modernism, opened on October 20th, 2011, at Scandinavia House: The Nordic Center in America. The exhibition brings together 48 works by Nordic artists who embraced, and pioneered, the transformative aesthetic innovations that swept the European continent during late 19th- and early 20th-centuries.
Luminous Modernism looks back at the first exhibition organized by The American-Scandinavian Foundation (ASF), a 1912 survey of contemporary Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish painting that traveled to Boston, Buffalo, Chicago, and Toledo following its debut in New York City. The exhibition had an enormous impact in and beyond the cities to which it traveled. Reviewers used words like “radical” to describe the work it contained (it was the first U.S. presentation of Edvard Munch’s paintings); artists like Marsden Hartley were strongly affected by it; and in each of those four cities it drew some of the largest audiences of any art exhibition up to that time. Although it was eclipsed just two months after it closed by the arrival of the more radical Armory Show, the ASF-organized exhibition and its reception constitute a significant chapter in the history of art and culture in America. Read mor about the exhibition at scandinaviahouse.org.