January is a month of art joy
Five artists represented in the collection of SMK — Statens Museum for Kunst have entered the Public Domain as of 1 January 2020. That calls for a celebration — but it also opens our eyes to some noticeable gaps in our digitised collection.
For some people, January is a dark and gloomy month that they just want to get over and done with as soon as possible. But for OpenGLAM’ers, it’s a month of celebration. Every January, when the old year is superseded by the new, a bunch of late artists reach the golden limit where they have been dead for so long that their works fall into the Public Domain. 70 years in European copyright law. And this January, we count five artists in the SMK collection whose works are now completely free of any rights and restrictions.
- Emile Othon Friesz, French, 1879–1949 (158 works)
- Robert Storm Petersen, Danish, 1882–1949 (36 works)
- Henrik Schouboe, Danish, 1876–1949 (5 works)
- Nils Nilsson, Swedish, 1901–1949 (1 work)
- William Lönnberg, Finnish, 1887–1949 (1 work)
However, even though we already released more than 30,000 public domain images, the digitisation of the SMK collection is far from complete. Digitisation of the collection is usually driven either by request — for instance when a picture of an artwork is needed for a publication — or by access to earmarked digitisation funding from the Danish state. A large portion of the 250,000 artworks in the SMK collection simply haven’t been photographed yet and made available online. Sadly, that goes for some of the artists who just entered the public domain. But there are treats to enjoy.
Emile Othon Friesz
Thanks to the Danish engineer and foresighted art collector Johannes Rump, the SMK holds a world-class collection of modern French art. In 1927, Rump generously donated his collection of crème-de-la-crème French avantgarde painting, sculpture and graphic art from the first decades of the 20th century to SMK, counting works by such notabilities as Matisse, Derain and Picasso. Lesser known but of equal quality is Emile Othon Friesz who is represented with no less than 158 works, from vibrant paintings to exquisite drawings and prints, many of them digitised. Othon Friesz was part of the Fauves — the wild ones — challenging the academic conventions of art and releasing energy and colour onto the canvas with boldness and yet a distinctly French elegance.
Robert Storm Petersen
Robert Storm Petersen — or Storm P as he is fondly called — was and remains a household name in Danish culture. Through generations, his cartoons have delighted audiences with their warm, whimsical humour, yet always with a twist of uncorrupted truth. In recent years, also his paintings, that are heavily influenced by expressionism, have garnered increasing attention and appraisal with their sombre, often socially indignant motifs. Storm P is featured by 36 works in the SMK collection, however, only one (1!) is photographed which is a real pity! So aggrevating, in fact, that we have set ourselves the task of getting a good portion of his works digitised and online as soon as possible. That’s another way of celebrating the public domain.
Henrik Schouboe
Never heard of Henrik Schouboe? You’re probably not the only one. In Danish art history, Schouboe is recognized for his contribution to a certain poetic Vitalism in early 20th century painting. A splendid example of that is April. Young couple in a landscape from 1908 which was acquired by the SMK the same year. In the following decades, Schouboe and his generation’s predilection for symbolic figures in distinctly Nordic settings fell into disregard as a series of international Modernist, abstract movements swept over the art scene. It didn’t help the legacy of Vitalist painters that the German nazi regime came to favour their painterly style. Only in recent decades have art historians shown renewed interest in artists like Schouboe, trying to understand their artistic ambitions in a new light. But apparently, a strong interest in Schouboe’s work hasn’t materialized yet. Of the handful of works by him in the SMK collection, we only have a couple of low resolution black/white reproductions. Who knows, maybe this blogpost will arouse an appetite for discovering more of his pictorial world?
Nils Nilsson and William Lönnberg
The last two artists featured in the SMK collection to enter the public domain this January, Nils Nilsson and William Lönnberg, are only represented by one artwork each, both of them reproduced in low quality black/white images. Hardly enough to call it a celebration, huh? But while it may seem like a disappointment, this journey into some of the underexposed corners of our online collection is also an occasion for us to discover some of the many interesting works that are lying dormant, and to consider how we can move forward with our ambition to shed light on more nuances of art history.
Go discover more unknown treasures from the SMK collection at open.smk.dk
Please note that the online collection is in beta. You’ll find images in varying qualities and may stumble upon inaccurate data, as we’re in the process of transitioning to a new joint database system for all Danish museums.
