Kierkegaard religion

By Thor J. Mednick, PhD

 

This richly illustrated catalogue, which informatively examines the well-documented influence of Søren Kierkegaard (1813-55) on Johan Thomas Lundbye (1818-48), accompanied last year’s exhibition of the same title and was released to coincide with the bicentennial of Kierkegaard’s birth.

It is no doubt fitting that such a catalogue should begin with a celebration of Lundbye by Hans Edvard Nørregård-Nielsen, a stalwart champion of the Danish Golden Age whose tireless pursuit of Lundbye’s physical and intellectual traces have done so much both to consolidate the latter’s biographical and professional record and to make irrevocable his setting in the diadem of Danish national romanticism.

Here, as elsewhere in his work, Nørregård-Nielsen wishes us to understand Lundbye not just as a painter who thought insightful thoughts, but as the painter of those thoughts, and not just as an artist from Denmark, but as the artist