Workers’ Museum/Copenhagen
Temporary exhibition: 10 january 2007 – 18 march 2007

Has the industrial society had any impact on Danish art? Many will probably answer that the notion of Denmark as a farming country will have had such deep impact that practically no works of art show Denmark as an industrial country. Art and Industry will confront this myth by focusing on the marks left by the industrial society on Danish art through more than 200 years.

The starting point is the 1780s when the first Danish artists took an interest in the industrial works, then few in number and situated far from the everyday life of the artists. The early industrial pictures were small in size. Not until the late nineteenth century did the phenomena of the industrial society enter art on a larger scale.

Laurits Tuxen From F. L. Smidth’s Machine Hall, 1911 Charcoal and pastel on paper FLSmidth A/S

Albert Mertz The Hammer Strikes, 1964 Oil on canvas Trapholt

Erik Styrbjørn Pedersen Operation. Oil Rig, 1990 Oil on canvas Belonging to the artist

Carsten Schmidt-Olsen Computerized Robot, c. 1993 With computermade paintings Belonging to the artist

At first, what initiated the painters was the social distress that spread as a consequence of industrialisation. Unemployment, poverty, and the workers rushing into the cities preoccupied those artists who wished to debate current problems. However, only rarely did the artists go inside the industrial buildings. For a long time the factory and the industrial work represented a foreign land to both the artists and their audience. There were, however, a few industrial owners who commissioned paintings of their own businesses and with time some artists began to go inside iron foundries and machine halls on their own initiative in order to make the workers’ world a topic in visual art.

The art of the 20th century has expressed very different attitudes towards the industrialisation. At the beginning of the century the negative view was predominant; the fathers of modern art did not link industry with anything positive. On the contrary, industry’s pursuit of pace and mechanisation was seen as a threat to art. In the cases where modern development was in fact recognized, industry was perceived as a necessary evil rather than a phenomenon of separate aesthetic value. The “machine aesthetics” of the inter-war period brought about a change to the negative view of industry in art; for the first time industry was associated with aesthetic qualities. Enthusiasm towards technology and belief in progress were now connected to the industrial world. Artists began collecting material for artistic renewal from industrial products, as well as from the environment and work at the great workplaces.

In the time following World War II, there are still a number of artists who have dealt with industry from an angle of enthusiasm towards its possibilities. Others have been inspired by new materials and new forms brought about by the industrial development. Concurrently, however, artists have created a bleak image of the industry as a symbol of the destruction of nature and humans alike.

Nowadays there are still artists who create new and up-to-date ways of interpreting the industrial society: some depict the few workers left in production as technicians in a still more clinical environment while others are attracted to the abandoned factories that as ruins lure with new aesthetic qualities.

Art and Industry is part of Danish museums’ celebration of the Year of Industrial Culture 2007. Introducing the varying views of different eras and social classes on industry, it invites discussions of how industry has influenced the artistic forms of expression and how visual art has taken part in shaping our understanding of industrial society