Abildgaard 1743-1809

The Louvre Museum Editions This catalogue was published on the occasion of the Abildgaard, 1743-1809 exhibition presented at the Louvre Museum until February 9, 2009. Nicolai Abraham Abildgaard (1743-1809), one of the leading figures of Nordic art in the late 18th century, is certainly not unknown in France. He had already been prominently featured in Paris on many occasions, from 1928 to 2007, during prestigious exhibitions. He was then seen as a precursor to the generation of artists who immediately succeeded him, and whose importance is now recognized under the name of the Danish Golden Age. Abildgaard in his time was an atypical Neoclassicist: a history painter, and in this respect attached to the Danish fine arts institution, drawing his inspiration from literature (Shakespeare, Ossian), he was also a vehement political satirist, not sparing his incisive touch to denounce the abuses of the absolute monarchy in the form of engravings and drawings. Close to the Enlightenment, at the time of the great upheavals of the French Revolution, and very attentive to the echoes it aroused throughout Europe, erudite and iconoclastic, he had previously participated in the 1740s in questioning, within the circle of Füssli, the too rigid aesthetic data of the prevailing Neoclassicism, substituting a freer and more human expression, announcing in this very way the various artistic movements that are ours today. This is to say to what extent the exhibition now devoted to Abildgaard, and which after Paris is presented at the Kunsthalle in Hamburg to end in apotheosis in Copenhagen, is of particular importance, both at the European and international levels. The specialist of this period as well as the general public will find in this catalogue a reference work, whose texts and notices now significantly enlighten an extraordinary artistic itinerary that has remained too long in the shadows.