Paul Fischer - Copenhagen in the best possible light
/For the opening exhibition at the Museum of Copenhagen, the work of the painter Paul Fischer is an inspired choice.
Fischer was born in 1860, visited Paris between 1890 and 1895 and died in 1934 so his paintings of street scenes and middle-class life in the city reveals much about a great and crucial but possibly now under-appreciated period in the development of Danish architecture and art.
It was certainly a formative period for technology in Copenhagen - a point of transition to a city with electric trams; electric lighting in the streets; telephone kiosks in the squares and a bustle in daily life that we would recognise as essentially modern. That period, in the last decades of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th century, is also, of course, a great period for new buildings and change. It followed the dismantling of the old defensive banks and moats that had constrained the city and then the construction, around the city, of important new parks and new public buildings - including the National Gallery, the Glyptotek, the new city hall and, of course, the building that the museum itself now occupies. Many of these new streets and squares were painted by Fischer.
For the composition of his paintings of street life, Fischer made use of photographs that he himself took - so he was an early street photographer - and these are shown alongside many of the paintings so there is an intriguing game to spot which buildings have survived; which have gone in the last ninety or hundred years and which streets and squares have barely changed.
Fischer was also a commercial artist - again in a remarkably modern way - who produced illustrations for advertisements and newspapers and magazines and designs for post cards and an extensive collection of examples are on display.
This is a fascinating exhibition that takes a clever course between exploring and celebrating the work of an accomplished artist but also looks at the record his paintings and photographs have left us of the people who lived in the city and how they used the streets and the buildings in that specific period.
Paul Fischer - Copenhagen in the best possible light
at the Museum of Copenhagen, Storm Gade 18 - the exhibition continues until 31 July 2020