New year, new art in the public domain
Celebrating Public Domain month 2023 with a closer look at some of the new artists in SMK’s collection who have entered the public domain
Another new year, another Public Domain month! Always a good occasion to celebrate when more great art enters the public domain where everyone can enjoy and build on our common cultural heritage. But it’s also a moment to meditate on some of the representational gaps in our collection.
In January 2023, we’re taking a closer look at a few of the new-struck Open Access artists in SMK’s collection. Often, Public Domain month is an opportunity to get acquainted with some exciting new names in the wide and deep expanses of art history. Also, it sheds light on the fact that artists on the outskirts of the canon are underexposed in more than one sense of the word.
- They tend to be a lot less researched and described, in print as well as online
- It’s rare to find contemporary, updated expert interpretations of their work — the few descriptions of their life and oeuvre often originate from their own lifetime, more than 70 years ago
- Works held in the museum collection are rarely digitized — and when they are, the quality tends to be below standard.
I don’t know about you, but Elsa Ström-Ciacelli (1876–1952) is completely new to me! She was a Swedish painter, illustrator and graphic artist who grew up in a socially privileged environment in Stockholm, but would go on to travel and develop her artistic language with strong influences from contemporary art movements, and with a distinct Southern European flavour. After having studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm from 1897 to 1905, she moved on to pursue further training and explore her talent in France, Germany, Spain and notably Italy. Here, her art developed along the lines and waves of cubist and futurist movements, and she met her husband to be, the Italian artist Arturo Ciacelli, whom she married in 1909. Throughout her career, she exhibited extensively in her home country Sweden, but also abroad, for instance in London and Philadelphia. Two striking woodcuts by Ström-Ciacelli in SMK’s collection serve to illustrate the geographical span of her living, one being a motif from the Swedish forests, the other a view of Florence. But they don’t do justice to the strong colouristic verve found in her oil paintings.
If you’re following the Danish art auction scene, the name Axel Bentzen (1893–1952) may be familiar to you. His colouristic paintings are often offered at attainable price levels, and his work is also fairly well represented in Danish art museums. In the SMK collection, we have seven fine examples of his characteristic painting style with broad, lush brushstrokes capturing landscapes, figures and interiors. From a young age, Bentzen was into art. An autodidact artist, he never received formal training but already as a boy, he spent many hours here in the galleries of SMK, copying the old Italian and Dutch masters in pencil drawings. In 1919, he traveled to Italy for the first time, and from then on his artistic language evolved towards the modernist nature-abstraction in bold colours he is most known for. Like Elsa Ström-Ciacelli, he also married an Italian, Maria-Francesca Nurzia. Tragically, she died at the young age of 26, but Bentzen maintained strong, lifelong bonds with the country. Some of his most well-known motifs, however, are from the neighbourhoods of Frederiksberg and Valby on the outskirts of Copenhagen — back then much more quiet and rural than today.
An additional example of how the areas around Copenhagen have been heavily urbanized in the last 120 years is provided by another one of the newly “public domained” artists in our collection, namely Peter Rostrup Bøyesen (1882–1952) whose painting The Outskirts of Nørrebro from 1905 shows one of today’s most vibrant parts of Copenhagen as a landscape with open fields and high skies. Only in the far background you see urban buildings.
Other artists in SMK Open, whose works have entered the public domain at the turn of the year, count the sculptors Siegfried Wagner and Rasmus Harboe, and the Swedish artist Carl Kylberg whose paintings and drawings are well represented in the collection with 61 pieces — albeit for the most part not yet accompanied by photographs.
As always, there’s much ork ahead of us in order to keep exploring and exposing more nuances of art history. Our continuous work to digitize the collection is an important piece in the puzzle, but as you’ll notice, far more objects in our database are registered than photographed. On January 1st 2023, 139,279 works are registered and just 52,865 photographed. Even though it’s frustrating not to be able to compliment all registered artworks with pictures, we can see that it’s helping people out there discover works they are interested in and requesting us to get more works photographed. Keep pushing us forward!
