Workshop: Across the Seas: Denmark and the World in Art and Visual Culture in the Early Modern Period.

In cooperation with the Maritime Museum of Denmark, Copenhagen

Organised by Caecilie Weissert and Johannes von Müller (Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel) and Benjamin Asmussen (Maritime Museum of Denmark)

The workshop ‘Across the Seas: Denmark and the World in Art and Visual Culture in the Early Modern Period’ takes an interdisciplinary perspective combining art historical questions with those of the histories of politics and economics. The sea serves as a common denominator allowing for bridging such disparate standpoints. Furthermore, it presents itself as a backdrop against which early modern Denmark keeps oscillating between centre and periphery.

By choosing this framework the workshop seeks to dislodge the presented objects from a conventional frame of reference. They will be addressed as ‘nodes’, making interrelations and itineraries visible and mapping them out, finally revealing themselves as factors that contribute to constituting the very structures they disclose. Next to a series of case studies dedicated to the material and artistic cultures of exchange between Denmark and non-European regions, notably China, and investigating the circulation of both art and artistic materials via the sea, the workshop will engage with both the challenges and methodological potential of an ‘oceanic turn’.

Please register before 8 June 2023 by email to: vonmuellerkunstgeschichte.uni-kiel.de

Program:

9 June: Denmark and the World (chaired by Caecilie Weissert)

14:00 Arrival
14:30 Welcome und opening remarks, Caecilie Weissert (Kiel)
14:50 Benjamin Asmussen (Copenhagen), Chinese Export Paintings as Sources of Danish Early Modern Trade and the Industrialisation of Art
15:40 Kee Il Choi Jr. (Zurich), Models and Marketing in Canton: Two Chinese Export Porcelain Punch-bowls Made for the Danish Market
16:30 Coffee break
17:00 Winnie Wong (Berkeley), The Clay Portraits of the Danish Kunstkammer: Chinese Sources on a European Demand

10 June: Maritime Art History (chaired by Johannes von Müller)

9:15 Arrival
9:30 Opening remarks, Johannes von Müller (Kiel)
9:50 Michèle Seehafer (Amsterdam), Immersion in Foreign Worlds – Lacquer at the Danish Court
10:40 Margit Thøfner (Milton Keynes), ‘Through various tracts of sea’: Anna of Denmark-Norway and the Trinity panels
11:30 Coffee break
12:00 Anne Haack Christensen (Copenhagen), Materials at Sea. Trading Painters’ Supplies in 17th Century Denmark
12:50 Closing discussion (chaired by Benjamin Asmussen)