Pedagogy, Provocation and Paradox:Denmark'sKunstnernesStudieskole

Abstract

AbstractThe last two decades of the nineteenth century witnessed an apparent revolution in art education inDenmark with the establishment of the ‘Free Schools’, a group of alternative schools that provided students with a choice other than theRoyalAcademy. The most important of these schools, theKunstnernesStudieskole(Artists'StudySchool, established in 1882), was subsidised by the government and headed by Laurits Tuxen,P.S. Krøyer, and Kristian Zahrtmann,Academy‐trained artists who modeled the school's education on the French atelier system. The debate that formed theStudySchool was at its core one of democratization, which was perceived to be synonymous with international modernism. Yet its artists functioned within a network of fluid roles designed to openly augment the existing pedagogical structure from within – a specificallyDanish phenomenon. This article proposes an alternative framework for late‐nineteenth‐centuryDanish art education systems that situates theStudySchool within the context ofDanish culture and as an extension of the social democratic tendencies proliferating at this time, which were significantly influenced by the preacherN.F.S. Grundtvig.Danish artists' actual situation had more to do with assimilating a myriad of local and international impulses into a specificallyDanish version of modernism.