ABSTRACT
Danish modernism was ostensibly similar to continental Europe’s well-known academic-modern-avant-garde trajectory, with Danish artists and critics themselves importing this paradigm to their own cultural environment. Indicative of the paradoxical nature of Danish modernism, or dansk modernisme in Danish, is the word itself, which is non-native and has been used to signify a wide range of ideas and styles concurrently, from Realism and Impressionism to Dada and Cobra, well into the 1990s. A review of the origins of modern visual culture in Denmark during the nineteenth century reveals some common attributes identifiable among progressive art and artists through to the 1930s, and it was the characteristics that would shape the Helhesten project. In order to fully understand the emergence of Helhesten, thus have to consider the conditions that brought about the first modern movements in Denmark, the early-nineteenth-century Danish Golden Age, and the late-nineteenth-century Modern Breakthrough.
