1851 -1935 · Skagen, family intimacy and Danish light

Evening lamps, domestic gestures and Amager's horizons make Viggo Johansen the great Danish painter of modern intimacy.

Viggo Johansen was born in Copenhagen in 1851 and died there in 1935. He studied at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and joined the Skagen painters' circle in the 1870s. Unlike several of his companions attracted by spectacular beaches and open-air parties, Johansen willingly looked towards the moor, the fishing villages and especially the family interior. His marriage to Martha Møller, cousin of Anna Ancher, places him permanently in this artistic network. Martha and their six children become the protagonists of a work attentive to ordinary gestures: reading, cooking, washing a child, waiting or sharing a meal. Børnene vasks reveals thus maternal work without reducing it to an anecdote. In Sunlight in the Dining Room, the clarity coming from the window transforms furniture and silhouettes into a sensitive experience of time. Johansen also excels in nocturnal scenes. An evening with the artist and Aftenpassiar bring together writers, musicians and painters around a lamp whose light constructs the social space as much as the composition. His landscapes of geese, lakes and stormy skies show a nature less heroic than lived. Recognized abroad, exhibited in Paris and professor at the Academy, Johansen contributes to the transition from Nordic realism to painting freer from color and atmosphere. Long less famous than Skagen's other painters, he appears today as a major observer of family, care and modern sociability. The "Viggo Johansen" selection notably compares An Evening at the Artist's Home and Sunlight in the Dining Room. His reading favors details.

Johansen gives domestic gestures the dignity of an event: light reveals what daily life makes almost invisible.