Melchior Lorck (1526-1588), Well, Water Trough, and Water tower, 1582, Statens Museum for Kunst.

Melchior Lorck (1526-1588), A Magnificently Equipped Dromadary With a Timpanist as Rider, 1576, Statens Museum
for Kunst.

Melchior Lorck (1526-1588), Portrait of Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, 1559, Statens Museum for Kunst.

Statens Museum for Kunst
Sølvgade 48-50
+45 3374 8494
Copenhagen
A View of a Foreign Culture,
Melchior Lorck in Turkey,
1555-59
April18-August 3, 2008

Melchior Lorck (1526/27-1588?) is the first Danish-born artist whose life work is so comprehensively documented. Despite great interest on the part of Danish and foreign researchers, Lorck is relatively unknown in wider circles. Later this spring, a major work in several volumes about the outstanding artist will be published, written by Erik Fischer, the former long-term head of The Department of Prints and Drawings at Statens Museum for Kunst. The occasion of the exhibition is this major publication, and is thereby part of a wider celebration of Lorck, in which The Royal Library is also participating.

Melchior Lorck’s remarkable life began in Flensburg. From an early age, he exhibited considerable artistic abilities. King Christian III offered to finance Lorck’s education abroad, on the condition that he later served as court artist. Lorck visited the chief artistic centres in Germany, the Netherlands and Italy, but when the money ran out, he did not return to his benefactor as he had promised. Instead he made his living at minor princely courts, until he was employed in Vienna in 1555 by Ferdinand I, the future Holy Roman Emperor.

The Emperor dispatched Lorck to Constantinople (Istanbul) as part of a diplomatic mission, whose purpose it was to negotiate peace with the Ottoman Empire. Lorck was entrusted with the task of recording their way of living, thus enhancing Western knowledge of Turkish culture. When Lorck returned to Vienna in 1559, his sketches from the journey were worked up in 128 woodcuts in all, which are known today under the title of The Turkish Publication. This apparently restless artist never achieved a final completion of the work, however. He never realised the projected publication himself. Instead, Lorck returned to Denmark in 1580, where the new king, Frederik II, restored him to favour and gave him work. But just two years later, the aging Lorck travelled off again, leaving few traces of his later movements. His final works are, surprisingly enough, motifs from the Gold Coast in West Africa. The Turkish Publication was first printed in 1626.

The exhibition of 106 works offers a comprehensive insight into Lorck’s unique artistic idiom. Initially there is a richly illustrated introduction to the artist and his time. Then there is a thematic hanging of almost all the woodcuts from The Turkish Publication. The originality of these meticulous and detailed pictures is incontrovertible. No European artist had previously portrayed so extensively the reality which Lorck encountered in Turkey. In other words, Lorck had no iconographic tradition to draw upon. The exhibition illustrates the quite special mannered elegance of The Turkish Publication, which was Lorck’s creation of an idiom that could “translate” the foreign culture into a European pictorial language. At the same time, the exhibition demonstrates how Lorck’s pictures from Turkey are markedly different from European prejudice of his time about Turks. There are no echoes here of the usual tales about Muslim culture being heathen, hostile and primitive. On the contrary: Lorck’s pictures seem to be infused with a certain matter-of-factness and thorough respect for, and interest in, the foreign culture.

It is art historian Erik Fischer’s lifelong research which lies behind the four-volume work Melchior Lorck. This publication is the first complete catalogue of Lorck, and thus constitutes a landmark in research on and dissemination of the artist’s work. The catalogue is accompanied by facsimile reproductions of both the complete The Turkish Publication and the approximately 12 metre-long prospect of Istanbul, which is in the University Library of Leiden. The publishing house Forlaget Vandkunsten will release the book in collaboration with The Royal Library later this spring. A fifth and final volume is expected in 2010.

This exhibition is part and parcel of the Museum’s ambition to give greater prominence to The Department of Prints and Drawings. As such, this is the first of a series of annual exhibitions which will stem from the Museum’s research, and the rich collection of more than 240,000 drawings, graphic works and photographs. These regular exhibitions will thus present outstanding selections from the 700 years of art that The Department of Prints and Drawings houses, and will be put into perspective with major loans from home and abroad.