Centuries-old artworks saved from Copenhagen’s stock exchange blaze

COPENHAGEN (Reuters) – Art conservators are assessing the damage to centuries-old paintings recovered from a blaze that destroyed Copenhagen’s Old Stock Exchange this week, the National Museum of Denmark said on Thursday.

As the blaze ripped through the 400-year-old Copenhagen landmark on Tuesday, passersby jumped off their bicycles to help firefighters, conservators and soldiers retrieve valuable paintings.

“It had to be fast,” Nina Wajman, a curator at the National Museum of Denmark, told Reuters.

Conservators retrieved paintings from the half of the building that had not caught fire, while firefighters in smoke-helmets and soldiers of the Royal Life Guards recovered paintings from the part that was ablaze, hastily loading them on to trucks.

“They might not have done it in the way an art expert would, but that’s minor, I think,” said Wajman.

She entered the building to recover a portrait in oil of Christian IV, Denmark’s 17th-century king who oversaw the construction of the building, which was originally built for trading in commodities.

“I wasn’t sure that it had been rescued, so I went in to look for it and it was still there,” Wajman said.

Some paintings were severely damaged by water or fire or because they were hastily torn off the walls.

Conservators are still inspecting the paintings, which were brought to a depot of the National Museum, and are trying to get an overview of the damage and what is missing.

“We had great focus on the valuables inside the building. But the problem was that I needed all my firefighters to contain the fire as long as we could,” Jakob Vedsted Andersen, head of the fire department in greater Copenhagen, told Reuters.

“So we had to ask people for help to bring out the paintings and the sculptures,” he said.

Employees at the nearby Danish Chamber of Commerce, including its CEO, helped to carry paintings as big as 3 metres wide into a section of the nearby Christiansborg palace.

Klavs Lockwood, a local, was at the site early on Tuesday.

“These paintings were very big and heavy, so I quickly offered my help,” he said.

He said the painting he helped carry had been torn in several places.

“You could see it was taken off the wall in a hurry.”

(Reporting by Jacob Gronholt-Pedersen, Louise Breusch Rasmussen, Isabelle Yr Carlsson and Tom Little. Editing by Jane Merriman)