"LUMINOUS Modernism" celebrates the "Exhibition of Contemporary Scandinavian Art" that caused a sensation in America 100 years ago. When that show toured New York, Buffalo, Toledo, Chicago and Boston, visitors were astonished by the works of artists many had never heard of or seen. Viewers were moved by the caressing light that enveloped the landscapes and interiors of Vilhem Hammershoi, a Danish painter; they were shocked by the eerie and sometimes painful solitude of people portrayed by Edvard Munch, an artist from Norway. The 160 works had an impact as powerful as it was short lived. Within months, the "Armory Show" opened in New York, featuring 1,300 works that introduced droves of goggle-eyed Americans to everybody who was to become anybody in the history of 20th-century art, from Paul Cezanne to Marcel Duchamp.Paris was the capital of the international art world, and little more was heard about artists from the frozen north—except for Munch. Nordic art was so little known that when John V. Loeb, a financier, became America's ambassador to Denmark in 1981, he was amazed to discover the "unusual and fascinating" work of its artists. Mr Loeb was no art neophyte. His parents collected French and Italian pictures, and he already had a collection of German Expressionists. Impressed by Danish art, he started buying. The four paintings by Hammershoi in "Luminous Modernism" are from the important Danish art collection he built. Decades after he started, he says the paintings "are so warm and peaceful, they help to calm me down."Munch became so famous that Andy Warhol, given to capitalising on icons from Mao to Marilyn, produced his own rendering of "The Scream". Now Hammershoi's star is on the rise; last month one of his interiors sold at Sotheby's London for £577,250. Yet there are many paintings in "Luminous Modernism" by artists as little known in America today as they were a century ago. In fact, some of the countries represented in the show didn't exist at the time of the original exhibition. Finland and Iceland only subsequently gained independence, joining Sweden, Norway and Denmark in the Nordic group.This reporter's weakness for animals led to special attention being paid to a schmaltzy sunset scene, "Horse by the Beach", a 1902 work by Sweden's Nils Kreuger. "Flower Meadow in the North" (pictured top), an animal-free 1905 painting by Norway's Harald Sohlberg, may sound sentimental, but it isn't. A band of white daisies, like a large handkerchief, stretches out into the distance, cut across by a silver river beyond which rises a dark forest. The sky is an icy blue. This is a poetic work to stand before and slowly enjoy.The exhibition is staged by the American-Scandinavian Foundation, established in 1911. The creation of the foundation and the travelling show of Nordic art were both responses to events that are as little known nowadays as some of the art on view. Back then the mass migration of Nordic native sons to the new world was causing alarm. From the early 19th century to the outbreak of the first world war, more than a million Swedes settled in America, many in the prairie land of the Midwest. Swedish commissions studied how to stop the farmer drain. At the same time, bridges were built between the old world, the émigrés and the people they lived among. Happily, this spirit of relationship-building continues. The Kings and Queens of Sweden and Norway, the Crown Prince and Princess of Denmark, and the presidents of Iceland and Finland flew to New York for the official opening of "Luminous Modernism". The next night, at the gala fundraising ball, they were joined by hundreds of Nordic-Americans who seemed delightfully comfortable straddling their new and ancestral homes. May this show will do the same for Nordic artists.is at Scandinavia House in New York until February 11th 2012