The Louisiana Museum of Modern Art ~ Denmark's Most Visited Art Museum ~ Greets Our Editor

Written by Harold Harrington Tuesday, 03 April 2012 22:15

The Louisiana Museum of Modern Art is an international private museum with a considerable collection of superior modern art. It is the most visited art museum in Denmark. The name of the museum derives from the first owner of the property, Alexander Brun, who named the villa after his three wives, all named Louise. Situated 45 minutes outside Copenhagen, the museum opened in 1958. It was founded by Knud W. Jensen, who wanted to create a museum where Danes could see modern art, which until then had no special place in the Danish museums and show the interaction between visual art, architecture and the landscape. From the mid-60s on, Louisiana changed its approach from being a predominantly Danish museum to a museum with a renowned international collection. Its permanent collection includes more than 3700 works and is one of the largest in Scandinavia. It starts in the period after 1945 with artists like Picasso, Giacometti, Dubuffet, Yves Klein, Rauschenberg, Henry Moore, Louise Bourgeois, Philip Guston, Morris Louis, Jorn, Baselitz, Polke, Kiefer, and Per Kirkeby. Every year Louisiana offers 4-6 temporary exhibitions, presenting both great modernist artists and the latest international contemporary art. Throughout the years the museum has persisted in taking the international view as a premise for its exhibitions and Louisiana’s status implies that the museum is able to attract future exhibitions and artists of a high standard available to only very few Scandinavian museums. Louisiana has become well known and recognized for what Knud W. Jensen called the sauna principle. He divided the exhibitions into ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ – the hot ones featured the artists that people knew and could recognize, the cold ones those they had never heard of, the ‘difficult’, often contemporary artists. The trick was to link the two so that people would be attracted to the city of Humlebæk by the popular exhibitions. It has never been Louisiana’s goal to represent the whole chronological line through the art of the epoch. Louisiana’s collection is characterized by concentrating on more compact groups of works and artists into which they offer the viewer deeper insights. This is especially true of artists like Giacometti and Asger Jorn, who are both represented by several very fine works – and it is also true of a number of artistic periods: European Nouveau Réalisme with Yves Klein, American Pop Art with Warhol and Lichtenstein, German art of the 1980s with Kiefer and Baselitz, as well as video art from the 1990s until today with important installations by, among others, Bill Viola and Gary Hill. Louisiana also displays a collection of Pre-Columbian art. Consisting of more than 400 objects, the collection was a donation from the Wessel-Bagge Foundation in 2001. The grounds around the museum houses a landscaped sculpture garden. It is made up by a plateau and the sloping terrain towards Øresund and is dominated by huge, ancient specimens trees and sweeping vistas of the sea. It contains works by such artists as Jean Arp, Max Ernst, Max Bill, Alexander Calder, Henri Laurens, Louise Bourgeois, Joan Miró and Henry Moore. The sculptures are either placed so that they can be viewed from within, in special sculpture yards or independently around the gardens, forming a synthesis with the lawns, the trees and the sea. There are also examples of site-specific art by such artists as Enzo Cucchi, Dani Karavan and George Trakas. Several times a week – in spring and autumn – Louisiana goes ‘live’. Louisiana Live offers museum guests a series of engaging and highly interesting evenings that make the museum a cultural meeting-place. The Louisiana Café has one of Denmark’s most beautiful panoramic views of the Øresund sound. Throughout the summer season, one can enjoy the food and the view outdoors from the Calder Patio. The museum is included in the Patricia Schultz book: "1,000 Places to See Before You Die." Website:_ www.louisiana.dk/

The Louisiana Museum on Modern Art is the forum for the first presentation in Scandinavia of American artist Walton Ford. The exhibition is opened from December 8th to March 6th 2011. His large-scale watercolours are melodramatic, powerful, and wondrous depictions of the way human civilization and our imagination has perceived and treated the animal world. Walton Ford is a brilliant artist in the classical sense and at the same time an impressive and truly contemporary storyteller. His large, masterful watercolours of animals are at once seducing and alarming – full of vivid colours, bizarre clues and surreal symbolism. Walton Ford paints watercolours populated with animals of all kinds: birds, fish, monkeys, oxen, tigers and lions, either consuming and fighting one another bestially or being mutilated by human beings in a grim, inscrutable yet beautiful universe. Everything in the artist’s pictorial fables is painted with a wealth of details and accuracy that lures the viewer into a close study of almost every brush stroke. Stylistically, Walton Ford’s animal tales recall classic naturalistic, zoological illustrations from a bygone age, executed with technical perfection; but on close examination they are far from the objectivity to which science aspires; rather, they are strangely horrifying representations, and sometimes with a humorous angle. . . Louisiana Museum has links between the exhibition activities and the development of the collections and the exhibitions often leave traces in the collection thanks to acquisitions or donations. The museum has gained a reputation of being in touch with the zeitgeist of the contemporary art world that draw in the crowds. The Lousiana Museum is a singular building designed with fundamental idea of joining architecture with art and nature. In 1958, architects Jørgen Bo and Wilhelm Wohlert were commissioned to design the museum taking as their point of departure the old patrician villa. Over the years they have been responsible for the ongoing expansion of the museum. The Louisiana today stands as a masterpiece of Danish modernist architecture. An architecture particularly famous for the way the new extensions have been added to the old main building all the way adapting to the beautiful park landscape with its trees, forest lake, lawns and the Øresund sound. In 1966 and 1971 the museum was gradually extended with the West Wing. Then in 1976 this was followed by the Concert Hall. In 1982 the South Wing was built, and for many years it housed the museum’s own collection. The South Wing was built into the landscape to maintain Louisiana’s ‘low-lying’ look. With construction of the East Wing, which was completed in 1992, the buildings of the museum have been linked in a kind of circle. In 1994 the Children’s House was built; it helps children and the young to develop close ties with the museum. Outside the landscape windows of the Children’s House lies the Lake Garden with its winding paths, steep slopes and architectural works by a number of international architects such as Ralph Erskine, Joseph Paul Kleihues, Aldo Rossi and Dominique Perrault. New stylistic elements have been introduced here and there, but the continuity has been retained.

The Louisiana Museum is exhibiting the works of Anselm Kiefer until 9 January 2011. Kiefer is one of the post-war period's greatest and most famous German artists, and for many years he has enjoyed a central place in Louisiana's collection. This major exhibition features works from four decades from Kiefer's artistic voyage. This is the first major showing of this important artist in Scandinavia and at the same time forms a grand finale in Louisiana’s showings of the post-war German ‘gang of four’: Polke, Richter, Baselitz and now Kiefer. A central theme of the exhibition is found in the artist’s particular insistence on the relevance of grand narratives. Kiefer (born 1945) uses myths that to a considerable extent absorb classical material, but which must be called both the myths of the age and his own myths, often with a starting point in the artist’s own traumatized nationality. The exhibition presents around 90 works ranging from the earliest years after the Academy of Art in Karlsruhe in 1969 and all the way up until today, showing brand new pictures by Kiefer, who in 2008 was honored with “Der Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels” (The Peace Prize of the German Booksellers), which was thus awarded for the first time to a visual artist. There are five loosely demarcated themes, each of which clarifies artistic concerns to which Kiefer’s works offer central contributions: New Works, Landscape as Myth, World Time – Life Time, Iconoclasm and The Book. A brand new film about Anselm Kiefer with the title “Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow” is shown in the museum cinema. The film is by Sophie Fiennes and was shown to great acclaim outside the competition at this year’s Cannes Festival. The film documents Kiefer’s working processes and can be experienced as a personal journey into the universe that Kiefer has built up since 2000 in the mountains in the south of France. Kiefer's works also form part of the educational museum's educational program. The Museum has a long history of cultural-historical exhibitions and of presenting large photo, design and architecture shows, and their publishing program produces exquisite catalogs to accompany their exhibitions. When Louisiana celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2008, some of the artists who had exhibited at the museum were asked to design a print to be sold in support of Louisiana. A visit to this Dane jewel is a must for any art lover.