Louisiana Museum of Modern Art

Inspiration from Denmark

VBAT Refreshing

Published in

Inside VBAT

4 min readJul 12, 2018

Written by Nathalie Sobin
Creative Intern at VBAT

Louisiana Design Museum — Sculpture garden. By Nathalie Sobin

One of my absolute favourite museums in the world is Louisiana, situated forty kilometres north of Copenhagen in Denmark. Knud Jensen founded Louisiana in 1958 and his intention was to create a museum for modern Danish art. A few years later Louisiana became an international museum with many internationally renowned works instead, and is today one of the world’s most respected exhibition venues.

This time at Louisiana, the famous German painter Gabrielle Münter’s work was exhibited. Her independent, searching and colourful artwork finally fully comes to light, after she has for a very long time been seen in many people’s eyes as “an unnecessary companion of Kandinsky”. Those are her written words from her journal year 1926. One other quote of hers that I find extremely interesting is:

“That a woman can have an original and genuine talent and be a creative person in her own right — one tends to forget that.” She has a point;

Munter is almost always mentioned in connection with the Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky and as a co-founder of the influential, short-lived “Blue Reiter”, which was a group of artists from the years 1911–1914.

On this exhibition you will enjoy how finally Münter draws out of the shadow and into the spotlights and gives us a full picture of her sixty-year career, both before and her development after Kandinsky. Kandinsky was her teacher and fiancé, who ended up abandoning her. Through ten themes and over 130 artworks, many of them have never been shown before; you will experience her as an open and experimental artist who had her own unique style. Her artwork became famous internationally.

Before her death she writes that Kandinsky had been right in his prediction that “belatedly, but surely, I would receive wide recognition.”

Another section of the museum showed Ed Ruscha, who is known as “The Mr. Cool of Arts”. He has created some of the most iconic interpretations of modern America. He is an important figure in the twentieth century of American history of art. He has interpreted developments in modern visual culture in and around his home-town of Los Angeles. He is most famous from his precise representations of Hollywood logos, gas stations, images of words and archetypical landscapes. His work is characterised by his cool, cinematic kind of style. His work is full of subtle codes and is very easy to decode.

Once you feel the hunger kicks in, you can enjoy a delicious Nordic lunch and stroll around in the magnificent sculpture garden of the museum. If you look over the ocean you can see my home country Sweden. There is something about the Danish architecture and design, so many captivating details, never too much so it gets overwhelming and never too little, always in a perfect fascinating balance. I guess there is a reason why Danish design is on the map of the leading countries within design.