Louisiana Museum of Modern Art

The Louisiana owes its name to a nineteenth-century romantic and its reputation to a cheese wholesaler. The estate on the Øresund coast at Humlebæk was built in 1855 by Alexander Brun, master of the royal hunt, who married three times, each time to a woman called Louise. A century later the businessman Knud W. Jensen bought the neglected villa to found a museum of modern art, kept the poetic name, and opened in 1958. The old house still serves as the main entrance.

What makes the Louisiana famous is less any single work than the way it is built into its landscape. Jensen first approached Jørn Utzon, who was busy with Sydney, and then gave the job to the young architects Jørgen Bo and Vilhelm Wohlert. After months of walking the site they designed a sequence of low buildings linked by glass corridors that wind through the park, so that rooms of art alternate with views out to trees, lawns and the sea. Their debt to Californian modernism, especially the houses of Rudolph Schindler and Richard Neutra, is plain, and the museum became a landmark of Danish modern architecture. It grew in stages, with a west wing in the 1960s and 1970s, and a south wing in 1982 with larger rooms for big international works.

The collection begins after the Second World War. After seeing Documenta in Kassel in 1959, Jensen persuaded a sceptical board to turn to international art, and the museum built up a collection that includes a room of sculptures by Alberto Giacometti and works by Picasso, Yves Klein, Rauschenberg, Warhol, Lichtenstein, Kiefer, Hockney and Asger Jorn. Several works were made for the building itself, among them Roy Lichtenstein's Figures in Landscape and a series of paintings by Sam Francis. Yayoi Kusama's installation Gleaming Lights of the Souls is on permanent display.

Outside, the sculpture park slopes down towards the Øresund under old specimen trees, with works by Henry Moore, Alexander Calder, Jean Arp, Max Ernst, Joan Miró and others set in sculpture yards and on open lawns so that art, trees and water are seen together. Between six and ten temporary exhibitions a year keep the museum lively, but many visitors return simply for the walk from room to garden and back.

Getting there

The museum stands at Gammel Strandvej 13 in Humlebæk, about 35 km north of Copenhagen and 10 km south of Helsingør. Copenhagen Airport (CPH) is about 40 km away. Direct trains run from Copenhagen Central Station to Humlebæk in around 40 minutes, and the museum is a 10–15 minute walk from the station; bus 388 along the coast also stops nearby. There is free parking at the main entrance.