Qualla: Louisiana Museum of Modern Art

Louisiana Museum of Modern Art: Introduction

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit IMBiblio, CC BY-SA 2.0. Alexander Brun married three times. Every one of his wives was named Louise. When the court huntsman built his villa on the coast north of Copenhagen in 1855, he called the estate Louisiana, and the name — which sounds like a claim about the American South and is in fact a small domestic coincidence repeated three times — outlived him, outlived the house's usefulness, and now belongs to one of the most admired museum buildings on earth.

Image: IMBiblio | CC BY-SA 2.0

Louisiana Museum of Modern Art: The Man Who Sold Cheese

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jorchr, CC BY 3.0. Knud W. Jensen was a businessman in the dairy trade with a serious interest in art and literature. In 1952 he bought the publishing house Gyldendal; he founded an association called Art at the Workplace that leased paintings to companies so employees could live with them. What he...

Image: Jorchr | CC BY 3.0

Louisiana Museum of Modern Art: A Covered Walk in a Park

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Electricnet, CC BY 3.0. Jensen first asked Jørn Utzon, who lived nearby at Hellebæk. Utzon was already committed to the Sydney Opera House and declined. The commission went instead to Jørgen Bo and Vilhelm Wohlert, who spent months simply walking the property before they drew anything, and what they eve...

Image: Electricnet | CC BY 3.0

Louisiana Museum of Modern Art: Cirkusiana

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Own work, Public domain. It opened in 1958 and the reviews were not universally kind. The building had no climate control and not enough storage, faults Jensen freely admitted. The Swedish paper Dagens Nyheter nicknamed it Cirkusiana, on the grounds that a museum also running concerts, films, dance and p...

Image: Own work | Public domain

Louisiana Museum of Modern Art: Closing the Circle

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit IMBiblio, CC BY-SA 2.0. Louisiana grew the way it was designed to, by extending the walk. Two floors of West Wing arrived in 1966 and 1971. A concert hall followed in 1976, fitted with chairs by Poul Kjærholm and acoustics good enough that Grigory Sokolov, Arcadi Volodos, Emmanuel Pahud and Midori have ...

Image: IMBiblio | CC BY-SA 2.0

Louisiana Museum of Modern Art: Sculpture Above the Sound

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Yo Hibino from Aichi, Japan, CC BY 2.0. The park slopes from a plateau down toward the Øresund, thick with old specimen trees, and the sculptures are placed through it rather than in it — some in enclosed yards visible from indoors, some standing alone on the grass with nothing behind them but water and, on a clear day...

Image: Yo Hibino from Aichi, Japan | CC BY 2.0