Museums

I finally went to my first museum in Copenhagen. The city is filled with them actually, but for some reason it took this long.

First stop was to Statens Museum for Kunst. The building is big, beautiful, and old. My friend Anders (pronounced On-us, not An-ders) and I went to check out the Toulouse Lautrec exhibit and it was great! If you’re like me, you base everything in life on a movie. You may know Toulouse from Moulin Rouge… the short one with the line “the greatest thing you’ll ever learn…”. Remember him? Well supposedly he was actually that crazy in real life and was truly inspired by the Paris entertainment scene.

His models were friends and “ladies of the night” that he met in cafes, cabarets, and dance halls. He’s most known for his bright colors and poster art, but his sketches were just as intriguing. Certain characters were featured several times and the people were always exaggerated and slightly interpreted. Yvette Guilbert was a lady in different drawings and paintings and there was a horribly sad song written about this poor “drunkard” lady. Near the end of Lautrec’s life (he died at age 36) he painted a circus scene that was one of his more interesting we decided. Much different from everything else he did. Overall it was a really great exhibit! We even got to use Anders’ iPhone to listen to some special descriptions of the art. Great use of technology.

Another neat thing they do at the museum is sponsor an artist each to month to interpret artwork. We stumbled upon a really great painting called “And in his eyes I saw death” and a band called Stoffer & Maskinen (Materials & Machinery) that did their own music piece inspired by the work. We could again listen to it on the iPhone while sitting on a bench in front of the painting. A great idea to add yet another sense and enhance the experience.

The next museum was the Carlsberg Glyptotek, which is the private art collection of the Carslberg brewing company’s founder, Carl Jacobsen. The main exhibit Andrew and I went to see was of the artist Gauguin and his pieces inspired by his time in Tahiti and all of Polynesia. He is known for his young Polynesian models and his wood sculptures. I didn’t know anything about him going in so it was neat to see his work. After going through the exhibit we stopped in to see the French painting collection filled with Degas, Renoir, Monet, Manet, and Cezanne. Amazing to see these works up close!