Louisiana Museum of Modern Art: Landscape, Sculpture and Design North of Copenhagen

Few museums ask you to look out of the window as often as they ask you to look at the walls. The Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, on the Øresund coast at Humlebæk in North Zealand, was planned so that its galleries, glass corridors, lawns and sea views would be experienced together, with the landscape treated as part of the collection rather than a backdrop to it. That makes it a natural stop for anyone interested in how Danish modernism thinks about space, light and everyday experience, and it is why our Scandinavian Design Small Group Tour through Denmark, Sweden and Finland spends part of its sixth day there. This article looks at how the site, the buildings and the sculpture park work as one designed whole.

Why the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art is a design story

Most art museums are built to concentrate attention: closed rooms, controlled light, nothing to distract from the work. The Louisiana Museum of Modern Art set out to do something different. Its buildings are low and horizontal, stretched out across a park of old trees, and they keep opening onto the lawns, a lake and the Sound. The museum itself describes the architecture as a major work of Danish modernism, in the “discreet modernism” of the late 1950s, and says its architects’ starting idea was to link the buildings with their natural surroundings.

That idea is the reason Louisiana belongs in a study of design and not only of art. Walking through it, you experience the same principles that run through Danish design more broadly: honest materials, human scale, daylight and a close relationship between an object and the way people actually use it. Here the object is a museum, and the use is the slow, unhurried business of looking.

A country house, three Louises and a founder’s idea

The museum’s unusual name comes from the house it grew out of. The property was built and named in 1855 by Alexander Brun, an officer and Master of the Royal Hunt, who married three women in succession, all of them called Louise. When Knud W. Jensen took over the estate in 1955, he kept the name for his new museum.

Jensen’s aim was simple and, at the time, unusual. According to the museum, modern art was hardly represented in Danish museums in the 1950s, and he wanted a place where Danes could see it. His first plan was a home for modern Danish art, but within a few years he changed course and built an international collection instead. He also wanted a museum with a wide audience rather than an elite one, a place that would feel informal and welcoming. The public answered quickly. The museum records that around 40,000 visitors were expected in the first year after it opened in 1958, and that 225,000 came.

From the start, Jensen also thought about the youngest visitors. A room for children sat just inside the front door of the original museum, and in 1994 that idea grew into a three-storey Children’s Wing, an early sign of how seriously the museum takes the experience of everyone who walks through it.

Bo and Wohlert’s “covered stroll”

In the mid-1950s Jensen asked the architects Jørgen Bo and Vilhelm Wohlert to design a museum based on the old villa. Jensen at first imagined the villa plus a separate exhibition pavilion at the edge of the cliff facing the Sound. Working together, the three arrived at a different plan: buildings linked so that visitors would feel they were on a “covered stroll” through the park. Construction began in mid-1956 and the museum opened in 1958.

Bo and Wohlert’s original design used long whitewashed walls, exposed structures, laminated wooden ceilings, deep-red tiled floors and large glass panels that open the interior to the surroundings. The museum traces two influences. Wohlert had studied at the University of California at Berkeley, where he came to know the timber houses of the San Francisco Bay Area, and the buildings also echo the simplicity of traditional Japanese architecture. The museum sums up the guiding qualities as coherence and gentleness, and quotes Wohlert’s own aim: “Each step should feel like an experience.”

On the museum’s fortieth anniversary, Jensen wrote that the site “made its own demands and became in a sense our employer”, deciding where the buildings should stand and where the sculptures should go. That phrase captures the design method. The architects did not impose a monumental form on the land. They let the terrain, the existing trees and the views shape a building that is, in effect, a route. The 1958 museum consisted of glass corridors and three pavilions connecting the old villa to a cafeteria with a view across the water to Sweden. That first section, which includes the Giacometti Hall and the Jorn Hall, is known as the North Wing.

Furniture was part of the same thinking. The museum notes that furniture and fittings for the new museum were designed by Wohlert himself, and in 1958 he received both the Eckersberg Medal and the Træprisen, the latter for Louisiana.

Seven stages of growth without losing the low profile

Louisiana outgrew its first buildings quickly, and its later history is a lesson in how to extend a building without spoiling it. The museum lists seven extensions and alterations, all by Bo and Wohlert, joined by the architect Claus Wohlert from the East Wing onwards.

The two floors of the West Wing were added in 1966 and 1971. In 1976 came the Concert Hall, whose acoustics suit chamber music and which is also used for debates and lectures; its seats were designed for the room by the furniture designer Poul Kjærholm, a reminder of how closely Danish architecture and furniture design have worked together. The South Wing of 1982 gave the museum a gallery with a higher ceiling for larger works, and it was built into the terrain to keep Louisiana’s low profile.

The East Wing, completed in 1991, joined the buildings into a roughly circular form. It lies underground, which suits drawings, prints, photography and video that must be kept out of daylight, and it leads to the Great Hall beneath the Calder Terrace. Its effect on the visit was just as important. The museum says that from then on you could walk all the way around, sometimes concentrating on the art and sometimes turning to a view of the park or the Sound. The Children’s Wing followed in 1994 and an extension for visitor facilities and the shop in 1998. A comprehensive modernisation between 2003 and 2006 added up-to-date technical systems while keeping, in the museum’s words, the original architectural scheme, aesthetics and materiality. Funding from the philanthropic foundation Realdania for the 60th anniversary in 2018 paid for further work that looked back to Bo and Wohlert’s original intentions.

The sculpture park and the Sound

Outside, the design argument continues. The museum describes a walk in the Sculpture Park as an essential part of the Louisiana experience at any time of year: it is where the panoramic views of the Sound open up and where you can see how the buildings sit in the landscape. Around 50 sculptures stand in the park, and they are part of the permanent collection. Some are unmistakable; others are almost hidden, or blend into their surroundings.

Placement is the point. The museum explains that the sculptures are positioned to interact with the architecture and nature around them. Henry Moore’s Reclining Figure No. 5 (Seagram) stands out by the cliff with the Sound behind it. Richard Serra’s The Gate in the Gorge and George Trakas’s Self Passage were acquired for specific sites and have become part of the terrain itself. Three works by Alexander Calder stand in front of the café on the Calder Terrace, and the park also includes Henry Heerup’s granite figures, yellow brushstrokes by Roy Lichtenstein and stone globes by Alicja Kwade.

Jensen had firm views on outdoor sculpture. He believed good sculptures always pass the “test of strength” against nature, and that the only real danger to an outdoor display was too much of it. “Each work demands to be seen without too much competition from other works of art and without a restrictive landscape setting,” he said. The result is a park that feels spacious rather than crowded, where the changing weather, light and seasons alter how the same piece looks from one visit to the next.

The landscape architects Ole and Edith Nørgaard laid out the general outlines of the original park. Later, Lea Nørgaard and Vibeke Holscher shaped the ground around the new extensions so that the park echoes the maze-like plan of the buildings, always hinting at something around the next corner. On the other side of the museum lies the Lake Garden, named after a lake that, according to the museum, was dug out and turned into a fortified privateer port during the British bombardment of Copenhagen in 1807. Today it forms a calm backdrop to the Children’s Wing and to the sculptures in the Giacometti Gallery.

Galleries that frame the view

Inside, the collection is shaped as deliberately as the buildings. The museum describes it as a good 4,000 works covering the period from 1945 to the present, with an emphasis on painting and sculpture. It has never tried to tell the whole chronological story of modern art. Instead it concentrates on groups of works and particular periods: Alberto Giacometti and the Danish painter Asger Jorn, European Nouveau Réalisme with Yves Klein, American Pop Art with Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, German art of the 1980s with Anselm Kiefer and Georg Baselitz, and video art since the 1990s.

Because the collection is too large to show at once, most of it appears in rotating selections alongside temporary exhibitions. A few features are almost always on view, and the museum names the Giacometti Gallery, the Asger Jorn Gallery and Yayoi Kusama’s installation Gleaming Lights of the Souls among the most important. The Giacometti Gallery shows the design approach at its clearest: his figures in a room that looks out onto the Lake Garden, so that sculpture, architecture and landscape are seen in a single glance.

Will the Giacometti Gallery and Kusama’s installation be on view?

Usually, but not always. The museum describes the Giacometti Gallery and the Asger Jorn Gallery as almost always on view, while Kusama’s Gleaming Lights of the Souls can only be seen when the South Wing is open. Temporary exhibitions change through the year, so check the museum’s official website for what is showing when you travel.

Louisiana on the two itineraries

On the Scandinavian Design tour, the visit falls on day six, after the Copenhagen days spent on furniture, textiles and city planning that our article on Copenhagen design and its museums, showrooms and public spaces describes. The day begins with a drive of approximately an hour to Fredensborg and a tour of Jørn Utzon’s Fredensborg Houses, completed in the early 1960s for Danes returning after long periods abroad. A further drive of approximately an hour brings the group to Louisiana, and dinner that evening is at the hotel. The two visits sit well together. Utzon’s courtyard houses and Bo and Wohlert’s museum were designed within a few years of each other in the same North Zealand landscape, and both set modest, low buildings into the terrain with great care; our guide to Jørn Utzon’s architecture in Denmark explores the houses in more depth.

On the Tour of Denmark’s Culture & History, Louisiana comes on day 18. The group transfers to Hillerød to visit Frederiksborg Castle, then sees the Nordmandsdalen sculpture park, which the tour page describes as holding seventy statues. From there the tour travels to Humlebæk for the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, and on the way to Copenhagen it stops to view the Øresund Bridge, which links Denmark and Sweden. Seeing an older sculpture garden and Louisiana’s modern park on the same day makes a telling comparison.

How much walking does a visit to the Louisiana Museum involve?

Both tours are graded Level 2 (Moderate): travellers should be able to carry their own luggage, climb and descend stairs and take part in three to five hours of physical activity a day, the equivalent of walking up to 8 kilometres on uneven ground. At the museum, the route through the galleries is a long circuit on several levels, and the sculpture park extends across the lawns to the cliff above the Sound. The museum says its galleries on all levels are reached by ramps, lifts and stair lifts, though it notes access can occasionally be limited. If you would like to talk through the day in more detail, a Tour Specialist can help.

Is entry to the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art included?

Yes. Both tours include all excursions, entrance fees and local guides, so there is no separate museum ticket to buy. The museum’s opening hours are set by Louisiana itself, so check its official website if you plan your own return visit.

Louisiana within the Scandinavian design route

On the Scandinavian Design tour, Louisiana marks a turning point. The Copenhagen days look at design as objects, showrooms and city spaces; Fredensborg and Louisiana show it applied to housing and to a public institution set in landscape. From here the route continues to Aarhus and on into Sweden and Finland, where the same questions about light, materials and daily life get their own national answers. Our guide to Scandinavian design across Denmark, Sweden and Finland follows that thread through the whole journey. For practical matters such as language, money and when to visit the country, see our answers to common questions about Denmark.

The Louisiana Museum of Modern Art rewards the slow visitor. Its founder wanted a museum where art would speak directly to the viewer, and his architects gave him buildings that step aside so that the art, the trees and the sea can be seen together. Walking its corridors and lawns is as good an introduction as any to the quiet confidence of Danish modernism, and a fitting stop on a small group journey through Scandinavian design, travelling with up to 16 travellers.