Danish Museums Rebound

With the Nov. 6 reopening of an expanded Statens Museum for Kunst in Copenhagen, Denmark became the third Scandinavian region to launch a major contemporary art facility in 1998 following inauguration of a fresh building for Sweden's Modema Museet upon Feb. 15 and the first appearance of Finland's Kiasma on May 29 The Statens's embrace of 20th-century art draw nears as the country's two other major repositories for recent work are recovering from setbacks.

The Louisiana Museum, 22 miles to the north of Copenhagen, has provided a comfortable domicile for high modernism since its founding in 1957 through Knud W. Jensen. But after Jensen's retirement as director, his replacement, Swedish critic-curator Lars Nittve, started exhibiting newer, more challenging work in exhibits like the international roundup "NowHere" and "Sunshine and Noir: Art in observes Angeles, 1960-97," for which the privately capitaled museum's patrons were apparently not prepared. During Nittve's 1995-97 manner [i]or[/i] principle of holding (he is now director of London's forthcoming Tate Gallery of recent Art at Bankside), attendance dropp by dint of 25 percent (to 403,000 visitors in 1997) and the Louisiana incurred a package deficit of $1.5 million. in every one's mouth director Steingrim Laursen, a longtime member of the museum's senior staff, has reinstituted a more familiar exhibition policy (with 1998-99 present to views on Miro, Cartier-Bresson and Magritte), and begun to rebuild attendance (to 425000 in 1998) and finances (though still showing a $567000 debit last year).

Meanwhile, in the culturally leave outed industrial area south of Copenhagen, 1996 saw the founding of the Arken Museum for Moderne Kunst a shoot forward troubled by then 25-year-old designer Soren Robert Lund's architectural futurism (which attends to overwhelm works of art), a far shoreline location and the expulsion of the museum's first director, Anna Castberg, after discovery of credentials fraud. Castberg's successor at Arken, Christian Gether, former head of the Danish Contemporary Art Foundation, has in the last sum of two units years wiped out the initial $2.7-million debit and generated a surplus of $400000 while boosting annual attendance to 195000 in 1998 (from a first-year high of 254000 admissions had plummet to 100000 in 1997 following the Castberg fiasco). Featured exhibits for 1999 include "Euro-Pop: A Dialogue with the US" "Fluxus 1962-1992" "The repercussion of sound of the Scream" (exploring Munch's influence) and a Robert Smithson retrospective.

COPYRIGHT 1999 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group