A Man Who Knew the Ins and Outs of Designing a Museum

A few weeks before the Getty Museum’s opening, back in the fall of 1997, its then-director, John Walsh, was giving me a little walking tour of Richard Meier’s magisterial hilltop creation, and one thing I cottoned to right away was the sense of journey filtered through the recurrent motif of in and out: the way visitors could explore a few rooms of art and then experience dazzling vistas from outdoor patios and corridors before returning, refreshed, into more art-filled halls.

“It reminds me,” I told Walsh, “of my single favorite museum in the world, the Louisiana in Denmark.”

To which Walsh replied that he wasn’t the least bit surprised: “Louisiana is one of the places we took Meier, and that is precisely the effect . . . we wanted him to try and recapture.”

The Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, in the village of Humlebaek, is about a half-hour north of Copenhagen. The facility, perched on a bluff, its verdant lawn girdled by woods, overlooking a narrow blue sea strait with, in the distance, Sweden, is one of the most beloved museums--certainly of contemporary art--anywhere in the world. And it’s been much on my mind recently, owing to news of the death earlier this month, at age 84, of its founder and veritable incarnation, Knud Jensen, just as surely one of the most beloved figures in the art world.

The day I first met Jensen almost 20 years ago, I got him talking about the philosophy that had animated his expansion into the surrounding woods, during the late 1950s, of the original manor house (named after the wives, all three of them Louisas, of the man who had first established the estate back in the 19th century). “Have you noticed how in museums that feel like labyrinths, part of your mind is always stuck on hypothesizing a means of escape?” he’d asked me, an elfin gleam in his eye (people called him King Puck). “At Louisiana, I felt that escape should always be just a few walls away. Also, the views of the woods and the lawn seeping in all the time allowed for the perpetual play of art and nature which has become one of all our hallmarks.”

He went on to point out that there was another side benefit: “Recent art can get quite fierce. Thus, it’s good that we’re always offering a way out, some safe place to turn the eyes, like a familiar tree, a stretch of lawn, children playing outside, some safe haven from the wild beasts.”

Jensen hardly started out as any sort of art-world lion tamer. The son of a highly cultured cheese magnate, following World War II (during which father and son quietly sheltered resistance activists in their far-flung warehouses), Jensen fils took on the leadership of the family concern, proving quite adept at business. One day in the mid-1950s, officials from Kraft Cheese, probably his principal exporting client, approached him with a stark offer: Either he would sell them his company the next morning for something over $1 million dollars--a decent price--or the next day they would withdraw their business and bankrupt him. He decided to accept.

Jensen was about 40 at the time and now had to reinvent his life. A million dollars was a good deal of money then but hardly a Rockefellerian sum. Still, he resolved to establish some sort of institution devoted to the arts, next to the cheese business, his other great passion. He located the dilapidated Louisiana estate and launched his quixotic project.

Vilhelm Wohlert, one of the two local architects Jensen brought on to realize his dreams (the other was Jorgen Bo), had studied at UC Berkeley, where he’d been exposed to the California Modern ideas of Bauhaus transplants Richard Neutra and Rudolph Schindler, and Wohlert now transferred some of those ideas back to Denmark. (It’s intriguing in this context to think of the Getty as the culmination of a sort of quadruple whammy: Weimar ‘20s International Modernism transposed into California Modernism and then back into Danish contemporary and then back once again to that L.A hilltop.)

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The museum the three men succeeded in fashioning--vaulting glass corridors joining low-flung white-brick and teak pavilions--would have remained but a shell without the proper art to fill it. And in this regard, Jensen was shameless: He would lay preposterously exuberant siege to the artists he most coveted, relentlessly melting their hesitations (who was this little man?) with his indefatigable charm and vaulting enthusiasm, until many of them or their heirs (Henry Moore, Jean Arp, Alberto Giacometti, Alexander Calder, Max Ernst, Morris Louis and countless others) began lavishing their works on the place, for free or at steep discounts. Jensen could otherwise never have afforded the astonishing treasure trove he was able to build up.

Jensen, incidentally, had a particular relish for California artists: Sam Francis, Ed Kienholz and Robert Irwin were all among those exhibited regularly and in depth. (And it was Louisiana that generated “Sunshine & Noir,” the critically acclaimed, late-’90s touring exhibition of current L.A. art.)

Jensen was vigorous to the end (he died peacefully in his sleep a few days after a stroke)--endlessly delightful and delightable, insatiable in his curiosities and his enthusiasms.

Twenty years ago, his museum was going through a bit of a financial squeeze, and some of Jensen’s colleagues were urging spartan cutbacks. He resisted. “I’m reminded of a story about our old Danish prince, Christian Friederich,” he declared, that gleam radiating from his entire being. “In 1814, after Denmark had ended up on the wrong side of the Napoleonic Wars and had gone bankrupt, Christian Friederich’s advisors came to him with a proposal to close the Royal Academy of Fine Arts as an austerity measure. He refused. ‘Poor and miserable we certainly are,’ he declared. ‘Now let’s get silly too, so that we can just be done altogether with this business of being a state.’ And that academy is there to this day.”

Jensen likewise resisted--Louisiana launched its biggest expansion yet--and the place is there to this day. It will now doubtless carry Knud Jensen’s incomparable spirit well into the coming millennium.

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Lawrence Weschler profiled Knud Jensen in the New Yorker in 1980; that piece is included in his recent collection, “A Wanderer in the Perfect City” (Ruminator Books).