The admission for this museum was free and we were there at opening-hour 10 a.m. Only a handful of people were gathering outside the museum in the rain, so we had the luxury of walking around in empty rooms with art, which was really pleasant!
The first floor is where we spend nearly all our time. The Danish art was there, along with the foreign art and the sculptures. The sculptures, already my favorite objects to photograph without a doubt, where lined up pretty neatly. The lighting was perfect to make nice photo's! Take a look at the following examples:
After we had seen the Danish art and the sculptures, we were moving on to the foreign art where we faced the cultural shock of our lives. I haven't been to many museums in my life, but I know cultural madness when I see it (I'll describe it in a moment). This museum has built up its collections around one big room, surrounded by smaller rooms. The big room has a chronological collection, while the smaller rooms surrounding it are 'themed'. For me, as an art n00b, this was quite confusing as I didn't know to which movement and period in art a work belonged. The museum did not give a lot of side information about the paintings beyond the basics like the title and the artist.
The madness was as follows. We were walking through the first small themed rooms of the foreign art when we got to the big room. It looked like this:
It was all the way crammed with paintings! It was a cultural orgy like I've never witnessed before. Paintings are so nice, but in this way it was too much of a good thing and it was totally impossible to enjoy the art in the way it should, in my opinion, be enjoyed. I like the way Tate Britain displayed their works. Plenty of space around it, benches near the big works, so you could sit down for awhile while enjoying them. In this room, they had one splendid Van Ruysdael painting, but I could hardly enjoy it. It was too distracting to see it being surrounded by tens of other paintings. This room actually made me a little pissed. We moved on quickly, to the smaller rooms where the paintings were hung up with more space between them.
All in all, I did enjoy myself in this place, but that one room fucked up the experience quite a bit. As a Dutch girl, I really like the Dutch paintings and it hurt me to see them being abused in this cultural orgy.
Museum experts, please tell me that this isn't normal???
3 comments:
Don't know if I count as a museum expert, but I know that until the early 20th century, this was the way every fine art gallery was organised. The concept of 'giving the painting some room' is from a fairly recent date. There are wonderful paintings of art galleries in the 16th and 17th centuries, in which the walls are completely covered with paintings. Not like in Copenhagen, but literally frame-to-frame, with no space whatsoever between them.
Personally I prefer the 'modern' approach, in which a painting gets some room to breathe, so to speak. But in the end it's the viewer that has to focus on, and connect and bond with the painting. So through the years I've learned to concentrate on just one painting, blocking out everything around it (and that also includes other museum visitors). It takes some effort, but it definitely enriches the experience!
By the way, I agree that every museum should provide a nice bench or (preferably) a couch from which you can study and enjoy the paintings! My absolute favourite in this regard is the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, which has installed incredibly comfy Chesterfield couches in all of their rooms.
you are not just a museum expert, you are my PERSONAL museum expert :P
How can half blind people like me even see the paintings on the top row? Boh?
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