Two More Museums and hints of Spring

(this is regarding Feb 25- March 5)


Wow, I was just looking back on my blog and I realized that I hadn’t posted anything since the end of February! So I’ll be filling everyone in on what I’ve been doing since then but I’ll make a couple separate posts for organization sake.

The last bit of February and the first week of March I again took it easy and didn’t try to cram a lot of things in. I did go to two museums (trying to see them all before the weather gets really nice), the Kunstindustrimuseet (Museum of Art and Design) and to the Thorvaldsen Museum. I had been to the Kunstindustrimuseet very briefly a couple of weeks earlier just to look at a specific piece for a class, but I didn’t really spend enough time looking at all of the objects. This is definitely one of my favorite museums in Copenhagen and it is broken into two parts, one shows notable Danish design furniture and goods (mostly chairs but there are lots of other things) from the 20th century to now so it has example of all of the famous Danish chairs by the big names such as Kaare Klint, Arne Jacobsen, Borge Møgensen and Poul Henningson. It is really fun to look at all of the different ways chairs can be made but just having all of those supposedly comfortable chairs there really makes me want to sit in them! The other part of the museum is given over to more historical international furniture and objects d’art from Europe (mostly France, England and the Netherlands) and from China and Japan (Modern Danish Design is greatly influenced by the Japanese). I also really liked this part, especially the Asian furniture. Finally, I could really tell I was in a design museum in a country known for its design when I went to the bathroom. The interiors were very sleek and modern, with copper stall doors and mahogany toilet seats! (I also really like how most of the public bathrooms here have actual walls for the stalls and door that go the full height of the room.

Later that week I went to the Thorvaldsen Museum, which I think was the first building created specifically to be a museum in Copenhagen and is I think the only museum in Denmark devoted to a specific artist. Thorvaldsen was a famous sculpture in the mid 19th century and he pretty much only worked in the Greek/Roman style, so the statues are pretty much what you would expect to see if you were in Italy. The thing I enjoyed the most about this museum was the architecture and the interior decorations. The building was built in a Greco-Egyptian style and the interiors used very rich yellows, eggplants, greens and red which really offset the white marble statues well. Also, it was arranged so you could see down an entire wing which created a very neat effect.

Although it definatley wasn’t spring yet, the weather was getting to be a little bit more spring like and there was a little something extra in the air. There were also starting to be more sunny or only partly cloudy days, which really so far has been the main clue that spring is coming.