EUROPE NEWS

By lunchtime on the second day, TUPNews had given away all my business cards and found enough story ideas to launch my own magazine, so I elected to take the afternoon off and explore Copenhagen.

I ended up hitting three art galleries, enjoying each one more than the last.

The Bertel Thorvaldsen sculpture museum is in the old town, near the royal palace and finance ministry. This quarter is worth checking out just for the weird spires of nearby churches, and of the old stock exchange.

Not a particular fan of sculpture, I was a little reluctant, but the charming girl at the concierge desk had recommended it particularly, and I didn’t want to let her down.

Say what you like about Thorvaldsen, but the man had a good line in great big fuck-off statues of popes and kings. Most of them look like they should be sitting on plinths, not nose-to-nose in a modest-sized gallery – the scale is a little unnerving. You’re in and out in twenty minutes, but as one-trick ponies go, Thorvaldsen gets the thumbs-up.

Next up was the Nikolaj contemporary art center, which I found by dumb luck. Went to see the inside of a cool-looking church with a cool-looking spire, turns out someone’s converted it into a cool little modern art gallery.

The exhibition focused on the Fluxus movement, one of my least favourite. Lots of “War is over if you want it”, crazy beat happenings and general hippy carryings-on, but one gem: a poster and recorded commentary of a two-ball football match that took place on Iffley Road football ground in Oxford in 1973, between University College and St. John’s College. The commentary was Danish, so I do not know the result.

Again, twenty minutes in and out. But by further dumb luck, Wednesday is free museum day in Copenhagen, so I wasn’t sweating it.

I had inadvertently saved the best for last, in the form of the magnificent Statens Museum for Kunst, which was recently extended. The new building itself is fantastic – large, vaulted and white-marble, but with a great deal of natural light, most of which comes through a sixty-foot high glass window that overlooks a park. There is amphitheatre-type seating in the atrium where one can sit and look out on the city. It also has a do-it-yourself cloakroom, with little lockers, which I loved.

Artwise, it’s a neat little collection, with the highlight being the preposterous “Highlights” exhibition, a nine-room show that attempted to show the visitor highlights of all art from the last seven hundred years. The curator has attempted this despite not having any real big hitters, aside from a couple of Matisse and a lesser-known Picasso. I love the optimism.

The same curator may be responsible for the new Rembrandt exhibition, which features two paintings that may or may not be newly-discovered Rembrandts previously dismissed as fakes. The museum is confident that these paintings, which had been kicking around upstairs for decades, are the real deal, and is as such happy to charge money for the privilege of viewing them – but one must respect their honesty in titling the exhibition: “Rembrandt?”

The sun was starting to set and my feet were starting to ache, so I set off for my hotel, hoping to hit a hot-dog stand on the way.