Louisiana Museum of Modern Art
Gabriele Munter – Madchenbildnis - Portrait of a Young Girl (1908)
- Specifications
- Description
- The Maker
- Brand:Louisiana Museum of Modern Art Denmark
- Country: Printed in Denmark
- SKU: LA-11591-FJ
- Material: Printed on paper.
- Dimensions:33.1" x 23.4" (A1)
The work, Portrait of a Young Girl, is almost modeled on areas of color and belongs to the color experiment that also occupied the abstract painter Wassily Kandinsky and the Die Brücke painters in the first decade of the 20th century.
Before Gabriele Münter began to paint, she had already started to photograph around 1900—for the first time on a trip to the U.S.A. With the camera in hand, she began to capture and maintain "the world", but soon she began to paint almost daily and continued on that path throughout her life.
Gabriele Münter was an open and experimental artist with an international network and an extensive exhibition business. During the First World War she stayed in Stockholm and in Copenhagen, where in 1918 she had her artistic breakthrough with her first major solo exhibition at Den Frie in Copenhagen with 100 paintings, 20 stained glass windows, etchings and murals.
In his 60-year artistic career, Gabriele Münter created over 2000 paintings, several thousand drawings, watercolors, stained glass, graphic magazines and around 1200 photographs.
From the beginning, the founder, Knud W. Jensen, intended for the museum to be a home for modern Danish art. But after only a few years he changed course, and instead of being a predominantly Danish collection, Louisiana became an international museum with many internationally renowned works.
Louisiana's close contact and collaboration with the international arts and cultural milieu has since been one of the museum's greatest strengths. And also one of the main reasons that it has been possible for Louisiana to present an exhibition program that has resonated so strongly with the public over the years. Louisiana has thus achieved a standing as one of the world's most respected exhibition venues, and in the future, it will be able to attract exhibitions and artists at a level that few other museums—either in Denmark or abroad—can match.
Knud W. Jensen put into action many of the period's visionary ideas about modern museum operation, including a desire for art to have a wide audience. It has always been the view at Louisiana that art is not just for an elite but includes experiences and visions for the many.
Why is it called Louisiana?
Many people wonder about the name of the museum. The short explanation is this—a nobleman and his three wives.
Knud W. Jensen chose to "take over" the name of the country house that he later converted to a museum. The property had been built and named in 1855 by Alexander Brun (1814-93), who was an officer and Master of the Royal Hunt and who married three women who were all named Louise.
Here at Louisiana, he was a pioneer in beekeeping and the cultivation of fruit trees.
From the beginning, it was Knud W. Jensen's vision to create a museum with soul, where the public could encounter artwork—not as something pretentious, but rather something that spoke directly to the viewer. And he emphasized the need for "supplementary content" that could help bring alive and enrich the environment: The more opportunities for experience that the program offers, the more Louisiana lives up to its idea—to be a 'musical meeting place' and a milieu that is engaged in contemporary life.
—Knud W. Jensen
