An evening chez Matisse
After a long day of important talks and discussions at the Human Rights Watch Summit in Amsterdam, Jeanne and I were treated to dinner at H’ART Museum, followed by a private evening visit to its current exhibition, Chez Matisse.
Housed in the seventeenth-century Amstelhof beside the river, H’ART was formerly known as Hermitage Amsterdam. The exhibition brings together 80 works from the Centre Pompidou, placing Matisse alongside his contemporaries and artists from later generations to explore their shared experiments with colour and form.
I have to admit that, for reasons I cannot quite explain, I have never been particularly drawn to Matisse. This exhibition did not really change that. What captivated me, however, were several of the paintings shown in dialogue with his work.
Natalia Goncharova’s Still Life with Lobster (1909–1910) is anything but still. A lobster, oysters, bottles and a cut lemon occupy a blazing red tabletop. Thick black outlines and vigorous brushstrokes give the objects an almost physical energy, with the curves of the lobster and foliage playing against the upright bottles.
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s Lovers (1921–1923) brings together two figures, one naked and one clothed, amid orange walls, green skin and patterned fabrics. The colours connect them, while their expressions seem inward-looking. In the upper left corner, Kirchner has written a dedication to the architect Henry van de Velde on his sixtieth birthday, 3 April 1923. I liked finding this personal greeting inscribed directly into the painting.
Anna-Eva Bergman’s Black Prow (26), from 1976, has a very different presence. A great black ship’s prow fills almost the entire canvas against a pale background. Simple, monumental and rather mysterious. The exhibition text connects the boat with death in Norse tradition and draws a parallel with the black vestments Matisse designed for the chapel at Vence.
Then there was Le Corbusier’s Metamorphosis of a Violin, dated 1920–1952. The instrument dissolves into black and white shapes, coloured planes and wandering lines, its contours suggesting a human body. A welcome encounter with Le Corbusier the painter, alongside the architect who usually occupies our attention.
And, of course, there was Rothko, one of my favourite artists. I spent a disproportionate amount of time in front of his great red and black painting. The dark field seems almost suspended within the red, and the longer you look, the more there is to see.
After a day filled with words, it was good simply to stand there and look.
10/15/2026 13:18:07
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- An evening chez Matisse
After a long day of important talks and discussions at the Human Rights Watch Summit in Amsterdam, Jeanne and I were treated to dinner at H’ART Museum, followed by a private evening visit to its current exhibition, Chez Matisse.
Housed in the seventeenth-century Amstelhof beside the river, H’ART was formerly known as Hermitage Amsterdam. The exhibition brings together 80 works from the Centre Pompidou, placing Matisse alongside his contemporaries and artists from later generations to explore their shared experiments with colour and form.
I have to admit that, for reasons I cannot quite explain, I have never been particularly drawn to Matisse. This exhibition did not really change that. What captivated me, however, were several of the paintings shown in dialogue with his work.
Natalia Goncharova’s Still Life with Lobster (1909–1910) is anything but still. A lobster, oysters, bottles and a cut lemon occupy a blazing red tabletop. Thick black outlines and vigorous brushstrokes give the objects an almost physical energy, with the curves of the lobster and foliage playing against the upright bottles.
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s Lovers (1921–1923) brings together two figures, one naked and one clothed, amid orange walls, green skin and patterned fabrics. The colours connect them, while their expressions seem inward-looking. In the upper left corner, Kirchner has written a dedication to the architect Henry van de Velde on his sixtieth birthday, 3 April 1923. I liked finding this personal greeting inscribed directly into the painting.
Anna-Eva Bergman’s Black Prow (26), from 1976, has a very different presence. A great black ship’s prow fills almost the entire canvas against a pale background. Simple, monumental and rather mysterious. The exhibition text connects the boat with death in Norse tradition and draws a parallel with the black vestments Matisse designed for the chapel at Vence.
Then there was Le Corbusier’s Metamorphosis of a Violin, dated 1920–1952. The instrument dissolves into black and white shapes, coloured planes and wandering lines, its contours suggesting a human body. A welcome encounter with Le Corbusier the painter, alongside the architect who usually occupies our attention.
And, of course, there was Rothko, one of my favourite artists. I spent a disproportionate amount of time in front of his great red and black painting. The dark field seems almost suspended within the red, and the longer you look, the more there is to see.
After a day filled with words, it was good simply to stand there and look. (10/15/2026 13:18:07)
- Our first evening in Amsterdam included a small philosophical pilgrimage.
Jeanne and I are here for the Human Rights Watch Summit. For me, freedom of expression and freedom of conscience are among the most fundamental human rights. So it seemed only natural to pay my respects to Baruch Spinoza.
His monument stands beside the Zwanenburgwal, near the site of his birthplace. In Nicolas Dings’s sculpture, he wears a cloak decorated with birds and flowers. At his feet is a sentence worth taking slowly: “The purpose of the state is freedom.”
I cannot claim to be an expert on Spinoza. I once read a few chapters of the Danish translation of his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. Much of my understanding of his importance has come through reading the Danish philosopher and critic Frederik Stjernfelt’s many articles about him and the Enlightenment.
What has stayed with me is Spinoza’s defence of our freedom to think, to question religious authority and to express what we believe. He helped prepare the intellectual ground for the Enlightenment and, eventually, the freedoms we now seek to protect as universal human rights.
For me, freedom of conscience includes the freedom to believe, to doubt, to change one’s mind and to have no religious belief at all. Freedom of expression allows those convictions and doubts to enter the world, where others can challenge them.
Standing beside a canal in the evening, this seemed a fitting way to begin a visit devoted to human rights.
We have become quite good at putting freethinkers on pedestals. Making room for living dissenters remains more demanding. (10/15/2026 12:59:47)
- I came for the birds and found a little of my youth along the way.
On 11 September, I attended a lovely book reception at Greens Boghandel on Sorgenfri Torv, north of Copenhagen. The occasion was Den store bog om fugle i Danmark, published by Gyldendal, written and illustrated by Jens Overgaard Christensen, husband of my good friend Charlotte Sahl-Madsen.
An absolutely wonderful book. Jens is both a painter and an ornithologist, and his remarkably lifelike watercolours bring those two ways of seeing together. The birds are precisely observed, yet full of presence. Just look at the owl in the photograph.
During the reception, Jens spoke about the range that watercolour allows: from the smallest details of plumage to freer passages where water and pigment do some of the work. Scientific precision and artistic freedom on the same sheet of paper.
One of the speakers described his paintings as ambassadors for nature conservation. I liked that thought. They draw us towards the birds and the landscapes they inhabit. Perhaps the desire to protect a place begins with the desire to spend time there.
For me, the evening was also a return after many years. I worked at Greens throughout my gymnasium years. My mother was the parish priest at Sorgenfri Church for many years, including that period, so this neighbourhood holds a good deal of my personal history.
Founded by Arvid Green in 1956, Greens brought books and art together from the beginning, with a gallery alongside the bookshop. A fitting setting for Jens’s paintings — and a rather lovely place to revisit.
Perhaps that is something a good bookshop and a good bird book have in common: they invite us to pause and look more closely. (10/04/2026 17:40:33)
- On our last day in Venice, Jeanne and I just managed to visit Anish Kapoor’s Palazzo Manfrin, right next to Ca’ Bonfadini, where we had spent our final few nights.
I have always been a little sceptical about Kapoor. The mirrored surfaces, the optical tricks, the sheer scale: extraordinary visual effects, certainly. But I have often left feeling more impressed than moved. My most recent encounter was his exhibition Unseen at ARKEN in 2024.
Palazzo Manfrin gave me something to reconsider.
The building has its own history of looking at art. It once housed Girolamo Manfrin’s celebrated collection, including Giorgione’s The Tempest, now in the Accademia. Today, Kapoor’s works inhabit rooms whose worn walls offer a rather different setting from a museum gallery.
What particularly impressed me, though, were the architectural models: projects built and unbuilt, ideas for spaces rather than simply objects.
Seeing them at this scale made me look differently at the monumental works. I could begin to imagine entering the forms, moving through them, experiencing them from within. The models also left room for something that the finished spectacle can sometimes overwhelm: curiosity.
I am still not entirely converted. And yes, I realise the irony of illustrating my reservations about visual effects with photographs of us enjoying Kapoor’s mirrors.
But I left wanting to know more. For me, that is a better response to art than simply “wow”. (10/04/2026 17:20:34)
- From a wooden pew in Trinitatis Church today, Bach’s music made the morning star feel very close.
At the cantata service, Trinitatis Church’s Choir and Baroque Ensemble performed Herr Christ, der einge Gottessohn, BWV 96, with soloists Camilla Toldi Bugge, Rikke Lender, Adam Riis and Torsten Nielsen.
The closing chorale and Adam Riis’s tenor aria were particularly beautiful. The aria’s plea to draw the soul with “cords of love” stayed with me—a rather tender image of what it means to be guided. Johanka Sniehottová’s recorder playing brought a different kind of beauty: the morning star’s brightness made audible above the ensemble.
The music also spoke directly to the day’s Gospel reading from Matthew: the commandment to love God and our neighbour, followed by the question of whose son Christ is. Bach turns those questions into music—Christ as God’s son, and love as the force that draws us towards him. The service’s closing words from Second Peter returned to the same image: the morning star rising in our hearts.
I am currently reading Karl Ove Knausgård’s Morning Star series, so another, more unsettling star briefly came to mind. A small association between the pew and the bedside reading pile: in Bach, a light to follow; in my reading of Knausgård, a light whose meaning remains uncertain.
Today, though, it was the beauty of the chorale and the tenor aria that I carried out into Copenhagen. (10/04/2026 17:00:18)
- I had been looking forward to Amalie Smith’s Levende at Kunsthal Charlottenborg. Having visited today, I suspect I will return once or twice before it closes next year.
Like Madame Nielsen, whose review in Weekendavisen makes an interesting companion to the exhibition, I have followed Smith’s work for many years. What keeps drawing me back is her way of bringing art and science into conversation. Materials, technologies, literature and scientific research all become part of an inquiry that remains open, precise and curious.
Here, that inquiry concerns life itself. How does it emerge? What sustains it? How does it acquire form, and what does it leave behind?
Five large display cases contain humanlike figures assembled from ceramic body parts and machine-knitted textiles. Around them lie fossils, shells, tools, plastic waste, a smartphone, milk-storage containers and birthday candles. Geological time shares a confined space with the objects of an ordinary afternoon.
The cases suggest archaeological collections, perhaps burial chambers. The textiles suggest warmth and protection. The figures might be resting, or they might be what remains after someone has gone. There is something compelling about this uncertainty: the same objects can speak of sustaining a life and of remembering one.
In Linjedanneren, a larger and a smaller figure lie among objects associated with caring for a child. The vast history of life meets feeding, cleaning and the practical repetitions of bringing someone up. A lineage continues through all the work required to keep another person alive. Evolution, seen from this angle, includes washing up.
That movement between scales is what I find particularly interesting. Smith can move from molecules and the origins of life to care, mortality and everyday work without making the latter seem like a sentimental addition to the former. They belong within the same inquiry.
The accompanying sound work, Radio Levende, made with Simon Brinck, brings songs and sounds together with fragments of Smith’s conversations with researchers Birthe Kragelund, Sara Imari Walker, Steen Rasmussen and Kim Sneppen.
Walker describes a living being as a temporary meeting point for many historical threads. There is no single line leading to any one of us. Biological inheritance, cultural memory and ideas converge in a particular form for a while, then continue along other paths. Our children and our ideas may outlive us, embodied in forms we will never know.
I find that a generous way of thinking about an individual life. We arrive carrying histories we did not create, take part in them, and pass something on.
Rasmussen’s discussion of digital life adds another perspective. Processes inside a computer are physical too. They require energy and resources; patterns must be moved and maintained. For someone who spends a fair amount of time thinking about technology, this is a useful reminder of how easily our language makes its material conditions disappear. Even the cloud has a body.
And then there is Sneppen’s confidence in our hands. Hands allow us to give thoughts a physical form: something we can work on, share, preserve and leave for others. It is a particularly resonant thought in an exhibition made with clay and knitted textiles. Smith’s hands are part of the inquiry too.
Madame Nielsen admires Smith’s delicate yet incisive balance between art and science, while questioning the distance created by the glass lids. Why keep us apart from the material world whose connections the exhibition seeks to reveal? Why let us see, but not touch?
That question deserves to remain in the room. The glass protects fragile things while also making them remote. Objects associated with warmth, nourishment and care become things to contemplate from the other side of a barrier.
For me, the exhibition’s appeal lies in how it moves between the universal and scientific on the one hand, and the deeply human on the other. The human dimension here is expansive, concerned with what we share: dependence, care, work, mortality and the desire to understand the world we belong to. Smith makes room for all of this without retreating into an inward-looking account of the self.
The title of the accompanying booklet stays with me: Hjertet tror, det skal pumpe for evigt — “The heart thinks it has to pump forever.”
It won’t, of course. But while it does, we feed children, shape clay, build computers, carry other people’s ideas and occasionally spend a Sunday trying to understand how these activities belong together.
I will be back. (10/04/2026 16:32:16)
- I have walked past this lion outside the Arsenale in Venice more times than I can remember. I am quite sure I have photographed Jens, Vilhelm and Jeanne standing beside it on earlier visits.
Yesterday, on our way to our second visit to the Arsenale section of the Biennale, Jeanne and I stopped again. But this time I looked at the lion rather differently.
It was only after rereading Joseph Brodsky’s Watermark that I became aware of the rather extraordinary “graffiti” scratched into its marble almost a thousand years ago.
The Piraeus Lion did not, of course, originally belong in Venice. It stood in Piraeus, the harbour of Athens, before Francesco Morosini brought it to Venice as war booty in 1687. It has stood outside the Arsenale ever since. Long before the Venetians acquired it, however, Scandinavian travellers had left their own claim upon it.
In the 11th century, Norsemen serving in the Byzantine world, most likely Varangians and apparently including Swedes, carved runes into the lion's shoulders and flank. These were not just names scratched casually into stone. One of the inscriptions runs through an elaborate serpent or dragon-shaped band, closely resembling the ornamentation of contemporary Swedish runestones. The Swedish History Museum dates this inscription to the last quarter of the 11th century and notes its stylistic connection with Uppland. Historiska Museet
The inscriptions are now badly weathered, so translations remain partly conjectural. But one reconstruction commemorates a warrior named Horsi and contains the wonderfully direct statement that “The Swedes set this on the lion.” Another surviving section names Åsmund as one of those who carved the runes, together with men whose names have been read as Eskil or Askel and Torlev. A shorter inscription on the lion's left thigh appears to have been carved at another time by another group of Varangians. There is something wonderfully human about this. Men from Scandinavia travelled thousands of kilometres through the river systems of Eastern Europe to Constantinople, served the Byzantine emperor, somehow found themselves in Piraeus, encountered an already ancient Greek marble lion and decided to leave their mark on it.
Then, six centuries later, the Venetians carried the whole lion away to Venice.
And now tourists walk past it on their way to the Biennale.
History sometimes survives not in the grand narrative but in graffiti. And, embarrassingly, sometimes one needs Brodsky to tell one to look more closely. (09/30/2026 08:09:59)
- This time in Venice, I finally had the opportunity to visit the Berggruen Institute Europe at Casa dei Tre Oci on Giudecca.
The Berggruen Institute, founded by Nicolas Berggruen, is one of those institutions I have followed from afar for quite some time. Its ambition is unusually broad: to create space for long-term thinking about democracy, technology, geopolitics, culture and, ultimately, what it means to be human.
Casa dei Tre Oci, the striking neo-Gothic palazzo overlooking the lagoon, became the home of Berggruen Institute Europe after an extensive restoration. It is conceived as a “house of ideas”: a place for lectures, conversations, workshops, residencies and exhibitions, and for encounters between thinkers from Europe, China and the United States.
I already feel connected to Berggruen through my subscription to and enthusiastic reading of Noema Magazine. It is one of the places where long-form essays about AI, technology, philosophy, democracy, economics and culture are still allowed to be genuinely long, and where complicated questions are not forced into reassuringly simple answers.
I am equally fond of the small books published in the Tre Oci series. They often grow out of lectures and conversations held here and have featured thinkers including Giorgio Agamben, Rosi Braidotti, Francesca Bria, Peter Sloterdijk, Wang Hui and Slavoj Žižek. Small books, physically at least, dealing with decidedly large questions.
One of the latest publications is Constructing Consciousness, which I now need to order and slowly chew my way through. It brings together three prize-winning essays approaching consciousness from strikingly different directions. The neuroscientist Anil Seth argues for understanding consciousness as a property of living systems rather than computation alone, while Xin Huang explores AI, tokens and brain-computer interfaces, and Xiaoben Liu considers the possibility of digital consciousness and the role of language in representing subjective experience.
The visit also gave me the chance to see Joseph Kosuth’s exhibition The-exchange-value-of-language-has-fallen-to-zero. Kosuth, one of the central figures of conceptual art since the 1960s, has spent much of his career investigating the relationship between language, meaning and art. His work felt particularly at home in a building devoted to ideas. And in an age in which humans and machines are producing words in unprecedented quantities, the title of the exhibition has acquired an additional resonance.
Unfortunately, I did not make it to Palazzo Diedo this time. Fortunately, I visited it two years ago. The restored palazzo is the home of Berggruen Arts & Culture in Venice, with some 4,000 square metres devoted to contemporary art and to encounters between artists, disciplines, cultures and historical periods.
Two very different Venetian palazzi, but behind them lies an idea I find deeply sympathetic: that art and serious thinking still deserve physical places where people can meet, disagree, linger and spend rather more than 30 seconds considering a question.
I look forward to returning to both when the Biennale brings us back to Venice in two years. Perhaps sooner, if Berggruen gives me a sufficiently good excuse. (09/29/2026 17:08:57)
- Two more wonderful musical memories from September.
Early in the month, Vilhelm and I went to DR Koncerthuset for the opening of the Danish National Symphony Orchestra's new season, with Fabio Luisi conducting Mahler's Fourth Symphony.
The evening actually began with Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto, with Rudolf Buchbinder at the piano. But for me the centre of gravity was Mahler.
The Fourth is perhaps Mahler at his most deceptively innocent. Compared with the enormous forces and metaphysical struggles of some of the other symphonies, it can almost seem intimate. Yet the whole Mahlerian universe is there: beauty constantly threatened by something darker, folk music and irony, the grotesque beside the sublime, and behind it all the question of what innocence might mean once it has been lost.
The extraordinary slow third movement gradually opens into something almost transcendent, before the soprano enters in the final movement with Mahler's setting of Das himmlische Leben, a child's vision of heaven. American soprano Liv Redpath, replacing the originally announced Ying Fang, sang the part with exactly the clarity and apparent simplicity the music needs. DR Koncerthuset
It was also an appropriate beginning to a season marking ten years of Fabio Luisi as chief conductor of the orchestra. Their relationship has become one of those musical partnerships where orchestra and conductor seem to breathe together. DR Koncerthuset
A couple of weeks later I was back in the same hall, this time with Jacob and Nina, for a very different journey: Wagner.
Pietari Inkinen conducted excerpts from the two final parts of Der Ring des Nibelungen: Act III of Siegfried, followed after the interval by music from Acts I and III of Götterdämmerung. His concert version concentrates the vast mythology of the Ring around Siegfried and Brünnhilde, taking us from their awakening love to betrayal, Siegfried's death and Brünnhilde's final immolation. DR Koncerthuset
Magnus Vigilius sang Siegfried and Catherine Foster Brünnhilde, both facing the rather unreasonable vocal demands Wagner placed on singers, presumably because moderation was never really his preferred artistic strategy. Both have substantial Wagner experience, Foster particularly from Bayreuth. DR Koncerthuset
And then there is the orchestra. Hearing Wagner live reminds you how inadequate the word "accompaniment" becomes. The orchestra remembers what the characters forget, anticipates what they do not yet know, and sometimes seems to understand the drama better than anyone on stage.
Two September evenings. Mahler's child's-eye glimpse of heaven and Wagner's world going up in flames.
Not a bad month for music. (09/28/2026 21:12:18)
- Today I made a small literary pilgrimage to San Michele, Venice’s island of the dead.
The cemetery has its origins in the Napoleonic period. In 1807 Venice began burying its dead outside the densely populated city, initially on the island of San Cristoforo. In the 1830s the canal separating it from San Michele was filled in, creating the cemetery island we know today: enclosed by brick walls and water, filled with cypresses, monuments and graves.
I went there particularly in search of two poets.
First, Ezra Pound.
My interest in this brilliant, disturbing and deeply contradictory figure was awakened by Jens Carl Sanderhoff’s remarkable novel Det tøvende århundrede eller Sankt Sebastians martyrium.
Sanderhoff does not attempt a conventional biography. Instead, he enters the consciousness of a Pound-like figure and confronts one of the uncomfortable questions surrounding twentieth-century culture: how do we understand an artist of immense importance whose political choices were so profoundly compromised? Pound helped shape literary modernism, while embracing Mussolini’s fascism and broadcasting propaganda from Italy during the war.
Sanderhoff’s novel has now appeared in English as A Century of Hesitation, published by Spuyten Duyvil. I hope this rather extraordinary Danish novel will thereby find the wider readership it deserves.
Then I walked the short distance to Joseph Brodsky.
Brodsky’s small book Watermark has accompanied me on several journeys to Venice. Based on his repeated winter visits, it is not really a guidebook or even conventional travel writing. Venice becomes material for thinking about water and stone, beauty and decay, memory and desire, and, perhaps above all, time.
I came to appreciate Brodsky’s Venice even more after reading Jesper Lützhøft’s 40 dage i vandørkenen. Through 40 photographs and 40 short prose texts, Lützhøft creates his own fragmentary Venice of doors, shutters, alleys, water and imagined lives. To me, it belongs to the literary tradition of seeing Venice that Brodsky so brilliantly embodies.
And then, walking around Brodsky’s grave, I found the inscription on the back of the stone:
LETUM NON OMNIA FINIT.
“Death does not end everything.”
The words come from the Roman poet Propertius. In the original elegy, the dead Cynthia returns to speak to her poet-lover. More than two thousand years later, the words seem almost uncannily appropriate on another poet’s grave.
Perhaps that is what I had really come to San Michele to be reminded of.
Writers die. Their voices have an irritating habit of carrying on.
Letum non omnia finit. (09/28/2026 20:32:29)