Her face was as waxily unreal as if she were wearing a papier mache Mae West mask and her generously matronly figure was scarcely
Her face was as waxily unreal as if she were wearing a papier mache Mae West mask, and her generously matronly figure was scarcely what anyone would call "hourglass" - "dayglass", rather. Like that of a transvestite (and she was of course a favourite transvestite icon), her allegedly irresistible allure was a pure simulacrum. If Madonna, let's say, were to look at herself in a distorting funfair mirror, Mae West is what she might see. As for her movies, most of these have dated very badly, worth catching now, if at all, only for one of Mae's exquisitely timed mots. ("When a gal goes wrong, a guy goes right after her" or "I'm the woman who works at Paramount all day and Fox all night" - the latter makes better sense if you say it aloud, but not in front of the children.) What on paper must have appeared a pairing made in heaven - Mae West and W C Fields - turned out to be, in My Little Chickadee, a dispiriting mismatch, akin to teaming up Laurel and Costello or Romeo and Isolde. And when, in 1934, the ultra-conservative Hays Code was set up to root out every trace of immorality in the American cinema, her career was over.The fashion in women's bodies, as in their clothes, is a cyclical process, and it may well be, hard as it is to imagine it now, that Rubensian opulence will be all the rage in 2050.
It's inconceivable, nevertheless, that West will ever again be regarded as a potent sexual icon Historically, she was important, even rather courageous. But, to our grandchildren, she's destined to seem as absurd as the genteel naked ladies of Victorian porn now seem to us.. TO ANYONE involved in the world of museums, the mention of Louisiana does not bring to mind a southern state in the United States, full of mint juleps and ante-bellum mansions, but a 1950s museum north of Copenhagen, which has become the symbol of the post-war democratic movement in museum design. Louisiana Museum, founded by Knud Jensen and opened in 1958, marked the move away from the previous tradition in museums of grand, old, mostly 19th-century buildings in decaying city centres towards a belief that the experience of art should be out-of-town. Art, and particularly modern art, was expected to be combined with a day in the country. At Louisiana, aesthetic experience was intended to be less strenuous and less systematic than it was when governed by the old-fashioned belief in morally improving museum fatigue.
In other words, Louisiana is not so much a place, more a state of mind. Louisiana is of particular interest to the British art world at the moment because Sir Nicholas Serota, the recently ennobled director of the Tate Gallery, has appointed Lars Nittve, the former director of Louisiana, to be director of the new Tate Gallery of Modem Art at Bankside, due to open next May. Bankside is one of the most important developments in museums in this country and is certain to make an enormous impact internationally. It will be Britain's first kunsthalle, designed by Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron in the coolest and most sophisticated style of contemporary international modernism, a piece of ultra-clinical Swiss engineering within the much rougher carcass of the old Bankside power station. One might, therefore, have expected its director to be part of the black-suited international art brigade - the agreeable surprise is to find that Lars Nittve is a large and amiable Swede. I had never been to Louisiana until earlier this year when I discovered that it is possible to visit it on a day trip from London (but only just), flying from Stansted Airport early in the morning and then taking a train from Copenhagen airport through the northern suburbs of the city up the coast towards Elsinore and looking across to Sweden.The entrance to the museum is deceptive, deliberately.
One walks down the street from Humlebaek, the railway station, until one finds a small, mid-19th-century hunting lodge by the side of the road surrounded by trees and in the middle of a car park. This is the house which Knud Jensen bought in 1954 as the site for his museum. As Jensen himself described the idea as he talked about the project over a cup of coffee in the museum cafe, he had become bored with having to visit the museums of central Copenhagen on Sundays when the city was deserted, the shops were closed, and most Danes wanted to escape into the countryside. He decided to establish his museum in a park by the sea, close to nature, so that sculpture, in particular, could be seen surrounded by grass.Now 82, and having celebrated last year the 40th anniversary of the opening of Louisiana, Knud Jensen is a remarkable person, small, animated and elfin, belonging to the generation of early Bang & Olufsen and still presiding over his creation. Born in 1916, he was the heir to a prosperous dairy business, but, like a figure in a novel by Thomas Mann, he decided that he was more interested in literature, music and the arts than in cheese. During the 1930s he made friends with poets at university in Copenhagen. In 1950, he organ-ised a programme called "Art in the Workplace", whereby 40 companies subscribed to a scheme which made it possible for travelling exhibitions of contemporary art to be shown in factory canteens.