00:02
Jens Faurschou
If I should choose any artwork hanging in Denmark, this would be the work. It's my absolute favorite work. And that is Matisse's portrait of his Madame Matisse, Green Line.

00:20
Jens Faurschou
When he made that back in 1905, it changed the whole way of making portraits. And I am sure people at that time said, you can't paint like that.

00:31
Jens Faurschou
It not only changed art history, it's also as a painting, a beautiful painting you never get tired of looking at. It's a completely abstract painting. It's an abstract painting more than it's a portrait. It's fantastic. 

00:46
Jens Faurschou
I can't tell you why it's just so beautiful. What I really like in that painting is the colors. It hits my guts and I'm just saying, wow. And I still say it each time I see it. I got my injection of art for the day, if I see that painting.

01:14
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
My name is Tina Jøhnk Christensen, and I'm the host of Danish Originals, a podcast series created in partnership with the National Gallery of Denmark and the American Friends of the National Gallery of Denmark. Our goal is to celebrate Danish creatives who have made a significant mark in the US.

01:31
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Today, our guest is Jens Faurschou, a Danish gallery owner. Welcome, Jens.

01:36
Jens Faurschou
Thank you.

01:37
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Actually, maybe we should say the other way around, that you welcome us, because we're in your house.

01:44
Jens Faurschou
Yeah, that's true. Welcome to Humlebæk.

01:47
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Thank you so much. We are in the northern part of Copenhagen in your private house. Usually we record from Los Angeles. Tell us where in the world we are and about the place that you call home.

02:04
Jens Faurschou
We are just about down the coast, maybe one kilometer from Louisiana, which I think most Americans who are interested in art know. It's our very famous museum, which was founded by Knud W. Jensen, another pearl, like SMK.

02:28
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And you are a gallery owner. You opened a gallery back in 1986 in Copenhagen called Galerie Faurschou. What motivated you to open the gallery?

02:41
Jens Faurschou
What really motivated me was that I met a lot of young artists at a job I had as a student at Kunstbibliotek. And it was just a lovely experience for me. I had no experience running a gallery. I had no experience in art history. I had studied business economics at the Copenhagen Business School. I can't say it was something I had dreamt of my whole life. It just happened.

03:17
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
You were more dreaming about becoming a CEO.

03:20
Jens Faurschou
Yes. I don't know what it's called in English. Maybe you can translate it for me. I got a masters in Regnskabsvæsen og Økonomistyring med hovedfag i Koncernstyring, so I really thought that I should one day be the head of one of our big Danish companies.

03:40
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Planning, economic planning?

03:42
Jens Faurschou
Something like that.

03:43
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Something like this. And in the '80s you went to New York. It was a bit of a culture shock for you.

03:50
Jens Faurschou
This was in the summer of 1984. I had no idea about the art scene in New York, and I was actually just on vacation to see this city. Of course, I knew that it should be the most amazing city in the world. I met up with Jon Hendricks. I later learned that he was Yoko Ono's manager when it comes to curating her art exhibitions. And he took me out in New York and that was a very interesting experience.

04:35
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Talk about that evening.

04:36
Jens Faurschou
It was Stelarc from Australia and he had this performance that night. A lot of the buildings in the Lower East Side at that time were abandoned. He was coming out a window, on a wire, hooks in his skin, over the street. The performance could not be announced before, because it was illegal, because he was naked. So he came out and was hanging in the middle of the street against this beautiful sky.

05:09
Jens Faurschou
And there were people from the art world who were there, because it was gone from mouth to mouth that he would do this performance. And then, of course, other people came as well, who were in the area. And then also the police came, and I remember there was one who shouted, shoot him down.

05:31
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Oh my God!

05:32
Jens Faurschou
I think it was for fun. His assistants pulled him in and he came down. And my friend John said to me, I'm afraid they're going to take him to the station, keep him overnight, put him in front of a judge, and that would not be nice. But when Stelarc came down in a rope, the policeman told him that he had violated the law, being naked in public, and he got a fee of $50.

06:08
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
$50? Okay! That's doable.

06:12
Jens Faurschou
That's doable. It could have been different. Maybe five years ago, I was just searching about this performance and I found a photograph where I see myself standing among other people on the other side of the street of the house where he came out, and I could see my very long hair in 1984.

06:37
Jens Faurschou
It was actually beautiful, but it was also very disturbing. And I was really asking myself, what is art? Is this art? And I learned from John, who became a very good friend, that art is when your borders are challenged. And I must say they were that evening, which was one of my first evenings in New York.

07:02
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And how do you think that something like that shapes you as a gallery owner and when you're looking for art that you want to represent?

07:11
Jens Faurschou
I think you always have to be open to what you experience when you come out. And if there's something you don't understand, then maybe you should get a closer look instead of saying, oh, I don't understand this and walk away. And that's probably what I learned from that experience.

07:32
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And you grew up on the island of Funen in the middle of Denmark, where I also grew up. Where exactly did you grow up and was it a family of artists? How did you get inspired?

07:45
Jens Faurschou
I grew up in a suburb to Odense and Næsbye, and later, Tarup-Pårup. My parents had grocery stores, so I learned to clean floors and put things up in the grocery store since I was five. That was normal. And actually I liked it. My whole youth, my brother and me and my sister, we always worked until we were 18, and then went further on in life.

08:22
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
So no artists in the family?

08:25
Jens Faurschou
No, no artists in the family. My parents were interested in ceramics, and they took me around to studios in Funen, where there were artists working in that media. And I loved that, actually.

08:42
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
What was it like initially being part of the arts world in Copenhagen?

08:48
Jens Faurschou
At the time when we opened the gallery, there were very few galleries. There was Asbæk and there was Birch and a few others, where today there's a lot. So it was very different. There were also much fewer artists than there are today. So it was not so difficult to figure out who are the great artists and who are the less good artists. And then of course you try to work with the ones you feel are the great artists of our time.

09:22
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And what was it about that world that made you change your whole plan about what you wanted to do in life?

09:28
Jens Faurschou
Probably the artists that you can work with, people who think so differently than all of us who are not artists, the creative ways they work and don't take anything as that we can't question things. There's a lot of things we don't question in our daily life, but they do, and they do it all the time. Then we see their works, and we start to think, and maybe 20 years later, it's not disturbing what they were doing.

10:05
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Did you ever dream about becoming an artist?

10:08
Jens Faurschou
No.

10:09
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
No. Not at all?

10:11
Jens Faurschou
No. And I don't dream of my children being artists because I think it's a very lonely way of living. You are alone with your work and you can't do it with anyone else. It's you and it's only you. You have to go through whatever you have to go through. I think being a family member to an artist can be challenging, so I don't hope my children will be artists. I think it's a very hard way to go.

10:49
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
But some people do create communities around it, like SUPERFLEX, for instance.

10:53
Jens Faurschou
Yes. That's right, but it's very rare. Very rare. I think the best example I have on that is Jan Krugier who was a Holocaust survivor. As a child, he was adopted by a Swiss family and came to Switzerland and became an artist and a good friend with Giacometti. It didn't work so well out for him and Giacometti told him one day, you know, to be an artist, it's such a lonely way.

11:30
Jens Faurschou
What you need, you need to talk to people and be with people. So he became one of the best art dealers and gallerists that existed in Switzerland. It's a big difference between being an artist and not being an artist for sure. And the whole way your social life is. I'm sure of that.

11:53
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Is the for profit art world in Denmark a competitive one?

11:59
Jens Faurschou
Yes, of course it's competitive. It's competitive in two ways. Of course, it's about having the clients you all want to have, the ones who spend the most money and who are considered good collectors. So there's competition on that side. And then there's definitely a competition about who works with what artist, and there's a strong competition there, of course.

12:26
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
How does one put a financial value on a piece of art?

12:32
Jens Faurschou
Okay, yes. Because there's many values of art. Artists, they control their production. So they can basically put their price themselves, and they can decide to put it high, then they will sell very few. And they can decide to put them low and then they might sell more.

12:56
Jens Faurschou
It's a very different decision to take. Because if you sell a lot, and you come out to many people, then maybe you create a bigger demand, actually. So if you want to get a big demand, and be known that you're not too expensive to begin with, then you can slowly raise your price. But it's very dangerous to raise the price too high, because if you don't sell, that's a negative success also.

13:32
Jens Faurschou
In the art world, the biggest success rate you have is if your paintings are selling for a lot of money at auction. It doesn't mean that it's the best art. But in the market, it means a lot. For the artist, it's important to have a price where the demand is still strong, and the best is if the demand is higher than the supply because that shows a success. And then people might need to go and buy it at auction because they can't get it at the exhibition because it's sold out and that can keep the auction prices up. So it's a very interesting market.

14:14
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And since you came from Copenhagen Business School, did you have a different take on all that?

14:21
Jens Faurschou
Setting the prices always interests me, and still does. I'm very interested in how are prices made in the art world, both in the primary market, which is a monopoly, and then in the secondary market, which is free when it comes to auction. Should be free — there might be people who try to manipulate it, just as you have in the stock market, where it's illegal. In the art market so far, it had not been illegal.

14:56
Jens Faurschou
But, if you have a big holding of an artist and work comes to the market, it might be in your interest to keep a high price. For instance, the Mugrabi family, who are the biggest owners of Andy Warhols in the world, have, for sure, I will not call it manipulated here, but they have for sure bought a lot of paintings at auction to keep up the value of their holdings.

15:31
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Speaking of Warhol, I believe you almost met with him.

15:35
Jens Faurschou
Yes.

15:38
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Talk about that.

15:39
Jens Faurschou
Yeah, that hurts.

15:40
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
I am sorry.

15:45
Jens Faurschou
It was in the summer of 1986. I was fly fishing up in Norway. It's a hobby I really enjoy, where you forget everything and—

16:00
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
But get inspired.

16:02
Jens Faurschou
Inspired. Exactly. And I got an idea which I would love to present to Andy Warhol. I knew that Andy Warhol was very open to ideas. You know the story about Jørgen Leth and the Whopper. And, there was another Dane who got an idea that Andy Warhol should make this series of Hans Christian Andersen, which also was done.

16:30
Jens Faurschou
So I worked on this idea for about half a year and then I called Andy Warhol's manager, Fred Hughes. And to my surprise, it was very easy to get an appointment with Andy Warhol. So I got in the book some date in the early spring 1987.

16:54
Jens Faurschou
And then I had to leave a Monday, and I would see him on a Wednesday. And on the Sunday, I was visiting my parents-in-law and my brother-in-law was also there working outside. And at lunchtime, he came in and he said, who was it you were going to meet in New York? Andy Warhol. Oh, he just died. He was one who always joked, so I didn't really take notice of it.

17:28
Jens Faurschou
And then, the same evening, I opened the news, Danish TV news, we only had one channel at that time. So it was very simple, very few programs still. And the first news which came out was that Andy Warhol died. I remember I went straight to the bar, I took out a bottle of Dimple whiskey, I remember it was, and I think I finished the bottle.

18:03
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Oh my goodness. You were very disappointed.

18:07
Jens Faurschou
Yes, because this had been in the head for more than half a year and yeah, I was very disappointed.

18:14
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Incredibly disappointing.

18:16
Jens Faurschou
Yeah, but I have had the luck to meet a lot of other artists who thank God didn't die just before I had to meet them.

18:26
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Maybe brag about them. Who are they, the people that you feel honored to have met?

18:33
Jens Faurschou
Anselm Kiefer, Bill Viola, Shirin Neshat, Ai Wei Wei, and I have made exhibitions with all of them. So that's how you get to know them. And Doug Aitken.

18:50
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Are they as special as people as they are as artists?

18:54
Jens Faurschou
Every one of the artists are very special. Not that I can say one artist is like another one because they are very special. Absolutely.

19:05
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
You have made quite an international career of yourself. You opened a gallery in New York. You've opened one in Beijing, of all places. Talk about those experiences, going out in the world and opening galleries. Especially in China, must be challenging.

19:20
Jens Faurschou
Yeah, China was very challenging, but also very gifting in the way, like my meeting back in 1986 with this performance in the Lower East Side, China opened my way of thinking to another level in terms of art.

19:43
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Can you explain how?

19:45
Jens Faurschou
Yes. They are, I don't know, 1.5 billion or something like that. There are a lot of Chinese. And we are only five and a half or whatever here. We were five when I was born. And I think, being a small country, even though we are thinking, and we are doing a lot of good stuff out in the world, we still have, it might sound wrong, but a smaller way of thinking.

20:16
Jens Faurschou
What I saw out there, the way they were planning their museums, when they were building museums, and I met a lot of these people who were actually in the process of building museums. It was with big rooms, with space for big art installations and things like that, which I have never had the space for, of course, in the gallery.

20:38
Jens Faurschou
And the museums we have here in Denmark don't have these kinds of spaces, so that really meant a lot to me. And I think, if I hadn't been in China, I don't think we'd have had Copenhagen Contemporary here in Denmark, because it comes out of this. I got this crazy love for big installations.

20:59
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And you mentioned challenges. What are the challenges of being in China? There must be some language barriers and cultural barriers.

21:06
Jens Faurschou
And yeah, there's of course the language barriers, but that's not so difficult because you always have one who can translate for you. One thing I learned, which is interesting, that's this culture. I don't know if it's a barrier, but if something is important, why do you make an appointment about that in two weeks from now?

21:25
Jens Faurschou
Now, if it's important, then let's meet now. Which makes planning difficult, or not difficult, but just another way of planning. So I couldn't plan a trip from here ahead and say, can I meet you in two weeks? So when I came there, I would typically call people up the day before and say, can we meet tomorrow? And then we did that, because of course it was important. Otherwise I wouldn't meet them.

21:58
Jens Faurschou
Where here, if it's an important thing, you better call people and let them know in good time that you want to see them. That was just one thing. Then when we had to make the contract for the space, the lease contract, whenever you change a comma or word or something, then everything we have agreed about have to be reviewed again.

22:24
Jens Faurschou
So, it took a long time, a very long time to do that. But then when it's renovation, my god, they just sent enough people and it took no time to renovate the building. I also saw some of the very huge buildings, modern buildings they built there, you could nearly see from day to day that they were growing. A different way of doing things than we do.

22:53
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
What were the main things you took along with you from Beijing?

22:57
Jens Faurschou
My relationships with artists, with Ai Weiwei, Liu Xiaodong, and a lot of other artists, Li Wei, Yu Hong. I made very good friends with a lot of great artists coming out of China. That's the gift I have with me.

23:16
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
We spoke about challenges before, and one would assume that it's easier in New York because it seems to be the culture that's more similar to ours, Western world, but it might not actually be so, right?

23:29
Jens Faurschou
It's different. One thing, which was probably easy for me when I came to China, I could come there and nobody had shown Louise Bourgeois or Andy Warhol or Rauschenberg, or Doug Aitken or Shirin Neshat. I showed all these artists out there, and it was easy because there was no competition at that time.

24:07
Jens Faurschou
Whereas in New York, there's a lot of competition. If you have to get people to come to you, you have to make some interesting stuff, and that's challenging, but that's also a lovely challenge. So it's very interesting to do exhibitions in New York, definitely.

24:17
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Do you feel at home in that world?

24:20
Jens Faurschou
I feel at home in making exhibitions.

24:23
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
In New York, I mean.

24:25
Jens Faurschou
In New York. We've also done it in Venice, we've done it in Denmark, and we have done it in China, yeah.

24:32
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
You mentioned museums with a lot of space in Beijing. And you talked initially about Louisiana, which is very close to here. And we partner with SMK. What do you think makes a good museum? What's a good museum for you?

24:49
Jens Faurschou
A good museum is a good collection. And both Louisiana and SMK have a good collection. When it comes to modern, contemporary art, post-war art, Louisiana is probably the place in Denmark who has the strongest collection. When it comes to a more historical collection, SMK is very special, especially when we come to works by Matisse, they have an incredible collection of Matisse, but they also have a very strong collection of Danish art in SMK. And then of course, Old Masters, they have a fantastic collection.

25:32
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And what's your own relationship to SMK?

25:36
Jens Faurschou
I helped them last year to acquire a masterpiece by Asger Jorn that I'm very happy about. It took two years, but you have to be patient. And that's one thing I learned. It's a very late painting Asger Jorn did, and it was Per Kirkeby's favorite painting of Jorn. I exhibited it many years ago and had the challenge to get it to SMK now, which was wonderful.

26:06
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And what makes good art in your opinion? We talked about how you evaluate it financially, but that doesn't necessarily have to do with what is good and what is not good. What do you think constitutes or makes good art?

26:23
Jens Faurschou
Good art has to challenge you, which we talked about. But when you look at a particular work within an artist's oeuvre, what makes this Jorn much, much better than the work he made half a year before, maybe same size, maybe same colors, I can't tell you. I would love to be able to. It's just something when you see it. For me, I always say it's in the guts. It's like, oh!

26:59
Jens Faurschou
I can't say why this one is better than the other one. Why an artist is good, there's many things you can add to that, that they meant something in art history, and so on. Jorn definitely was an artist who meant a lot for his period. He was a very strong character in the Cobra movement, probably the strongest of them.

27:28
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Do you feel that you've continued the same sort of love for art and artists that you had when you were a young student at the Copenhagen Business School and decided to venture into that world?

27:41
Jens Faurschou
The problem with art is you get addicted and it gets worse and worse so you get more and more happy. You can't live without it, it's not possible. And it's very interesting following what's going on in the art world. If you take the 20th century, you had a lot of different periods where artists were working in Minimalism or Pop Art. And nowadays it's very difficult to put artists into a field, I think. There's so much going on.

28:21
Jens Faurschou
Probably the exhibition which excited me most this year was a show curated by Jérôme Sans, a very good French curator at Museum Burda in Baden-Baden. I went to the opening, and there were four artists. They were all good. There were four rooms, individual rooms, but there was still a connection between them.

28:48
Jens Faurschou
And Jérôme Sans said something in the opening speech, which has stuck with me ever since, and I've thought a lot about it. It was that all four artists, they didn't relate to art history in any way. There was not something relating to Duchamp, or to Rauschenberg, or Picasso, or the Old Masters, or the Impressionists. Nothing. They got all their inspiration from nature. That was the only inspiration they had.

29:25
Jens Faurschou
And then I said, hmm, that's interesting and it's absolutely correct. And then I started to see that in many places. So I think we're going into a period now where maybe we had enough Duchamp. I love Duchamp. I love Rauschenberg. Rauschenberg was very inspired by Duchamp, one of my big heroes from the 20th century, and who I also had the pleasure to meet several times.

29:58
Jens Faurschou
But maybe there have been enough Duchamp, there have been enough where the art world looks at itself. And right now, what we need, we need to take care of our dear earth. And I see a lot of artists actually working in that field. And I think we will see a lot of exhibitions going forward dealing with that.

30:21
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Is that important to you, sustainability?

30:23
Jens Faurschou
Oh yeah, of course.

30:25
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
How does that shine through in your work?

30:29
Jens Faurschou
When SAS introduced Pandion — that's the above-diamond card — you don't know how much you have to earn to get it. But when I got that many years ago, I was like, wow. Because it gives you a lot of privileges which are very wonderful to have. Then came COVID. And the sky we see out here, if you go out and look now, because we're not so far away from the airport, there's stripes always somewhere.

31:04
Jens Faurschou
During COVID, there was a blue sky and there were no stripes on the sky. And we have all learned that one of the worst things you can do in this world is flying. So I said to myself, I have to get rid of Pandion, it's not a nice thing to have, you shouldn't be happy to have a Pandion card.

31:26
Jens Faurschou
And I don't have a Pandion card anymore. But I have a gold for life, because I had Pandion for so many years. I still have a few privileges, but I really try to fly less. And then we're also thinking more and more when we make exhibitions, and I think that's a big problem in the art world, that when we do exhibitions, we fly artworks from one end of the world to the other end to make an exhibition for a short period.

31:59
Jens Faurschou
So, one thing is to make the exhibitions much longer. That's one thing you can do and you can think about how you transport it, and if you can make the works closer to you. And it's not only me looking into that. I know everyone in the art world are looking into that.

32:21
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
You've been a gallerist for many years now. What makes a good gallerist? And what would you tell yourself, or what kind of good advice would you give yourself as a young man that you have learned throughout the years, that you didn't know when you started out?

32:41
Jens Faurschou
I still think that learning by doing is the best thing and best advice to give. I think there's one thing that I have. I was asked in Moscow, of any places, at an art fair, to talk to a group of young people who actually had this idea they wanted to be gallerists. I said that patience is the most important thing as an art dealer. If you don't have patience, find something else to do. So I think that's really one thing I would tell people.

33:18
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And my final question for you, since we are in your home, in your private house in Humlebaek. You have a lot of art on the walls. Which pieces do you value the most, and why?

33:35
Jens Faurschou
One I have in the bathroom, which is by a dear old friend called Ernst Beyeler, who made one of the best museums in the world, which is in Basel. And he started out as a gallerist just after the Second World War, and created, besides being a gallerist, an incredible collection. And he died quite some years ago.

34:11
Jens Faurschou
I was at a benefit auction some years ago at the museum, and they brought in a work by Ernst Beyeler. It looks a little like a Gerhard Richter. It's a work on paper. And I said I have to have that because I really admire that man. And I get happy every time I see it. And you're not gonna see a work from me at any time because I can't paint, I can't draw.

34:37
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And may I ask you why the bathroom?

34:40
Jens Faurschou
It just fits there.

35:42
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
It just fits there. All right, thank you so much for being part of Danish Originals, Jens. We really appreciate it.

34:50
Jens Faurschou
Thank you for having me. I appreciate the work you do and the work they do at SMK. It's one of my favorite museums.

35:58
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Thank you.

35:02
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
For today's episode, Jens Faurschou chose Henri Matisse's Portræt af Madame Matisse: Den grønne stribe or Portrait of Madame Matisse: The Green Line from 1905 from the collection of the National Gallery of Denmark.