Reykjavík Art Museum Kjarvalsstaðir

About this audio guide

This guide to Reykjavík Art Museum Kjarvalsstaðir opens with a teenage fisherman, Jóhannes Kjarval, sketching on scraps of paper between shifts hauling nets, until fellow fishermen and a labor confederation pooled money to send him to art school in Copenhagen at twenty-seven. It follows how that gesture built toward a museum in his name, ground broken in 1966 on architect Hannes Kristinn Davíðsson's plain, workshop-like design of copper roof and courtyard. Kjarval turned eighty the year digging started and died in 1972, a year before the doors opened, so he never walked through as a visitor. Stand in that courtyard and picture the plain materials fishermen's wages once paid for.