The Nordic Art Behind His Films

Descendant: Lars von Trier and Nordic Art edited by Anne Gregersen and Pernille Gøtze Johansson and translated by René Lauritsen; 240 pages; Strandberg Publishing (August 2026)

Catalogue of the exhibition Descendant: Curated by Lars von Trier. Willumsen’s Museum, Frederikssund 6 June to 20 September 2026; Thiel Gallery, Stockholm 10 October 2026 to 24 January 2027. 

In May 2009, the Arts Diary of the Guardian website held a poll asking its readers if Danish film director Lars von Trier was a genius or a fraud. Just over sixty per cent of respondents thought him a genius, while the rest dismissed him as a fraud. This sums up von Trier’s reputation rather neatly, at least among the intelligentsia. No doubt the proportion of people who consider him a fraud is considerably higher among people who avoid watching art films. He does not seem to mind. He has a high opinion of his own abilities and no problem with being loathed.

Indeed, von Trier often goes out of his way to court controversy. In 1991, when he found out that his film Europa had not been awarded the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival, he gave the judges the finger and referred to the jury president, Roman Polanski, as a “midget.” While he was promoting Manderlay, his controversial film about slavery, at Cannes in 2005, he outraged the American press by (among other things) dismissing then-president George W. Bush as an “asshole.” And after he made flippant remarks about Hitler at Cannes in 2011, he was banned from the festival until 2018. He has a knack for attracting attention whilst pretending to shun publicity, which is always an effective PR strategy.

Even von Trier’s fiercest detractors generally concede that he is a prodigiously gifted filmmaker. Meanwhile, those of us who admire his work understand why so many people violently dislike it. His films are not merely transgressive or provocative in the normal sense; they are intended to push audiences to the limits of their tolerance. Mainstream viewers can be forgiven if they find von Trier’s work shocking, disgusting, obnoxious, and exhausting. But they can also be inventive, moving, and startlingly beautiful, and the more patient among us know that these endurance tests are almost always rewarded in the end.

On Christmas Eve 2020, the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art released a YouTube video of an interview with von Trier in which he talks about his influences and creative processes at some length. It is no surprise to learn that he has always been a voracious reader, especially of Modernist literature. His insights into Tolstoy, Ibsen, Proust, and Thomas Mann give some idea of the range and scope of his artistic ambitions. (For some reason he does not talk about painting here, which is surely at least as important to his imagination as novels, plays, or pieces of music.)

Despite the fascinating content, the video is painful to watch because von Trier’s health is now so obviously fragile. In August 2022, a little over a year and a half after the interview was released, von Trier’s production company confirmed that he had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. He carried on working until February 2025, when he was admitted to a care centre for treatment. Yet even now he remains creatively restless. His most recent project, which he began working on in 2024, is an exhibition of the paintings and sculptures that have most directly influenced his work. This show tells us a lot about von Trier’s tastes, preoccupations, and place in Scandinavian culture.

Descendant: Lars von Trier and Nordic Art opened on 6 June at the Willumsens Museum in Frederikssund, around thirty miles outside Copenhagen. It will travel to the Thiel Gallery in Stockholm in October. This exhibition is the closest von Trier has ever come to producing anything like an autobiography, so it deserves attention. It emphasises the special importance that Friedrich Nietzsche has always had for von Trier, but it would be difficult to describe von Trier as a straightforward Nietzschean, or indeed a straightforward anything. He simply cannot be pinned down to any single philosophical or ideological position. Despite flirting with Catholicism and communism at various points in his life, he has always remained a classic Scandinavian social democrat at heart, albeit a pessimistic and disillusioned one with a deep suspicion of idealism. He thrives intellectually on paradoxes, contradictions, and irreconcilable differences between competing worldviews. They help him create the essential sense of friction and turmoil that seems to animate all of his work.