As she was nearing the end of her six-year contract as director of Norway’s new National Museum, Karin Hindsbo started to ask herself: What next? Since 2017 the art historian and curator had been charged with the dream but gargantuan task of rehousing what was formerly several separate public art institutions in a mammoth new building, the largest museum in the Nordic region, home to 400,000 artifacts.
But with the doors thrown open and with her 50th birthday looming, maybe, she thought, it was time to do something different, something away from the art world, where she had spent the past three decades. After all, ever since her student days, she had promised herself never to “stay too long” or “get comfortable.” “At that point,” she says, “you need to look [at] yourself in the mirror and answer truthfully: ‘Do I have the best period ahead of me or behind me?’ ” The only thing that might make her reconsider, she joked with her husband and friends, was a call from Tate Modern.
The phone rang while she was away skiing with her family.
“I just sat there afterwards with my husband, like, ‘Tate Modern called?’ ” she recalls of her disbelief at being offered the directorship of the world’s most-visited modern art gallery. “It was crazy.”
When we meet, she has been in the job for a matter of weeks and is still settling in—both into her corner office, where cardboard boxes buckle under each other (“That’s on me,” the Dane says, sheepishly), and into her West Hampstead home, where she has relocated together with her two boys, aged 12 and 15, and her husband, Norwegian businessman Martin Smith-Sivertsen. How did her sons take the news? “They had a veto card,” she explains, sleek in art-world chic (cream cable-knit tank over black satin shirt; white trainers; black suit trousers), “so if I had known this was going to be devastating, then I would have taken that into consideration and maybe even said no.” A list of demands, notably season tickets—Tottenham for one, Arsenal for his brother—helped get the move over the line. (In hindsight, she says ruefully, she “caved too soon” on those.)
As for so many, some of Hindsbo’s most memorable art experiences have been here at Bankside, and—though she refuses any talk of favorite artists—she pinpoints the 2015 retrospective of the American abstract painter Agnes Martin as having made “the biggest impression.” “It’s like it’s vibrating,” she says of Martin’s work, hands snaking, the art lecturer in her (before her museum roles, she taught at the University of Copenhagen) visible. “[Her] pieces are alive in some kind of way.” Hindsbo’s predecessor, Frances Morris, who became the first female director of Tate Modern in 2016, made it her mission to put female artists—among them Yayoi Kusama and Louise Bourgeois, as well as Martin—front and center, and Hindsbo will naturally continue that work. “You can never get lazy and think, OK, now it’s just going to be like that, because it’s not,” she says. “You have to watch it all the time.”