Denmark’s most debated doors will open next week with a three-year delay

Next week, a year-long dispute over a set of organ doors in St. Peter’s Church in Næstved.

The doors should have been the celebratory final addition to a long-standing project to recreate the church’s special baroque swallow’s nest organ, but instead ended in a dispute over gold.

The church had hired the painter Thomas Kluge to decorate the doors, but after a trial hanging in late summer 2021, the church’s parish council decided that they wanted gold edges on the doors. Kluge was strongly against that, and the case ended up in court, where Kluge was upheld that it was an infringement of his artistic copyright that the edges had been painted against his will.

The verdict was handed down almost two years ago, and now the doors are finally ready to be hung. This appears from Næstved Provsti’s internal newsletter, and it is confirmed by artist Thomas Kluge.

“They’re coming up,” he says.

According to the artist, it will happen on Wednesday 25 September without any ceremony.

“But I would like to invite people over and see that they are hanged at 7 p.m.,” says Thomas Kluge.

According to the article in the newsletter, the chairman of the parish council in Sct. Peders Church, that the doors will be open, so that those interested in the future can go in and see the insides that Kluge has painted. Politicians have unsuccessfully tried to get hold of the chairman.

Gold edge

On the two doors, Thomas Kluge has painted the archangel Gabriel’s visit to the Virgin Mary to announce that she will give birth to God’s son. On one side, the Virgin Mary is seen looking upwards. She is dressed in red, golden and blue draperies after the Byzantine model, inspired by Leonardo da Vinci’s painting of the same biblical scene.

On the opposite lid, a hand points towards the Virgin, thus creating a movement across the organ and up towards the vaults of the church or Our Lord, if you will.

The gold edge destroyed the composition that made the painting extend beyond the frame and become part of the church space, as Thomas Kluge has explained it.

In autumn 2022, the Court in Næstved Kluge ruled that the church was not entitled to paint gold edges on his works. Since then there has been silence about the matter, but now the doors have been cleaned by a conservator and are ready to go up as Kluge had intended them.

It was the church’s former organist of many years who had been responsible for ensuring that the swallow’s nest organ was recreated. For 27 years he worked on the project that he has referred to as his life’s work. And for him, his life’s work was destroyed by Thomas Kluge’s doors without gold edges, which the organist did not think suited the organ as a whole.