THE MONK IN THE VERSACE SHOES: PORTRAIT OF LARS MORELL

15.08.2025

THE INTELLECTUAL HISTORIAN LARS MORELL IS MODESTY AND EXTRAVAGANCE, SOBER DILIGENCE AND WILD PERFORMANCE ALL AT ONCE.

Lars Morell paces restlessly back and forth in the Didakteket at the Aarhus School of Architecture. He is dressed in a jacket, leather shoes, and a flat cap. He is lecturing.

That is to say: He does not point to the big screen behind him. He does not stand at the lectern consulting his notes. He speaks, and he walks. His gait leans slightly forward, as if he is constantly leaning into the next sentence, the next step.

The material is where it should be: In his head. The 68-year-old external lecturer has little use for digital tools, either professionally or privately. He owns neither a phone, a radio, nor a television. The computer, however, is a necessity at the workplace for writing books and communicating with colleagues and collaborators.

Showman

Years of lecturing and a deep command of the material have given him the ability to deliver his talks with complete fluency. One senses, too, an element of showmanship in it. The lecture on The Black Tent has just opened with a small performance: a textile piece by social artist Beatriz Gonzalez and two assistants, who move through the Didakteket carrying a black sail and a tent pole as prelude. Tableau.

The never-still lecturing style mirrors Lars Morell’s working life.

He has never held a permanent position, but for 16 years up to the turn of the millennium he was employed as a part-time lecturer at Aarhus University. Since then, he has lived primarily as an author and speaker, which has demanded a fair measure of restraint.

Perhaps his current role as external lecturer at the Aarhus School of Architecture is, in truth, the closest the intellectual historian and writer has ever come to steady employment. In any case, he is a fixture: Arriving between three and four in the morning, seven days a week. Drop by on Christmas Eve or New Year’s Eve, and you will find him there as well.

Each day he leaves at 4:30 p.m. He must be at Café Go’ Kaffe on Ingerslevs Boulevard by 4:55. He helps close up, and in return he takes home the leftover bread.

Narayana and Versace

The strict self-discipline, the diligence, and the solitary lifestyle call to mind a monk’s existence. Fittingly enough, Lars Morell has his books printed at Narayana Press in Gylling, run by Hindu monks. The photographs for this article were taken there, and for the occasion the gentleman donned a garment of his own invention: a fusion of monk’s robe and hoodie, which he designed himself and later had sewn by his regular tailor. On his feet: leather shoes from the luxury Italian label Versace, crowned with the silver Medusa head that is the brand’s emblem.

In other words: a singular amalgam of industry and simplicity (the robe), grit and street culture (the hoodie), and elegance and extravagance (the shoes). All elements that one also finds woven into Lars Morell’s character and way of life.

“The monks and I live in the same way. It was, after all, in the monasteries of the Middle Ages that people sat and handwrote and copied books. The book was invented in the monastery—at least the handwritten one. I also hold a special status at Narayana Press—because I am allowed to come on Sundays. There are only a very few of us who may.

Lars Morell regards the making of a book as a production that must proceed with precision. That means, among other things, that his books are always 64 pages long.

“There’s a photographer, there are foundations, the printing has been ordered, there’s a publication date. You can’t afford to be late. It just runs like clockwork. And production-wise, the big machines print 32 pages on a sheet. That’s why my books are always 64 pages. Two sheets. I’ve made at least 20 books of 64 pages.”

A Walking Encyclopedia

His bibliography today spans more than 40 books, a testament as well to Lars Morell’s great energy and dedication to the craft of authorship. His research often stretches over many years—sometimes ten, sometimes twenty.

“Many people said: ‘But he’s not even a proper art historian.’ So I thought: I’m not going to listen to that. I’ll write a book on 200 years of art in Aarhus. That’ll shut them up. And so I did.”

Lars Morell is a walking encyclopedia. He has also begun to ship out parts of his knowledge, continuously donating a substantial body of archival material to the Aarhus City Archives: for instance, his written correspondence with leading artists since 1968, including Per Kirkeby, as well as a larger collection of cassette tapes. He does not record his interviews on a phone, out of principle: he insists on using outdated technology.

Plainspoken

Lars Morell publishes both orally and in writing: he lectures, and he writes books. And he is acutely aware of the difference between the two forms of expression.

“I had an excellent editor, Ingeborg Brügger, who once said: ‘That’s a fine text, Lars, but go through it one more time. It can be much better.’ No one had ever said that to me before. I like the spoken word, but still—there’s a difference between speech and writing. I like the plainspoken form, but it has to be transformed.”

Lars Morell’s books also carry a simple, unadorned physical form, harmonizing with the plainspoken style and with his almost ascetic way of life. They are printed on gray cardboard, without back-cover text and without grand graphic gestures.

“My books should preferably look like the kind of books you could find for five kroner at a flea market in the Aalborg of my childhood,” he says.

He therefore told his collaborator on a book project, the photographer Poul Ib Henriksen—who was an advertising photographer—that he had better set aside his usual approach.

“As an advertising photographer, your task is to make things look exciting. When you work for me, it’s the opposite. We strip away, pare down, and distill.”

Untimely

The same style can be recognized in Lars Morell’s manner of being. It is direct, without embellishment. Sentimentality he leaves to others. One senses a man who knows what he wants, and who is quite at ease in opposition to his own time.

“When I wrote the book The Artist as Polymath in 2004, I made a leap. When I was young in the ’80s, I was very concerned with keeping up with the zeitgeist. Waves are always coming, and as a young person you want to be part of them. But with that book, I stepped off. I was fifty. At that age you stand somewhere else, wanting to create your own things. Nietzsche wrote four essays under the title Untimely Meditations. And everything I’ve done since has really been a kind of untimely meditation.”

He readily acknowledges a certain sharpness in his character and, for example, harbors a strained relationship with the very notion of contemporary art.

“Many of the young art historians are so taken with what they call contemporary art. I’m so tired of that expression. Art, architecture too, ought to reach beyond the present moment—backward, and perhaps forward as well.

From Aalborg to Aarhus

When it comes to his own story, however, he does not look back. There is no sentimentality about the land of his childhood—Aalborg in the 1960s and early ’70s. He was born in 1956 and lived with his father and mother in an apartment on Strynøgade for the first five years. Then the family moved into a newly built single-family house on the plot where their allotment cottage had once stood. His father was a slaughterhouse worker, later employed as an inspector in health control, while his mother worked as a secretary in a school library.

Lars Morell graduated from Aalborg Cathedral School in 1975. But he especially highlights the year 1972, when the Aalborg Museum of Contemporary Art opened its doors for the first time. For the sixteen-year-old boy, it was a formative event. A few years later, he saw a poster advertising an event with the artist Jørgen Nash in Lund. Morell went there and soon became something of a secretary to Nash. In that role he met several of the era’s prominent artists and was a regular presence in Ekstra Bladet, as Nash was deeply engaged with the media. In 1979, Morell pulled up stakes and began studying the history of ideas in Aarhus.

Aarhus as Horizon

The city has always been, for him, a love–hate affair. By his own account, he was somewhat at odds with it—especially in the beginning. But he reconciled himself to the fact that it now constituted his horizon. And gradually, curiosity took over.

“When I walk the streets and see things disappear and something else emerge, I think: Who lived here? Which painter lived here, and which sculptor there?”

From an ongoing dialogue with photographer Poul Pedersen about art and cultural history, he learned, for instance, the locations of the old photography studios in Aarhus and can point them out on the city’s upper floors, where they were most often placed for the sake of light.

Resident Expert on Tents

He himself lives in Frederiksbjerg, in an apartment that has been his fixed point of reference since 1979. Yet, paradoxically, at the Aarhus School of Architecture he lectures on the very opposite: the ancient dwelling of nomadic life par excellence—the tent. He has committed himself to delivering 14 lectures on the architectural history of the tent. His fascination with the subject arose through his friendship with the artist Per Kirkeby.

“Per had a thing about tents. He had traveled in North Africa with the black tent, in southern Russia with the yurt, and of course in Greenland with the expedition tent. I keep a kind of shoebox system. So every time I came across something about tents, into the box it went. And then twenty years passed. And then the box was full. And that’s when I started on tents.”

Tent Types

If you ask Lars Morell to list the different types of tents, he will offer the following: the lean-to, the dome tent, the ridge tent, the conical tent (tipi), the black tent (the Bedouin tent), the frame tent, the parasol tent, the pavilion tent, the tunnel tent, and the circus tent (a variant of the pole tent). For climbing Mount Everest, he recommends the geodesic tent, a variation of the dome.

The lean-to is the most primitive form of dwelling. Its purpose is to protect against the wind. It’s like at a bus stop. You’re standing there, freezing, waiting for the bus. And humans have been in that same situation for 30,000 years. You sit on the ice, waiting for a seal, and the most important thing is to shield yourself from the wind.”

It is the textile that links Lars Morell’s books, lectures, and the outfit he wears for display at Narayana Press. The tent has a canvas; his clothing is made of wool; and currently, he is working on the third of four books about the weaver Inge Bjørn. In this way, the threads of his life are woven together.

Finale

The lecture on the black tent is drawing to a close. Lars Morell has carefully instructed the small troupe waiting in the wings. They are not to wait for the lecture to end but to interrupt him and seize the space as it nears its conclusion. The choreography matters.

Now the fine clothes must go back in the wardrobe, and the everyday uniform—t-shirt and practical trousers—returns to the body until the next lecture looms on the horizon. The monk has left the stage.

Facts

Among Lars Morell’s most significant books are 200 Years of Art in Århus (2016), written for the city’s year as European Capital of Culture in 2017, and The Artist as Polyhistor, the intellectual framework of Per Kirkeby’s work (2004).
He has previously been featured in the documentary De originale by Stig Guldberg (2016), by Aarhus Stiftstidende(2016), and on livsstil.tv2.dk in 2018.
The next lecture will take place on Tuesday, September 30, 2025, at 3:00 p.m. in the Auditorium at the Aarhus School of Architecture. The topic is “Tents and Textile Forms in Le Corbusier.