1/4 A Night at the Rijksmuseum

as the French philosopher Descartes said God made the world but the Dutch made Holland and there's nowhere more uniquely beautifully Dutch than Amsterdam this wonderful city that seems almost to float on the water but for the last 10 years this has also been a city with a gaping cultural hole where its heart should be this is the Rijksmuseum one of the world's great museums Holland's equivalent to the National Gallery or the Louvre and yet for the last 10 years it's been closed to the public undergoing a massive restoration the closure of the next museum was a big hole in the national life we missed all these beautiful things can you imagine the French rolling the Mona Lisa through the streets only in Holland would this happen I consider the Hecht museum the nucleus or those more or less the egg we crawled out there very few countries where the national museum has been entirely rethought reinvented it really is amazing everybody's very excited I'm having it open again the national treasures of the Dutch people are inside this museum Wow it's just unbelievable for over a decade people all over the museum world but above all the Dutch people have been waiting waiting waiting but now the wait is over so join me on a journey to rediscover the treasures of a great nation so welcome to the Rijksmuseum 2013 this is the scene of probably the most remarkable the most expensive the most ambitious remodeling of one of the world's major museums ever undertaken the whole place is buzzing with crowds with journalists with TV crews but actually compared to what it's been like in the last few weeks it's relatively calm it's been a hive of activity here they've been frantically putting the last touches to their great Museum and we have had a backstage pass over the last few weeks we've been privileged enough to watch how the Dutch have reinvented their single greatest monument to that past it's all happening paintings are arriving in crates they're coming out of their boxes they're going up on the walls the whole place is buzzing with machinery which pinchy is their love letters custom ears Lovelace here I can't believe it so there's a Vermeer under there and you're not shaking yeah take a painting and I put it on the wall you're gonna do that now yeah second thank you that is I cut this is one of the great paintings in the world the gentleman behind the camera right he doesn't want to be on TV he doesn't like being on TV but he has agreed to be on TV to hang the picture so that's we really appreciate that hey oh wow huh okay I can't believe it it looks like it was painted yesterday isn't it fantastic the glass is clean what a beautiful painting now the reich's museum's collections are jaw-droppingly rich and varied there are treasures from Asia and the Far East there are masterpieces of painting like this Monet or over here a wonderfully piercing self-portrait by none other than Vincent van Gogh but this is also a museum with a single overriding mission to tell the story of the Dutch past to bring Holland to life now in the past the Rijksmuseum organized its collections on rather traditional academic lines department by department you know the sort of thing over here we've got glass over there we've got silver a gallery three is for ceramics galleries 22 to nine for painting but they've done away with all of that now and in a very bold daring and highly effective way what they've done is they brought all of the arts together and involve them in this great chronological sweep through history and it's quite some achievement 80 galleries 8000 objects and 800 years of history so you really do need more than an hour or two to get to know this place the Rijksmuseum is about the Dutchess of darkness it was constructed in the 19th century as a symbol for the Dutch nation and it has 'as the treasures of the Netherlands I think anyone coming to Amsterdam for the first time and looking at the Rijksmuseum can't fail to be struck by how unique it is how extraordinary it is there is no other building in the city like it it's this wonderful neo gothic romantic fantasy temple to art and nowadays it's one of the most popular most loved buildings in all of Hong but it was not always so when it was first unveiled in 1885 it was regarded with horror how Catholic with its stained-glass windows its resemblance to a cathedral the flamboyant of its color and its architecture many people saw it as a kind of a fish bone lodged in the throat of the Dutch state which was inherently at a Protestant state how dare Chi press the architect a Catholic have erected this building in the heart of Amsterdam and the king of the time William the third refused to set foot in the building my favorite detail on the whole building is that statue you see up there in the corner that is Chi presume self the architect with his beard looking rather furtively round the corner of the building as if almost as if to say whoa I'm a Catholic I'm in a Protestant world have I got away with it when we moved into this building in the 19th century the collection only had 700 paintings now we have 6,000 so the collection has grown a lot this meant that in the 20th century the decorations original decorations of the building were obscured so the building slowly disappeared and I think that what the renovation did is that it gave the building back its words and the building speaks again and now it's in harmony with the objects now I remember coming to the Rijksmuseum 20 years ago and believe me the transformation is truly mind-boggling look at this great central courtyard full of light space a sense of air where I'm standing used to be under water now when they decided to modernize and renovate this vast building there were to be no half-measures large parts of it were completely gutted in the beginning the process was supposed to take three years long enough you might think in the end it's taken them 10 years to complete which gives you some idea of the many obstacles they had to overcome the sympathetic new design is as elegantly minimal as kuipers original was extravagant and the delicate task of resurrecting the museum was undertaken by Spanish architects crews or teeth being asked to design the new rights resume it's not quite like being asked to walk on water but he certainly been asked to build on water last time I was here there was a canal down there yeah what have you done with it was not that it was a sea actually was not second oh yeah when you dig more than one and a half meter in a student you are under the level of the sea so actually you have all the water pouring out and now this building has risen yes almost sort of from the ashes of its former self it strikes me that you've been very sensitive to the original architecture this building it's a perfect example of the interest of the architecture at the end of the 19th century when doing this kind of task you pay tribute let's say that way to the system building now the whole project was scheduled for completion in 2008 so what caused this immense delay wasn't some astonishing aquatic engineering problem some logistical issue no it was a uniquely Dutch issue I think the biggest problem was the bicycle tunnel you're kidding me of this the bicycle tunnel what happens got me in the open when they decided to renovate this museum they also wanted to modernize it and they created a new space in the middle of the museum so they closed on the bicycle turnoff and that could have been the central entrance now this central passageway it's known as the city's gateway runs right through the center of the Rijksmuseum connecting the outskirts of the city to the center and before the renovations began it was used by more than 13,000 cyclists a day so when the architects responsible for the revamping suggested it be transformed split into two levels there was mass revolt Holland's cycling Lobby hugely powerful here fell over that handlebars in disgust they staged demonstrations sit-ins they forced a major revaluation of the whole architectural transformation of the museum when coppiced built the action regime in the 1880s it was at the border of the city and he built it over one of the important entrance roads and he built like a city gate and he was meant to go under it so from an architectural point of view from an urban point of view I think that we should stick to it I always agree that the bicycle to ride through but I wanted a bicycle to write in both laterals the passage the passage are three bays we wanted a bicycle to write in the two adults but the rescuer wanted to ride in the center where the power is in the end the Arctic had to redesign the whole plan and call symmetrical a an amateur extra money protest over the bike passage at it years to the project and the passions raised showed the peculiar nature of the Dutch attitude to this museum it's theirs their national space what does the Rijksmuseum mean to the people of Amsterdam to the people of Holland what does it mean to you the treasures of the country are healthier this is the main Museum it's a mother of all museums and no matter so this is the mother yeah Mother Earth another bath yeah we should consider it as our own national identity and the basis where we come from if we can say that there's a museum for foreign people or for once every 10 years to visit we will lose our identity definitely we're facing times where we look for our identity well it's here and it was locked we lost our concept of what it is to be Dutch what are where our cultural identity derives from we lost it all and we have to be proud of our Dutch culture if we understand where we came from if we go to the next museum look thoroughly what was our basis where where did Vermeer come from Rembrandt etc Mondrian especially now we needed our art I think it's just fantastic but what do you think it really is amazing it's happening very beautiful with the colors on the wall and the place is ready we renovated the original details it's been very well amazing the starry scarred if you see the starry sky from yes yes yes yes dazzling all the way from Glasgow yeah and that's our contribution another way in which they've married the old with the new here at the Rights Museum is by intruding into some of the spaces Commission's by living artists in this case a work by the Glasgow based Turner Prize winner

Channel: Art Documentaries

Views: 147,312

Rating: 4.8143849 out of 5

Keywords: Rijksmuseum, Andrew Graham-Dixon

Id: LTQmskJQyQw

Length: 15min 0sec (900 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 23 2013