Understanding the Rijksmuseum: The History of a National Museum

Well good afternoon ladies and gentlemen Jock Reynolds here your director and very very pleased youth to greet you here today for what's going to be a wonderful lecture delivered by Taco Dibbets the director of the Rijksmuseum who's come here from Amsterdam via Boston more about which I'll tell you in a few moments but what I wanted to tell you first is that I want to offer thanks to many many of you who are in this audience this is the first of the John Walsh lecture and education series that's being delivered and due to gifts of money from more than 220 of you we now have a major John Walsh endowment further for John Ross lectures and education for kind of slow looking and teaching that John is done here for many many years but especially over the last four years where we've been able to borrow extensively from the wonderful Dutch Golden Age painting collection of Rosemarie and Ike fan daughter lower we are with us today in the front row and with a good friend taco and I just learned that in fact taco before he went to like museum was an intern of John Walsh's at the Getty Museum I mean how and not only that Marissa bass one of our great young professors trained at Harvard and now here at Yale teaching northern European art from 1,400 to 1700 also was an intern of Tacos at the Rijksmuseum I mean this is it goes on and on I've just thrown my remarks out to say that I need to improvise a little bit in saying that it's been an enormous pleasure these fast last four years to be able to borrow fantastic works of art from the van otterloop collection and as you know to display them here for all of you to enjoy for our students to benefit from particularly not only the great lectures that John's given but the other people in the field who he's invited here to lecture all of this has really made a great contribution to the study particularly of nederlandse art and it's been recently announced I think you all know that the great collections of the Weatherbys and the auto Louis's is being made a gift to the MFA in Boston and they have invited both the Harvard University museums and Yale music the Yale University Art Gallery to be their preferred lenders for what we hope will be a major ongoing program to train people to learn more I care more about the great arts of the Netherland ohshit culture and we also know that taco you know and we hope that we're gonna have a real cross atlantic collaboration with your wonderful Rijksmuseum this rijksmuseum by the way was found in 1800 the Yale art gallery we came along later in 1832 but it was first founded in the hague and then in 1808 it was moved by a Napoleon to Amsterdam so it could have its own separation from the king and the hague and then by I think it was about 1985 it was you've got your own real building there I mean 1890 eighteen and there's another very interesting coincidence is that the plan to ultimately renovate and expand and re-install Rijksmuseum collection began first in 2001 and then really got underway and for a 10-year renovation in 2003 that also almost perfectly coincides with what we were doing here you know we closed the Louis Kahn building in 2003 we started the program thinking about it in 2001 and opened in twelve twelve twelve so we think there's a lot of synchronicity here amongst these institutions and we're tied it'd again wanting to think was me and Ike for the wonderful loans that we know now we're going to continue in in the generous fashion I want to mention there will be a wonderful study day being conducted on February 2nd up in the Boston with colleagues from Harvard and Yale but also others in the field coming to talk about how this new Center is going to get underway and so to have taco here today to talk about the history of his own institution and the wonderful work he's done first as a young curator then this director of collections now director the museum you can see he's only about 32 or 33 this is perfect this idea we're making way for a younger generation as part of the whole deal here so dr. I want to thank you for coming he's told me at the end of his remarks which he doesn't want to keep going on and on he would love to take some questions from any of you and then some of you if I think signed up for some of the close looking that John Walsh has often done you can go up in the galleries those of you who've done that spend a little time with him before he needs to leave so taco I again I want to say it's an enormous pleasure to meet you personally to learn about these relationships we already have with colleagues we both know and enjoy and I want to thank also Marissa Bass Nicola Souter Larry Kanter Ian McClure the whole team here that's made this four year experience with Dutch yard so rich for all of us all of you in the audience and especially the young learners and scholars who are entering the field so talk if you will come up and tell us a story or two thank you and one more thing but I should mount the second third and fourth lectures of the ball series I forgot to announce next week the guy right there on the front row Larry Kanter will give a lecture same time Friday on the young Frangelico Larry did the famous Frangelico retrospective at the Met the week after that on the 9th paul goldberger the great student of vincent Scully's gonna give a lecture architecture and Vincent Scully architecture in the power of language and then an Temkin one of our greatest alumni graduates from the Museum of Modern Art will come and speak about how this collection changed her life who's now the creator of modern painting and sculpture Momo so what a wonderful way to start this Walsh lecture series again great thanks for all of you but it's so so generous to endow this program which means it's going to go on for in perpetuity in perpetuity is a long time darker please the nice the nice thing is that we directors I don't know if this is if you can hear me the nice thing is that we directors come and go but the art stays so that's that must be quite comforting probably after you've heard my story even more comforting I'm starting with this sculpture around 1600 by a Dutch artist Decatur of a small boy who's being stung by a bee obviously it's a reference to to antiquity Cupid being stung by a bee but he's shouting and I will shout at you for the coming hour if I go on too long please say stop stop and I'd love to take questions but I also show it because it is really what the Rijksmuseum is about it's the Museum the National Museum of the Netherlands and it's a museum that wants to be always of today and always young like we all want to be the face of the museum of the Rijksmuseum if you think about it as a person is Rembrandt he is the artist I think the artists in the world best depicting us as human beings as individuals as who we are in or beauty in or sorrow in our ugliness in our joy Rembrandt's depicts as all and he has not been always the core of the collection when the collection was founded and indeed I think the Dutch are the only people or maybe even the people in the Rijksmuseum we are the only people who are very grateful to Napoleon because he was the one who founded our museum and who made FM Sam the capital city of the Netherlands he founded a museum which had to have an art collection a Dutch art collection it was stipulated and always one room with historical objects and one room with a library and it was founded at castle outside outside the hague and soon moved by napoleon to amsterdam and in amsterdam it was housed at the palace of Napoleon's brother Louie Napoleon and after that it moved to a house on the canals which was a house that was far too small for it and soon it started to grow and grow because people start to donate objects to the museum the state we had at that time a very mean king who didn't once spent an art so the state didn't spend on art it was really a collection that was built very much in a sense that is done in America as well by the people then in the end of the 1870s so we're already 70 years into the history of the museum it was decided that there should be a large National Museum a Rijksmuseum build in Amsterdam on a plot of land that was given by the city to the state and I'm saying this you might think but the state owns the city well with Amsterdam it's a different case the people in Amsterdam are quite stubborn they have their own mind and they feel that they are a small Republic within this state was in the Kingdom of the Netherlands this is historically set as well because Amsterdam you know there was a war between the Dutch and the Spanish in the 17th century 16th 17th century it's now 400 years ago but Amsterdam was a city that fought for the longest time on the Spanish side so they always wanted to have a special position it was a society that a museum should be built and of course the examples in the world where the British Museum and museums that looked like Greek temples and what happened in this Protestant city of Amsterdam lo and behold the architect who won the competition was a man called Kuiper's and he was a Catholic he is the man who built this building now still the Rijksmuseum it opened its doors in 1885 and there were a few stipulations the town had given the museum or the plot of land to the state stipulating that it could be a museum but it also had to be a city gate the gate to the new developments which are meant to be developed behind here and here you can see there were only two buildings up but now there is an entire neighborhood which was built at the beginning of the 20th century so city gate and a museum at the same time and it was to serve the public teaching art and history the Museum of the nation the museum opened in 1885 the then king and queen refused to set foot in the museum because they said it's like a cloister we will not set foot in a Catholic place and they weren't they weren't present at the opening it was the biggest building in the Netherlands and the shock was that CalPERS built this Cathedral for the Arts but he also built the Central Station - train station so when you would arrive as a tourist to Amsterdam and we sometimes underestimate the importance of the building of train stations because this suddenly made it possible to travel by train from France from Paris to Amsterdam and loads of artists we have books in which artists had to write their name if they wanted to copy in the museum loads of artists came suddenly from France you might all remember Miro who did his Dutch interiors he came on the train to Amsterdam and worked there so the train station a Catholic cathedral for trains the Rijksmuseum a Cathedral full art and history it was a huge building as I said the largest building in the Netherlands and the collection was far too small there were 700 were of art of there were 700 paintings and to give you an idea now we've got nearly 7,000 paintings it was a museum that needed to be filled but the day it opened there were too many spaces so the architects kuipers decided to make an exhibition of the building itself to have a deep the show on the on the on the ground floor on the main floor have it show all architectural styles represented in the Netherlands so it was truly eclectic he also felt that there should be more attention for the Catholic history of the Netherlands and all his important historical moments that we're and already depicted by the paintings in it where he picked it on the outside of the building in in tiles large tiled tableaus which depicted scenes from history the important man and at that time not women although there were many more important women than we think we're depicted in these arches so the building itself also told the history of the Netherlands and he obviously felt that there were important moment Catholic moments in the history of the Netherlands subjects that none of us have ever heard of but he made them very important and sayings that we had never heard of they were suddenly depicted in the National Museum and he really felt that it should be not a temple but a Cathedral that lifts you up that enlightens you and that is a cathedral for the Arts 1885 Rembrandt by that time had already become the most important artists of the Netherlands and the Rijksmuseum was to be probably a piece you would now think of contemporary art as often marketed the Rijksmuseum was the biggest marketing campaign for the Nightwatch the main and the most important painting we have in this is it I'm just going back because so this was the painting it was all about and kuipers designed a building that was the the floorplan was like a Renaissance Palazzo is inner courtyards and here between these two columns the Night Watch was to be hung the visitor would enter would enter in the front hall the vore hall as we call it which had large you will see it later large stained glass windows and then as in a procession you could walk to the high altar the Night Watch passing different side chapels to walk towards it so it was really the entire building was planned around two high altar the Night Watch and what kind of painting it is I will today not talk about it because that you have to come to MCM to see the real thing not talk about the painting that much but the importance for it for the Netherlands and why it was promoted so much was because in France you would affect you would have expected at the high altar a portrait of Louis quatorze in Italy you would expect Christ on the cross but what did the Netherlands do they put on the high high altar the people and in this case the people of Amsterdam so it was very clear that it was propaganda ating the country as a civic country with a civic part of power and the people depicted in it are still the people that are important today and you might guess who they are they are lawyers first of all of course and they are pharmacists secondary also very important and then they are our traders our merchants and those were the man of Amsterdam who were meant to protect as a civic guards to protect the city against the Spanish but when we say protect the city against the Spanish at that time and you might remember that I said before the Dutch the the people from Amsterdam remained pro Spanish for a long time at that time they were and this is 1642 so just before the end of the war it was mainly to protect the city from internal unrest and in a sense there were many internal unrest when it comes to religion the Netherlands know over 50 types of Protestantism so you can imagine they would quarrel endlessly over the Bible and over the word spoken the word read and often the militia the Civic Guards had to calm down the the census and had to come riots down that were really quite quite fierce over over disputes about how to read the Bible the Night Watch as I said it depicts a militia it was hanging in the middle and each Dutchman who would visit the Rijksmuseum would immediately realize this is a country built by Berger's and this is a country administered by Burgas so it was intentionally put there as a political statement of how the country should be run it was also you could say part of the collection of the town of Amsterdam if you visit the Prado you visit the collection of Kings if you visit the Louvre you visit the collection that was started by Kings if you visit the Queen's galleries in in London you see a collection from the 16th century of kings and the Rijksmuseum had the collection of the city of Amsterdam which is this the syndics by Rembrandt is also in a sense the old core of the collection even though it's a 19th century Museum these works were already in the town's administration since they were painted I think this is but this is I show sometimes I just saw paintings because they're my favorites so every we have a million objects but every everybody has their favorites and I think that if you say when I said rammer anticipate is the painter of the individual I'm always amazed at how he is able to make all these peep to make all these men sitting from different religious denominations sitting there as if it's it's very recognizable as if it's a moment that you open a boardroom you say oh sorry wrong room and you close it again and that's exactly what remin does today he or he but we the visitor now but he is the one distracting their annual board meeting afters of the syndics who are going through the ledgers with the annual was the annual report one in the movement and I think that that sir choral so was Rembrandt not only the individual faces and their expressions the movement is created by this man standing up like what are you doing him here saying it to us you're in the wrong room he's making an argument slapping with his hand on the on the ledger I told you it was right the other one is saying let's move on so holding the page and let's move on and he has just arrived with his missus glove still in his hand so he he arrived late and it's it's that when which that 17th century art has when you have as your goal to create a composition to create a picture that is as lifelike as possible and that's the way it was written about as lifelike as possible then as a painter the the hardest thing is to create movement in your painting and I think that Rembrandt does it in a brilliant way here and we feel okay we've got to close the door but we want to stay and look at it for as long as possible the museum consisted of different museums in a sense it was the fine art museum and this is a painting from when it had just opened here the rooms are very Tucker full with paintings all the 700 paintings were hanging but there were other rooms that were nearly virtually empty and kuipers in those rooms had decorated them with large scenes from Dutch history all the paintings were exhibited in the in these rooms and they included rooms that were named after donors to the museum so when the museum opened not only did it have the Night Watch there's a civic pride at the high altar but also the rooms were named after the people who had donated pictures to the museum it's interesting because that tradition in the States is still there in the Netherlands it has completely disappeared but you had for example the room you saw before where you see the Jewish bride hanging there already very important because it had a little barrier in front of it and somebody copying it it had that room was called - von der Hope room a banker who had started collecting in the 19th century who was very much following the fashion of collecting Rembrandt Rosedale etc etc what we now consider as the typical Dutch art at that time it wasn't late Rembrandt was not the most famous artist and he really started collecting it when he died he left everything to the city of Amsterdam and the city said that's very nice but you have to pay tax duty and we're not going to pay the tax duty so we're not going to accept this great gift at that time another group of of patricians from the city said ok we will collect the we will donate money so you can accept it and we pay the death duties and therefore the Rijksmuseum still has these fantastic works but also this work Rosedale which is a the mill ad vague by diverse data and when you go there now it's changed a little bit but still it's incredible to see how similar it still is and this was one of the paintings from the collection duper a man from Dordrecht who left his paintings to the museum in the early days and so it grew the collection grew and grew and these fantastic paintings were became really the icons of Dutch painting in the 20th century as well and then there is the first big intervention of the state the milkmaid by Vermeer she was about to be sold to the US and the Dutch said no this cannot happen a committee was formed in Netherlands everything goes by committee a committee was formed consensus was reached it was brought into Parliament and it was unanimously decided that this painting should be acquired for the country and it is has been in the Rijksmuseum since the beginning of the 20th century it's I don't know if you've you've ever seen it but it is for Vermeer it's incredible to see how well-preserved it is and that's a large part of its magic you really feel his breaststroke in a way he he indicates the brittleness of the bread and the breadcrumbs and the way he was little dots you can still see them on the paint surface and the way he depicted in a you can here see even the brushstroke the way he depicts the kind of dark blue skin of the milkmaid who's been cleaning probably often in cold water the way he does that and contrasts with the blue behind it it's a it's an amazing painting and it's again a painting that tells a story a story of a lady are made in this case standing in the dairy kitchen a kitchen on the north there is a window but you see the mold I always say it's the most beautiful a plaster wall ever painted you see the mold here and the window from a window on the north so it's a small hole in the window showed that it's really glass Brad is in this chest hanging against the hanging up against mice then you know it's called because there is a stove here where's the little test yes we call it in Dutch a little a little piece of pottery was in it hot coals and here is the milk the milk will be delivered at the door from from the country delivered at the door in large bucket so you could buy milk which you see here the bread is taken out of that and there's a pitcher was beer so which was used as yeast so she is in the process and that's why she's measuring so carefully I think that tension of her hand holding and pouring at the same time she's measuring so carefully because she's making a bread pudding with the yeast is bare the old bread and milk so also Vermeer creates a story a story of everyday life and it's amazing I think how he is able to make this to make this everyday scene into a monumental painting as we sometimes call it it's like a Dutch Madonna in the sense because it's really it is a monumental painting even though it's it's this big but to continue another early acquisition was the little street by Vermeer we've now since the two years ago it was discussed discovered by professor from the University of Amsterdam so that's why it's so important that you keep on training art historians he discovered that this was the house hoop so this was the house of the aunt of Vermeer so there was a very personal relation of Vermeer with her but that was also one of the early works that came to the collection the collection showed as you as you saw before with Vermeer as well showed a very Protestant side of Dutch art this is one of the main history pieces of the collection and we call it the fishing for souls it wasn't already in the collection since the 1830s what you see is you see here the Catholics the Spanish Catholics fishing for souls then obviously their boat is capsizing and they won't they won't succeed to get anymore in here you see the Spanish and then here these man in black the Dutch the Protestants and here they're fishing for their souls and even though the building was Catholic the collection was firmly confirming or affirming a Protestant view of life so many portraits and people in very sober black-and-white dress very few for example what you know the Dutch art about very few flowers their lives because those were considered too kind of joyful and scenes of everyday life of hard-working people so it was very much also reflecting a sense of the time in the nineteenth century the second part at the second museum set was a Fine Art Museum the second Museum housed in the building the Rijksmuseum was the museum for history for national history and I think that within Europe as a National Museum the Wrights regime is singular that it has a collection of fine art of history paintings and objects and these are we might know these fantastic pen paintings these are huge pen paintings four of them in a series made for one of the children of the Admirals of the Dutch navy in the 17th century by from the fielder that was part of the history collection and this is an object not very beautiful but it is the object that saved the life of the founder of international law in the 17th century who called sheis and he escaped in this chest for books it's a long story but I'm not going to tell it but it is one of these icons of the Netherlands actually I can't not tell it it's quite a fascinating story the amazing thing about it is there's three of these and we claim to have the real one but the three in and Adalind says how how popular he was but he heard a quote wrote a letter grotius wrote a letter to his or no his brother wrote a letter to him he escaped in this in this box left it with his brother and the brother wrote a letter after a year or two saying oh my gosh I went to look for the chest and it's gone I can't find it Claud gets quite upset and writes back and says well you really have to search well because that box shows got willingness who let me escape and then after a while they come to compromise because the brother found a chest that looks very much like it can that serve the goal and who hold a thought says yes it can surf the goal so there is no original box left but this is the one that comes closest to it but that's how already in the 17th century rewrote our own history the third museum was in the Rijksmuseum was the museum for applied arts which was often a choice and one of her former curators for textile said when she retired he said well it was so wonderful to work in the Rijksmuseum because over the 40 years that I work there often people come and old families from the Netherlands came and which would have said well we can I certain dustbin all we give it to the Rijksmuseum so it indicates that at a very and the Reich's was he was very generous at taking it on and it indicates that these decisions in the nineteenth century and a lot of European houses and a lot of Dutch houses objects that were very became very valuable and told us a lot about our history were thrown away sometimes objects that might not have a great value money-wise but have a great cultural value and I think that makes the Rijksmuseum the Rijksmuseum that it was really built by the people and donations came of objects from the families in the Netherlands which made it a museum for everybody and with such a strong Dutch character in its collections but then over the 20th century the the museum was slowly filled in these where the court charts I don't know if you let's see if I can know these were the courtyards they were building was all kind of small wools and the large spaces that were there this was the the is the gallery of Honor and they were thinking about building that in as well but they kept it open this is the other courtyard that was building large spaces were made smaller and smaller and during the twentieth century was a period of the democratizing in the 1950s and 60s these were building in the fifties or sixties it was felt that you needed to democratize the building so the building that was meant to impress with large spaces where you could wonder well where made the spaces where were made into small spaces so it would give more a sense of scale it ended up being a labyrinth where nobody could find their way that's when you have I know I'm in the country of democracy but when you have too much democracy nobody can find their way so that's what that's what it ended up like but it's interesting that when we started to when we started to work the history of the museum at that time it wasn't such a conscious decision but then when you read around it then you read the correspondence over it it was really a sign of the time of the 1960's that things had to be a human scale there should be smaller and thus it resulted also in a National Museum of this way of filling in the museum it was cluster with with offices with energy rooms the conservation studios were in the Attic any building was really a labyrinth this is how it was physically building so here you see the old walls of the museum and here they just build in nice little spaces so when in 2000 the country felt quite rich a millennium gift was given to the museum to make the museum fit for the 21st century it would only the government only provide it for the bricks and we raised the money ourselves for the content and for the display at that time there was an international competition and it was maybe quite ironic but I think there were fantastic architects that in this museum of the Dutch 17th century that young country that fought against the Spanish cruise a artists to Spanish architects were chosen to take the right to live into the 21st century but on the other hand a very logical choice because it was the time of the unification of Europe where it was felt you should have an international an international staff also in the museum working on it and they did quite a job as you can see here not single-handedly we helped but it was they did two amazing things they said we should go forwards with Kuiper's or forwards with the old arc with the architect of the building and I think the idea not to want to go back to the original architecture but to take it forwards was a very good one and they said we want to give the museum light and and err back again we want to give it its lungs back if you would look at the museum just two courtyards are really like two lungs that give open it up and they took out all these small rooms that were created in the courtyards and this was quite a rigorous decision and I think that with the renovation of the museum or the transformation of the museum we took quite a few rigorous decisions the rigorousness of it was that there was no architect who were in his right mind who would propose to have rather fewer exhibition galleries than mall exhibition galleries so at first the curators we I was one of the curators I just joined everybody said why are you going to join a museum that's going to close I said well that's a great opportunity to to be able to work on this new museum they they they took out the the inner courts so less is more was the motto for the new museum less is more and they decided to go back to the original floor plan so this is nearly the same this is our if you come into the museum this is our floor per and nowadays this is nearly the same as it was at the beginning they also had another thing that they wanted to do it was meant as a city gate as well so you could go under the museum was a bicycle and you might have heard and I said once to her former director it was great that they wanted to take the bicycles out of the passageway under the museum because it kept us in the international press for the ten years that we were renovating but I'm very happy that you can nice now cycle under it because it's it's unique in a world that you have a museum where you could actually have a cycle pass under it but this to arrive at this which has a great simplicity we learned that simplicity is usually the most difficult thing to arrive at and in the Netherlands if you start to build you need I remember the Spanish architect saying to me if you make is a cellar under the Prado which they done you take a spade and you dig if you make a cellar under the Rijksmuseum you have to hire a captain at sea because you immediately hate the water so all the building was done with with divers underwater and it was it was a huge a huge building process to arrive at this result as it is now which really opened it up it breezes again the museum and it has nearly a a Spanish light falling through through this chandelier that they designed which is some people thought it would be a cage if you don't pay for your ticket but it has all security it has the it has the the acoustics and everything in it and they they decided to use only Spanish stone to counterbalance the the very and use a very minimalist language to counterbalance the very eclectic architecture of Kuiper's who at his time only used Dutch materials in the 19th century they wanted to only use Dutch stones the red ones being from one River from the vowel as we called it and yellow ones being from the hazel another river and the the front hall which is which was restored back into its former glory we felt that at some point at some places in the museum you should actually be able to experience the museum as a building but also as a as a part of the collection as it really is so much part of the collection the story it tells it was completely during the 20th century you will see slides later it was completely painted white on the one hand because we wanted to turn it into a Protestant Church and what do you do you paint everything white and funnily enough if you will see in collection of the fun all tellers and of the Weatherbys you will see paintings by Sandra DOM and the the architect in the 1950s who painted the interior of the Reich's was in white he took a painting by Sandra Dom as an example and said this is how I wanted to look so it was painted white you now can't can't imagine any more an organ was hung because that's in a Protestant church of an organ on either side of the front hall and large copper chandeliers from the 17th century also like in churches were hung there we had it restored back and this part needed least wreck instruction because these are not frescoes but there were paintings they had been rolled up in the beginning in the beginning of the 20th century and when they were discovered in 1960s the then director or the restorer the conservators to destroy them and to serve them away but they didn't do it they hid them in the attic and we found them again so we could we restored them put them up again and these are the stained-glass windows I was talking about before which had staged probably because the Dutch we are quite mean and they they functioned this window so they were left that weren't taken out all the decorations were done by training a new generation of artisans who worked with stencils it's all stenciled and they were because the building work took ten years and it was a lot of delay in the building work they were able to do so much of the reconstruction work within the museum so in a sense the delays and the long period of the renovation were used very well by the staff this is how the gallery of honor looked before the museum close down the decorations on these beams were saved because they felt modernists they're steel beams and it was thought that modern age still you have to preserve it so they were always preserved but the rest of the walls everything was painted white but what do you do when you start to renovate a building you want to have the original volumes back and you want to have it breathe great simplicity also to get here great simplicity but it was a hell of a job to get there I remember when we were building it suddenly appeared that the State Department had decided to have every three meters the electricity socket or you would have security lights everywhere and to get the walls like this I mean you probably remember from the renovations here it's near impossibility but we did it but we also thought if you can rethink the institution how and you have these museums three museums in it history fine art and Applied Arts where each material starts in the Middle Ages up to the 20th century how can you make it an experience for the visitor that's more understandable you don't have to start over and over again with history and we decided that in a sense the Rijksmuseum is like the memory of a nation and how do we order our own memory it's chronological you think about when did I do my finals when did I go to study when did I have or when did I get married or not or when did I have my first child etc and around that you order in a chronological sense your memories at that time it ran 2,000 this was unheard of because whispers modernism history shouldn't be chronological but we did decide to do it that way and the motor next to less is more was mix the collections where you can alongside and the sense of create a sense of time and a sensibility for beauty so you walk through the Middle Ages to the 17th century this is a painting by bear Quaeda of the of the golden band we call it the golden Isle of the city of Amsterdam then the canals when this was at the time they were built in 1772 to the 18th century the age of decorative arts in the Netherlands to the 19th century the first impression is self portrait by van gock after his brother told him you should paint in light colours and start painting people that's the way money and this is what I produce and then I just because this is also one of my favorite paintings breitner and into the 20th century there was a lot of discussion shoot the museum enter the 20th century and we felt yes we shoot because we're now living in a 20 in the 21st century so I'm sorry to say including me were all history so time goes on and you go on also with the collection and we collect the 20th century not as a vanguard but as reflective and as in the long tradition of art and Applied Arts and history in the Netherlands and it always has a historical link another foreigner jean-michel VIN Mott was invited to design the galleries he started off doing it in 2003 and it became a friendship over ten years with which read the curators and his design company and him work together very closely and these were the discussions we had you probably you probably recognize him but it just went on and on but I do have to say after if we would have done the building in five years the installations we wouldn't have been able to hide behind saying oh we didn't really finish so it could have been better I think now we did the best we could and it's for the public to judge how that is but we really had the time and the possibility to think the installations through up into the last my new and this is what the result was these are the medieval galleries and I think one of the great things why we chose veal Mota friend the French designer was that he really presents the objects to the public on a platter it's yours and it's it's like a gift to the public and it's very accessible you really feel that you're in direct contact with the work of art on the one hand with the single work of art and I think that that's always very important that you can stand in front of a work of art without being distracted by the works around it on the other hand at the same time being able to get a sense of time and beauty that when you walk through it you see that the art of the Middle Ages was different from that of the 17th century we didn't want to make like they did here in the old museum period rooms because it gives the impression to the public that these objects really belong together where they never did so we decided to make room so you might recognize here this with this one to have rooms where you where this is the 17th century and this is about the administration of the cities and of the country here you see the board of one of the administrative bodies I think this is for the spinsters so there's a woman so for single women of a certain age and these were the man administering the their their condo I think you would call it in the u.s. there Hoffa where they lived and these were the female administrators of the lappers house so it was always you had mill administrative bodies and also female administrative bodies so we do give an impression but it's clear that there's these objects or these who do belong together but they were not in the same room as that one originally so not period rooms but giving a time of sense and beauty the question often asked but why these dark wools there were no museums at that time that we're having these dark wools and it was through a visit to a conservation department that uses gray on the wall that veal moth came to the idea and said we were for a long time struggling with all kind of colors and he said why do you have gray and I said that's because it's the most neutral color against and very very peaceful color for the restore to restore against and it is also with dark colors that your eye has your pupil opens more so it meets also more color to come in to your eyes so that was it was a very rational decision he made and I think it worked out very well because the paintings really become like like windows and their frames like window sills in which through which you look into the 17th century objects this would have been is it's an important object by Tom viana which depicts one of the battles within that eight-year war objects which used to have been with the silver department silver and gold department are now here you see them together with other objects but are now exhibited like this it's here standing here together with paintings a cannon and a funerary monument sketch of the same period so they are in their historical context but giving again also a sense of beauty here we see Rembrandt and their Rembrandt together with his friends lute ma a silversmith and domer a furniture designer so also again you have a group of artists that you show together who we're friends in real life in the 18th century we have one pair we have two period rooms which are really room said in their entirety were taken from the canal and exhibited in the museum it's also the 18th century beautiful sculpture of La Mesa which was made for Madame de Pompadour and the one of the two only tables that exists by Piranesi the museum is if you see it here it's less is more but the museum has huge reserves we've got over a million objects in the collection and to give an idea of that we made what we called a special collection which is like a treasure trove where you really see lots of glass lots of earthenware lots of Meissen porcelain it's after dressed in the largest collection of mice in the world and then we come to ear my bum the the person who designed our new logo and also she wanted to radiate simplicity in her work but she did it in a very joyful way she came out with the new logo for the museum and we had again a national competition and they were the most amazing baroque kind of drawings with bicycles running through the word and everything that you could imagine and she said she asked me one day will tackle what is the strongest the strongest brand you know and I I think I said Chanel and and she said you know I think it's a word you just need the word Rijksmuseum and nobody in the world can pronounce it but a lot of people know it because it's so difficult to pronounce so just believe in in in what you are as an institution and just have the word as your as your logo so she we designed that we we let her design the guidebooks and all the publication's we do in a very contemporary design because we feel that also old art is of all days as always it's always contemporary and we wanted to be relevant now and also appeal to a young audience now and I think it works in a sense also online we started online with what we call Reich studio we were the first to give all our images for free on the internet in the highest resolution with the idea came because of the music industry as well it's very difficult to control your copyrights we had three people working on it but their pay was higher than what they could actually claim in copyrights because on the internet there are images or if you've made a photograph of tonight what you can use it anywhere because there's no copyright on it anymore so there we also set simplicity this is just a skip it because we believe we want to have on them in our digital presence we want to be inside the museum as low-tech as possible I hate it when you go to a museum and there's a there's a there's a computer screen and it doesn't work and it's always maintenance but it's also it just distracts you from the real work of art from the object and we believe that especially if you're outside of the museum you can be as high-tech as possible and we're living at the right time because the Internet is so much based on images and we strongly believe in the power of the image so you have to have it in a very high resolution on the screen and also it's a great educational tool because children should learn and can learn in a museum to develop a critical sense and a critical eye for analyzing images which should get every day and the great thing was being online is that you the power of the image it intrigues you and 24/7 and you can touch it something that you can't do in the museum the other thing is we felt you have to be you have to be able to play with the collection so we did not only allow people to download the image at the highest resolution but people could also use the images to make products and there was one of Dutch fashion designer and she made this these hoops these dresses with images from the collections and they're now one of the best-selling items in our shop and the great thing is it's a it's it's it's it's publicity for the museum because there when they walk over the street people look at it and I think it's a beautiful image rather it's a beautiful dress so it is the way to bring the collection really to the people and what better way there is is to have it on the milk carton where you where you buy you buy a milk carton and I remember myself as this was was proposed by one of the large large grocery stores in the Netherlands Alworth hang and they propose to do this and I said yeah that's fine but we also have it's not only for pleasure but we also have a mission statement which is education so as a child we had you would often sit at the breakfast table and look well your parents were talking at the milk carton and we decided to have a little a little educational text with a riddle and as a child you could then read if you turn the milk carton around first of to finish it you could read the answer but at least it stimulates you to to really it in brands the images into the into your mind and onto your eye and it stimulates you to learn something so be present in unexpected places and be present in every household of your town this is a photograph it already for us it seems long ago 2013 when we had the National opening and which something that we consider is typical Dutch but it's actually typically American is the is the brass bands we had from every state over every county in the country a brass band come and play and it really became we had the opening our development department was hugely nervous because we said we're not going to have an opening for for a special guest we just have an opening for everybody one day for free and we the Queen opened it and everybody could go to the museum one day for free when I called our main sponsors they all immediately that's a great idea to do because it really shows that you're everybody's museum and I think that's what we want to be and do not believe these were the cues at the beginning when we opened we've now our logistics are now better so when you come to the museum you won't find a queue we have about two to two-and-a-half million visitors a year and the salt we had as museums at the beginning of the 21st century that by being on the internet and by living in a day at age where there's so much digital and so much kind of virtual reality and by everybody being able to travel we thought well why would what's the function of a museum I remember Bill Gates saying that he would have great plasma screens in his house with the masterpieces of all over the world on them and he wouldn't need to buy art I think since he's bored art and it's it proves that for all of us the the having the collection on the Internet only stimulates people to come and see the real thing we sometimes forget it but we we all want real things when we go to Tuscany we want to eat Tuscan food and we want to drink Tuscan wine but we also want to see Tuscan art when people come to the Netherlands they want to see the art that was made at the place so I think the the real object your tentacle jex is the strengths of the museum and that's our core business as well and bringing that to the people and making it everybody's museum I think you cannot you cannot be emphasized more than enough as a museum that you're an open museum and you have to really be there for everybody because everybody has to write to see art this is where I stop probably spoke fire too long so I'll shut up now maybe maybe for those who still have time if we can take some questions I apologize for this simple question but how is the reich's translated in stage State State Museum but to be clear we are one third state financed one third private donations and one third ticket sales so that's changed over the past ten years the Dutch museums have always charged so it's different from the US or the UK what was the effect of the years of German occupation on the museum the it's interesting because I just read a booklet that we that was published by the museum in the end of the forties the museum hardly had ever we are now in a large we have a research project to research 110,000 objects that entered the museum from 1933 up to the present day to research their provenance and we have a website where all the objects of which the provenance is not entirely closed closed over that period are published but during the period of the German occupation so 1942 45 there was hardly any acquisition at the Museum because there's no money it closes door quite soon the art was all brought to 3d first one location and to another location and to a third location but it is it is very impressive too to read the museum did a small exhibition of the Rijksmuseum during the Second World War in the in the 1980s and there the it's awful to see how far the the system of the occupation reached so it was more for admitting people Jewish people weren't allowed and they discovered that then director did allow them and the Germans threatened to incarcerate him so it was it was really went quiet in in that sense went very deep but the museum closed I think it was 1941 and after the Second World War when it was opened again there was an exhibition the Virgen there meister see the the coming back of the masterpieces and that was very well attended it was its museums and that's also what i try to indicate is that museums national museums play especially is play a very important role not only as a reflection of the time itself but they also make the time itself and art becomes very important at times of war so it was also it was actually amazing that there was so little art a lot of the art was hidden during the Second World War that so little was transported to Germany and I think the reason or we we know the reason for that was that the Germans tried to get the Dutch on their side by saying that there would be a great netherlands with the flemish dutch as one country Flanders and de netherlands had already been separated for over a century but they wanted to rebuild it and for that idea they had the identity of that chart but that luckily never came to be the recent joint acquisition with the Louvre of the two Rembrandt pendant paintings and I was wondering sort of you know as the price for art continues to increase do you see that perhaps becoming a stainable sustainable model in which you know countries can continue to hope to keep these wonderful works of art in the public domain I think the the it's a difficult subject in this case it's also very interesting subject I didn't include it it's a long story but the the the the Rijksmuseum wanted to acquire or we had a dream to acquire it pendants the only full-length pendants standing painted by Rembrandt and from the Rothschild family in in France from the French branch they were willing to sell them to us they had an expert license and we were able to raise the money was a lot of money hundred sixty million and at the moment that we were actually or that it was said in the press that we had acquired them the French boot their foot down and said no this is not going to happen so they and they said we want we but we are willing to share them because they knew that legally they couldn't always hold the sale and then you see the Netherlands it's a small country so you always have to navigate quite diplomatically and here in France is a large country so at the UN in New York it was decided by the then by olana then Prime Minister France and our prime minister that it was communicated by holanda that we were going to buy them together so then the two were brought together it was possible because there were two paintings and then it was the first time I think in history that a treaties between two countries so not an agreement but the treaties over works of art usually it's tunnels or motorways was was actually made that these two works of art should always be considered as one but again that's also a sign of the time there was the unification of Europe that was a possibility and yeah we we don't know I I'm sure it will work out because we're very very good terms with salut but you don't know if maybe in 100 years time there's a war between the two countries you never know but I hope not because I like France hi I came from China over 20 years ago and you introduced some wonderful art piece here is this museum having some like a really treasure pieces from China back to I think Holland is one of the eighth countries went to China at the end of 18th century in beginning of the 19th century a lot of the all the A's country that the other countries I know they grabbed a lot of Germany's arms well there's two there's two sorry to interrupt you but there's the Dutch came to China already century before in the beginning of the 17th century and that incited a cultural exchange and you have Chinese export that was basically exported by the Dutch all by the Dutch - they took over from the Portuguese who were before them to Europe and sold all over Europe that's why everywhere in Europe you find Chinese porcelain so that was Chinese export and then only in the 20th century we started to collect Chinese art as in archaeal archaeologic art so from from I think the oldest piece we have is a thousand or 2,000 BC but that was a twenty that started in the twentieth century the beginning of the 20th century following the French fashion at night late 19th century fashion for a theatre God but yes there is a collection of Chinese art it's not very big but the export art collection is very and we did together with the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem we did an exhibition a few years ago on this relation between China and other countries in Asia and the Netherlands thank you this sculpture slide and I'm wondering if there is a colonist it's the sculptor Colinas no no it's not it's not : it's its Falcone is he sculptor it's a French it's part of a French collection of the Rijksmuseum it directly was a strong collection of French applied arts in sculpture and this is Falcone and he bi he made it for for Madame de Pompadour and what does the rest of this sculpture show what is the boy doing yeah he's I you probably hope something naughty but it's all daddy wait I'll just show it because we had it was it I thought I showed it but but did I pass it okay here that's him you fascinating thing it's on its original boobs on its original stand and here you see the handles and you can turn it so you could really it was really meant to be turned very slowly and be admired and he's basically more menacing he's basically he's always there so yeah no but it's wonderful and it does remind you of quill eNOS quill eNOS is one of the most important Flemish emigres artists a lot of of artists came from from Flanders to the Netherlands over the 17th century including the family of France halls which Flemish Hall etc etc and Colinas was it's very much the same style okay well thank you very much

Channel: Yale University Art Gallery

Views: 12,305

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Keywords: Yale, University, Art, Gallery, taco dibbits, Rijksmuseum

Id: aMXyBbGX_VE

Length: 72min 44sec (4364 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 01 2018