Just after 5 a.m. the telephone rings at the Delft company Kunstwacht on Monday. Two blue vans rush to the heart of Amsterdam. It is a bit of a shock upon arrival. “It was a lot of paint, a lot of red paint,” says director Jesper Schreuder on the phone.
“We did not immediately know whether we would be able to clean it in time for the commemoration that evening. The National Monument is made of travertine, which is a fairly soft type of stone. It may have looked as if we had treated it with a high-pressure spray, but we steamed it clean. First two vans went to Amsterdam, but we eventually scaled up to five vans and eight employees.”
Schreuder has been working at Kunstwacht for more than eighteen years. He got there through the grapevine. He was first involved in the maintenance of art, but since 2025 he has been running the company together with three partners.
Kunstwacht manages and maintains public statues, monuments, memorials, wall decorations and special street furniture for more than a hundred municipalities in the Netherlands: with a turnover of 3.6 million euros (2024), it is the largest company in the Netherlands that carries out such maintenance.
“In 2002, Paul Schulten, co-director of Kunstwacht, was asked by the municipality of Delft to help think about the management and maintenance of all art and monuments in the city. At that time he had another company, Archeoplan, that restored archaeological finds. That was the beginning of this company. After that, things went quickly.”
The National Monument on Dam Square requires maintenance several times a year, says Schreuder. “We carry out a standard cleaning before May 4. We usually complete this a few days before the commemoration. We always come back on the day itself for the final check. Normally we would start at seven in the morning, but yesterday we started a little earlier.”
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How many people does Kunstwacht need to maintain all the monuments of a hundred municipalities?
“We are twenty people. They all have different specialties. We have wood specialists, ceramics specialists, people who deal with fine restorations, specialists in cleaning, we have people who can weld. As broad as you can imagine.”
“Works of art are so diverse. Some pieces are extremely fragile. Others are made from natural materials, such as tree trunks or grass. The items we use during cleaning or restoration can therefore vary. I would like to give a list, but that would be endless. But think of gold leaf, restoration mortars, joints, wood, concrete, polyester. We also use everything that works of art are made from.”
Do municipalities have sufficient finances to maintain their works of art and monuments?
“Until the 1990s, there were hardly any budgets for maintenance of art in public spaces. If a work of art fell, it was simply put right again, so to speak. Now municipalities are more consciously concerned with it by drawing up budgets. But there is still not always money for this. We therefore try to advise municipalities as best as possible. A work of art that is so outdated that it becomes dangerous or is no longer technically in order, of course has more priority than a work that is only discolored.”
“We receive a wide variety of reports. Think of graffiti – more often slogans in recent years that have to do with the current wars. But it also happens that trees fall on works of art or that cars have crashed into them.”
Does something ever go wrong during cleaning?
“Fortunately not, I will knock it off immediately. We are rarely in a hurry with this kind of work, yesterday’s graffiti on Dam Square was really an exception.”
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