A well-chosen set of preconditions really leads to original challenges. Ionica Smeets challenges you this summer. Episode 2: Collect with a crazy criterion.
This spring I was in the German Museum Ritter. In a village, right next to the factory of the same name that makes the square chocolate bars, there is a large square building. It houses a chocolate shop, an exhibition about chocolate, a cafe and my new favorite museum. Museum Ritter shows works from the collection of Marli Hoppe-Ritter, the granddaughter of the founder of the chocolate factory. The theme of her art collection is ‘square’, with for example paintings by Vera Molnar, folded felt by Peter Weber and a sculpture like a three-dimensional Mondrian by Jean Gorin. The collection consists of almost twelve hundred paintings, objects, sculptures and other works. (I myself would aim for a collection of 1,225 pieces, because that is a square and that fits nicely with the theme.)
What a wonderful idea to build your collection around the theme of ‘square’! Over the past few weeks, I’ve been telling all kinds of people about this brilliant selection criterion. The funny thing was that almost everyone was enthusiastic, except for a friend who knows about collections management. She went crazy at the idea: you get works from all kinds of periods, with all kinds of materials and techniques – how do you ever have the expertise to properly conserve it and restore it where necessary? Well, I know who I don’t ask to manage my collection if I ever build an eccentric billionaire collection.
Even with a smaller purse you can start a collection with a delicious criterion. math teacher Andrea Hoofs collects books with an unwritten number in the title. The nice thing is that it made her discover books she would never have read, such as Boy 7 or Box 127.
If you don’t like squares, numbers or books, you can build up a completely different kind of collection. Quirien van Haelen once wrote the poem Côte d’Azur. It starts like this:
Brigitte, Verona, Eva, Kim, Marieke
Aurora, Mäde, Tina, Claire, Yvon
Yolanda, Nina, Daisy, Sue, Manon
Martine, Lilly, Nancy, Annemieke,
Then come more girls’ names, followed by a few blank lines and then the conclusion: ‘Next year a bus trip to Lloret. Maybe I’ll get a whole sonnet there.’
This is of course a beautiful collection, but the selection rules need to be tightened up a bit, because just some rhyme and enough names to fill a sonnet is a bit easy. As a student, I kept track of the initials of the first names of the people I’d kissed, and I hoped to keep the alphabet full—a very clear criterion. Only things sometimes went wrong, for example when I thought I had decorated Jörg in a noisy discotheque (finally the letter J!) and discovered an hour later that I had misheard his name and now had the T double. I gave up on this collection attempt a long time ago, but I still jump when I encounter a Quirien: ‘That’s a good one for the Q!’
Have you taken up this challenge? Send a message with the results to [email protected].