That’s a different way to enter. Where in the past you first had to buy a ticket in a cramped reception when visiting Museum Arnhem, and then squeezed through a narrow corridor to the exhibitions, you are now almost immediately in the open, round room in the heart of the old building ( a national monument). Art used to be shown here, now you will find a cafe and the museum shop here. From here you can choose: either you walk into the sculpture garden (free entry), or you walk towards the new building, where four new exhibition rooms await you.
Museum Arnhem is open again. After a major renovation and renovation that lasted more than four years, the doors will open to the public on 13 May. ‘The renovation was urgently needed’, says Saskia Bak, director of the museum since 2015. ‘The museum was too closed, not inviting enough. It no longer suited this time.’
The program has also been refreshed. Bak: ‘We want to become a museum that reflects on what is going on in society. So far, we have mainly made exhibitions based on art-historical themes, movements and periods. From now on we will show what designers and artists have to say about current themes such as climate change, migration, identity and gender.’ According to Bak, these are themes that play a major role in Museum Arnhem’s collection, which consists of modern and contemporary art and design from the Netherlands and abroad.
The most drastic change of course: there will be no permanent collection. Instead, the collection will play a major and minor role in varying exhibitions. The collection plays a leading role in the three exhibitions with which the museum is opening, which deal with climate change, political polarization and interaction between art and public respectively. Afterwards, however, many of these works of art will disappear back into the (already new) depot.
‘The collection is always much larger than what you can show,’ says Bak. ‘In this way we handle it smoothly.’ Audience favourites, like it yellow house by magical realist Carel Willink and paintings by Marlene Dumas, will probably return regularly: ‘We show that you can tell different stories about each work of art.’
What is there to experience now that the museum is finally open again? A tour of four works of art from the collection.
Gbor Tsui (2019) by Serge Attukwei Clottey
We step into the exhibition from the round room that belongs to the old building Best before indoors, about climate change and the relationship between people and their natural environment. In the first room you immediately run into the monumental Gbor Tsui (2019) by Ghanaian artist Serge Attukwei Clottey (1985). Clottey made the installation, a golden yellow curtain that hangs in the middle of the room, by stringing together pieces of recycled plastic.
‘This artwork, which looks festive at first glance, touches on complex contemporary problems such as water scarcity and environmental pollution,’ says Bak. The pieces of plastic come from jerry cans that were used for a long time to transport cooking oil from the United Kingdom to Ghana. In Clottey’s childhood they were renamed water cisterns. In the frequent droughts they were used to transport water. The number of jerry cans now exceeds the available amount of water. Many specimens end up among the litter on the street and there they fall apart into small pieces.
A few rooms further on, we leave the old building and end up in the new wing. A large glass wall offers a spectacular view over the Lower Rhine. The old wing that was demolished for the new building had an exhibition hall with a similar view: the Rijnzaal. ‘Because the art there had to compete with the beautiful view, we chose to close the halls in the new building’, says Bak. ‘This open room offers a resting point between exhibitions.’ Only one work of art is exhibited here: a mountain of stones on which a golden ring rests, an installation by jewelery designer Katharina Dettar.
Huk Pacha (2020) by Claudia Martinez Garay
In the last room of Best before, in the new wing, there are five large, colorful tapestries reminiscent of tarot cards. There are striking symbols on it: corn on the cob, potatoes, pumas and snakes. Artist Claudia Martinez Garay was inspired for these rugs by the stories, traditions and symbols of the Andes mountains in her native Peru. She refers to the worldview of her ancestors from the Andes, for whom nature and man are not separated, but intimately connected. ‘Such non-Western perspectives are valuable for a subject like climate change’, says Bak.
Jan Telegraaf (1936) by Berthe Edersheim
Simultaneously with Best before also opens the exhibition From left to right† Here, mainly art from the Interwar period, the period between the First and Second World War, is shown, centered around the theme of political polarisation. ‘The theme and this exhibition stem from one of the spearheads of the Museum Arnhem collection: Dutch realism,’ says Bak. ‘We looked at that collection and wanted to develop a new view on realism for this exhibition, in which the influence of politics became visible. And there is a clear link with the present, in which polarization is of course also an important theme.’
This new look led to rediscoveries, such as the paintings by Berthe Edersheim. Together with her husband Harmen Meurs, she was part of a group of socially engaged artists who opposed racism and national socialism. Among other things, she painted portraits of Surinamese in the Netherlands, including a portrait of Jan Telegraaf, the leader of the Union for Surinamese Workers in the Netherlands. She did this in a neo-realistic style that betrays the influence of her teacher Charley Toorop.
Edersheim exhibited regularly in the Interwar period, says Bak, but she has since been forgotten. This has to do with the art climate during and around the Second World War, when socialist artists did not get a foothold. Not only with From left to right but Museum Arnhem also fills this gap with purchases: two paintings by Edersheim were purchased in 2019, the portrait by Telegraaf and a self-portrait.
mascot (2011) by Ad Gerritsen
In addition to painters from the Interbellum, From left to right also paintings by contemporary artists working in the tradition of realism. You can discover a nice parallel between the portrait of Jan Telegraaf and the portraits of Black Lives Matter activists by the contemporary artist Iris Kensmil.
What is more ambiguous is the link with the actuality in the painting mascot by the Arnhem painter Ad Gerritsen, which hangs next to the portraits of Kensmil. ‘Gerritsen paints on the basis of news photos and his work has a political charge, but you often cannot figure out the concrete reason,’ says Bak. ‘A painting like mascot transcends actuality’.
On the canvas you see a group of men around a woman with a partly shaved head, dressed in a blue dress reminiscent of a hospital apron. One of the men grabs the woman by the chin, as if to show her face to the viewer. ‘You don’t understand exactly what is happening here,’ says Bak. “Is this a sadistic game, a medical demonstration to students, or a beating?” It is not exactly clear, and yet, or because of that, the painting has a powerful charge.
‘Just as we used to collect and present a relatively large amount of art from women, we now allow many different voices to be heard, from artists from all kinds of cultural backgrounds,’ concludes Bak. ‘As a museum you can play an important role in broadening the horizons of visitors.’ To ensure that visitors are open to this, you must first meet them. The museum hopes to achieve this with the open, inviting new building.
New wing
The major eye-catcher of the renovation is the new wing, designed by Benthem Crouwel Architects, known for ‘the bathtub’ of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. The facade is covered with 82 thousand handmade tiles and protrudes on two sides over the edge of a moraine. A staircase in the wing, which provides 550 square meters of additional exhibition space, leads to a terrace where the view over the Lower Rhine can be enjoyed free of charge. The wing also houses the depot, which was previously located at seven locations.