The Rotterdam Kunsthal has lived up to its name. Time for an anniversary weekend

For a long time the entrance was impossible to find for many visitors and you got pain in your calves on the ramp right through the building. And then the first director, Wim van Krimpen, immediately complained about the architecture of Rem Koolhaas, which was completely unsatisfactory for organizing exhibitions.

This does not alter the fact that the Kunsthal on the Westzeedijk in Rotterdam has become an integral part of the Dutch museum offer. This weekend the ‘Kunst-Aldi’, good for about twenty exhibitions a year, celebrates its 30th anniversary. Founded in 1992, but conceived six years earlier. The reason was the blockbuster exhibitions in the eighties, of the caliber The gold of the Thracians and Masterpieces from the Hermitage, in Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen. The massive influx of visitors meant a gold mine for the museum’s greenhouse, but the crowds also led to congestion of the existing museum building.

Was it not an option, the municipality thought, to set up a new accommodation for this type of exhibition, an event hall à la de Rai or Ahoy? An art hall! A phenomenon that was still unknown in the Netherlands, but which had already caused a lot of furore in Germany. Not a museum with a permanent collection and numerous staff to supplement, manage and exhibit that collection, but a home for individual presentations that are not related to each other and where even the word ‘art’ is of relative importance. But they do attract many visitors – a lot of them – and provide a first acquaintance with culture, culture in the broadest sense, that is.

The Rotterdam Kunsthal has lived up to its name in thirty years. A selection of exhibitions from the past three decades: Andy Warhol, British sports cars, PlayboyFaces from the Golden Age, Jean Paul Gaultier, Willem de Kooning, The Secret Life of Syrian Lingerie, a hundred paintings by Toon Hermans, Edward Hopper, MC Escher and Dinosaurs. The last two attracted nearly two hundred thousand curious people each. The very wide range made many frowns. Wasn’t it utter populism? No, said Van Krimpen’s successor Wim Pijbes: ‘respectable populism!’

With its accessible programming, the Kunsthal has given a different, more accessible view of art and culture. With a different audience than just insiders. That this happened in Rotterdam, after all, the city of Pim Fortuyn, was probably no coincidence. You would expect this less quickly in Amsterdam, with its large art elite, although in a few years the private art hall of Rob Defares and Beatrix Ruf is to be built in the former courthouse on Amsterdam’s Zuidas. Renovated by Rem Koolhaas by the way.

The wide range of exhibitions at the Rotterdam Kunsthal can also be found in the 30-hour party program this weekend: you can follow a course, make illustrations, photograph fashion, night drawing, taste local food and design with Bas Kosters. And of course visit the exhibitions.