Wednesday, September 14, 2016

How a Dutch Businessman Fulfilled His Dream to Open a ‘World-Class’ Museum

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Joop van Caldenborgh inside Leandro Erlich’s “Swimming Pool” at Museum Voorlinden. Credit Nina Siegal
WASSENAAR, the Netherlands — The Dutch chemical company executive and art collector Joop van Caldenborgh was attending a dinner in London in the 1990s when the American abstract artist Ellsworth Kelly approached him.
“I didn’t even know what the artist looked like,” Mr. van Caldenborgh confessed recently. “A man came to me and said: ‘You must be Joop van Caldenborgh. You have “Blue Ripe.”’ I was so astonished that he knew.”
“Blue Ripe” (1959), one of Mr. Kelly’s early colorist paintings, is the first work that visitors encounter when they enter the Ellsworth Kelly retrospective at Mr. van Caldenborgh’s new private museum here, Museum Voorlinden, situated on a 100-acre nature preserve in the meadows and on the dunes of the Netherlands’ west coast. The exhibition, “Anthology,” is the first large-scale survey of Kelly’s work since the artist died in December.
That this low-profile Dutch businessman could pull together such a significant representation of Kelly’s work — with loans from the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum in New York, Tate London, the Pompidou Center in Paris and the artist’s own studio — for his private museum in a far-flung corner of the Netherlands indicates the kind of leverage that Mr. van Caldenborgh, 75, and other major collectors, now have in the art world.
It is an era when collectors around the world are building museums for their own collections: The top examples include François Pinault in Paris, Eli and Edythe Broad in Los Angeles and Budi Tek in China. But the collections vary widely.
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Wim Pijbes, director of Museum Voorlinden, with a Richard Serra sculpture. “It is a world-class collection, but it’s personal, and it has a few strong accents,” he said. Credit Nina Siegal; 2016 Richard Serra/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
In the case of the Voorlinden, it has landed a star director: Wim Pijbes, 54, once general director of the Rijksmuseum, who left the top position at that Dutch national museum this year. Mr. van Caldenborgh did not even court him for the position, Mr. Pijbes said. While a member of the organization’s board, he asked to be considered for the post. He would not disclose his salary, but said it had nothing to do with his decision to make the change.
“It is a world-class collection, but it’s personal, and it has a few strong accents,” Mr. Pijbes said. “It’s not an encyclopedic museum, of course, but to me it’s no different from the Frick in New York, for example, which was a personal collection of Henry Clay Frick, who collected the best of the best, in certain areas.”
Mark Francis, a director of the London Gagosian Gallery, who visited the Voorlinden last weekend, said that private museums were “rarely as well realized as this one.” “Every aspect of it is beautifully thought through,” he said. “To be able to do it, to have both the eye and the resources, it’s an unusual combination.”
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The museum, which opened on Sunday and occupies nearly 65,000 square feet, is founded on Mr. van Caldenborgh’s significant holdings: several thousand artworks acquired since the 1960s, though he declined to be more specific, saying he “never talks numbers” about the scope of his collection or the value. For many years, he displayed them at home or showcased them in the offices of his chemical company, Caldic, which has its headquarters in Rotterdam and 20 offices worldwide.
According to Quote magazine, which compiles an annual list of the wealthiest people in the Netherlands, Mr. van Caldenborgh, who is now retired, is worth about 400 million euros, or $450 million.
He began working on the plan to build a museum about seven years ago, and took meticulous care to ensure that it was lit with natural light, filtered through a vellum scrim, and that all of the museum’s technology — air conditioning vents, fire alarms, even exit signs — would be hidden to avoid distracting viewers from the art.
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Museum Voorlinden, which opened on Sunday, is in a 100-acre nature preserve on the Netherlands’ north coast. Credit Pietro Savorelli
In addition to the Kelly retrospective, the Voorlinden is also presenting about 40 other works from Mr. van Caldenborgh’s own collection in “Full Moon,” an exhibition curated by the museum’s artistic director, Suzanne Swarts. Works are assembled with no particular chronology or hierarchy into interesting juxtapositions, often using color as a link.
In one room, the lushly Fauvist landscape “Maannacht IV” (1912), by the Dutch artist Jan Sluijters, is displayed next to a vibrant sculpture of epoxy resin on wood, “The Performance,” by Esther Tielemans, with similar blue, red and mustard hues. In another room, a small installation by the Belgian poet and artist Marcel Broodthaers, “The Curse of Magritte,” hangs on the wall opposite “The Curse,” the original 1960 René Magritte painting that inspired it, of clouds in a blue sky.
The halls toward the back of the museum offer the most jaw-dropping works in the Voorlinden: monumental sculptures permanently positioned in spaces designed just for them. These include a labyrinthine Richard Serra steel sculpture; a room designed by James Turrell with a skylight that remains open in every kind of weather so visitors can watch the changing of the light; and a giddy “Swimming Pool” by Leandro Erlich of Argentina, which creates the illusion that visitors are walking under water.
Aside from what is on display currently at the Voorlinden, Mr. van Caldenborgh also owns a rare trove of books made by artists like Matisse and Picasso; an enormous collection of self-portraits by Man Ray, Henry Moore, Rineke Dijkstra, Bill Viola and others; and enough monumental outdoor sculptures by artists like Sol LeWitt, Jeff Koons and Jean Arp to fill a sculpture park called Clingenbosch, on his 50-acre estate a few minutes’ drive from the Voorlinden.
“I’ve been a businessman for a long time. In that period that I was working, I traveled a lot of the world and nearly always combined it with visiting a gallery, a museum or an artist, or all three,” he said. Since he retired 10 years ago, he added, “art has been 100 percent my life.”
Asked why he decided to build his own museum rather than to bequeath his collection to a public museum, or build a new wing onto an existing institution, Mr. van Caldenborgh said, “Nobody offered me that, number one, and number two, I would’ve been afraid that everything would go into the vaults and never appear again.”
Mr. Pijbes officially started his job in July, and so far he has taken a back seat to Mr. van Caldenborgh. “It’s his baby, he made it, he was very much in control of every detail during construction and installing and having Ellsworth Kelly as the first exhibition,” Mr. Pijbes said. “His dream is fulfilled, but running the museum is something completely different, and that’s something that starts on the day the doors open. And that’s the point where I take over, and he’s very much looking forward to that moment, I can assure you.”
Correction: September 14, 2016
An earlier version of this article misidentified the site of Museum Voorlinden. It is on the Netherlands’ west coast, not the north coast.
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Hieronymus Bosch’s Worlds that Could Have Been

Museums

Hieronymus Bosch’s Worlds that Could Have Been

(via Wikimedia Commons)
Hieronymus Bosch, “The Garden of Earthly Delights” (1480–1505) (detail), oil on panel (via Wikimedia Commons)
MADRID — Commemorating the fifth centenary of the death of Hieronymus Bosch, Madrid’s El Museo del Prado has arranged an exhibition that, according to its catalogue, displays “the greatest number of Bosch’s works ever to be assembled.” Thanks to king Philip II’s love for the painter, Spain already had an impressive collection of paintings by Bosch. These are here joined by paintings, drawings, engravings, and documents that come from Lisbon’s Museu de Arte Antiga, London’s National Gallery, or Vienna’s Albertina. In this pleasurable and fascinating exhibition one feels like one is entering a Wunderkammer.
Curated by Pilar Silva, head of El Museo del Prado’s Department of Spanish Painting, Bosch: The 5th Centenary Exhibition is organized in seven thematic sections: “Bosch and ’s-Hertogenbosch”; “The Childhood and Ministry of Christ”; “The Saints; From Paradise to Hell”; “The Garden of Earthly Delights”; “The World and Men: Mortal Sins and non-religious works”; and “The Passion of Christ.” However, curatorship is relatively discreet, with Bosch’s oeuvre presenting a world of the artist’s making.
Immediately visitors enter a worldview where the forces of good and of evil seem to engage in a nonstop battle. This can be seen in unusual iconographies, such as in “The Adoration of the Magi Triptych” (c. 1494) where the figure of the Antichrist is present in the very building where baby Jesus is born; looming from behind, an evil cohort haunts the holy scene.
he Adoration of the Magi, Interior (Saint Peter with donor, The Adoration of the Magi, Saint Agnes with donor) wikidata:Q2276130 DateCirca 1495 Medium oil on panel Dimensions Height: 138 cm (54.3 in). Width: 138 cm (54.3 in).
Hieronymus Bosch, “The Adoration of the Magi” (interior) (Saint Peter with donor, The Adoration of the Magi, Saint Agnes with donor) (circa 1495), oil on panel, 54.3 in. x 54.3 in) (via Wikimedia Commons)
Bosch’s animal hybrids and anthropomorphous fantasies have a more ambiguous role. They populate the space of masterworks such as the “Last Judgement Triptych” (c. 1505–15) or the “Saint Anthony Triptych” (c. 1500–1505), and some of them are repeated in multiple paintings. Both scary and hilarious, these creatures are present in the amazing “Haywain Triptych” (1512–15) where the hay in the middle panel represents the temptations of life, constituting an exempla contraria or what not to do. The procession of people fighting to access a cart heads toward the right panel, where devils are building a tower within a phantasmagoric hell. These depictions are quite different from the beautiful fragments of the “Visions of the Hereafter” (1505–15), which appear to be more conventional but convey an impressive poetic quality. A stunning image is the ascent to heaven, where the saved souls rise to a round tunnel of light. A more ironic depiction of daily customs is seen in the famous trepanation scene of “Extracting the Stone of Madness” (1501–05), on display near the end of the show.
Last_judgement_Bosch
Hieronymus Bosch, “The Last Judgment” (1482–1516), oil on panel, 64.4 in. x 97.2 in. (via Wikimedia Commons)
The exhibition has an unavoidable highpoint: Bosch’s enigmatic masterpiece, “The Garden of Earthly Delights” (1490–1500). In reality, we do not know what its original title was — the name we now give it was first used in the 19th century, and alludes to the seductive garden of the middle panel, which remains a point of attraction and controversy.
Creation Description Exterior (shutters) of The Garden of Earthly Delights. Date between 1480 and 1490 Medium oil on panel Dimensions Height: 220 cm (86.6 in). Width: 195 cm (76.8 in).
Hieronymus Bosch, “Creation,” exterior (shutters) of “The Garden of Earthly Delights” (1480–90), oil on panel, 86.6 in. x 76.8 in. (via Wikimedia Commons) (click to enlarge)
When closed, the exterior of the triptych displays a grisaille image of an empty world on the third day of creation, during which God separated oceans and seas from the earth and plants. This was the moment when God created paradise, which was still unpopulated, and still dark. God appears as a small, luminous human figure, with the Latin inscription: “Ipse dixit et facta sunt. Ipse mandavit et creata sunt” (“He said it and it was made. He ordered it and everything was created”). Wonder must have been great when the doors of the triptych were opened and the colorful interior exposed for the first time.
The relationship among the three scenes in the inner panels is not clear. The left and right ones represent paradise and hell in similar, typical iconography seen in Bosch’s other works, such as the “Haywain.” In the “Garden of Earthly Delights,” however, there is no representation of the original sin. Bosch shows God in paradise, introducing Adam to a recently created Eve. Their lush background is full of exotic and strange animals and a lake, circled by pink structures, that may represent the fountain of paradise. Some elements, however, remain sinister in this beautiful setting: a cat eats a mouse in the foreground, some other animals kill each other further back, and an inky pond full of dark creatures seems to prefigure the presence of evil in paradise. In the middle of Bosch’s fountain, an owl contemplates the scene.
The densely populated landscape of the central panel has enabled the dreamiest contemplation, and the wildest interpretations. The catalogue of the Prado exhibition refers to the scene as a “false paradise,” and many have seen the painting as a condemnation of sin. Other art historians, however, disagree.
In his book about the painting, Hans Belting notably reads the “Garden of Earthly Delights” as a utopia. He believes that the painting represents the world that would have developed without the original sin, showing life in a paradise where Adam and Eve would have followed God’s biblical order: “as for you, be ye fruitful and multiply.”
The Garden of Earthly Delights. wikidata:Q321303 Datebetween 1480 and 1505 Medium oil on panel Dimensions Height: 220 cm (86.6 in). Width: 390 cm (153.5 in). (via Wikimedia Commons)
Hieronymus Bosch, “The Garden of Earthly Delights” (1480–1505), oil on panel, 86.6 in. x 153.5 in. (via Wikimedia Commons) (click to enlarge)
Using a metaphor from comic books, art historian Juan Antonio Ramírez saw the central panel as a speech bubble coming out of the paradisiacal scene in the left panel: Standing before Adam and Eve, God narrates his promised future for humankind.
Following these theories, the “Garden of Earthly Delights” would represent the world we could have lived in, God’s truncated plan for humanity. If the orgiastic character of the scene has posed many problems regarding its Christian context, Belting explains that “in the Latin text of the Vulgate, approved by the church, God created a paradisum voluptatis, or “paradise of lust.” The crowded garden is full of naked couples and groups, delighting themselves with sensory pleasures, eating gigantic fruits, and engaging in forms sexual play which include individuals, couples, groups, animals, and even plants. There is no work, no illness, no elder age, no childhood. The profusion of scenes of hedonistic youth in a place of eternal spring invites the viewer to get lost in the painting.
The Garden of Earthly Delights [detail] Date between 1480 and 1505 Medium oil on panel (via Wikimedia commons) (click to enlarge)
Hieronymus Bosch, “The Garden of Earthly Delights” (detail) (1480–1505), oil on panel (via Wikimedia commons) (click to enlarge)
However, in the right panel, that same landscape becomes a hell of explosions, demonic creatures, and sophisticated means of torture — some of them musical. “Uneasy painter: / your palette ascends to the skies, / but on a horn your paintrush flies / To Hell,” Rafael Alberti aptly writes in his poem, “Bosch.” The so-called Tree-Man — a figure composed of two arboreal “legs” — has been read as a self-portrait of the artist: in the exhibition, it also appears in a beautiful drawing by Bosch that comes from Vienna’s Albertina museum. In his article “Eternal Carnival,” Guillermo Solana, director of the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, highlights the carnivalesque meaning of a world which is turned upside-down, a place “where everything is inverted, where men and beast, king and beggar, mouth and anus exchange their roles.” ‘S-Hertogenbosch, the birthplace of the artist, notably held religious parades with a strong presence of grotesque and humorous disguises. For Solana, the work of Bosch corresponds to “what St. Augustine called concupiscentia oculorum, the disordered desire to see what nobody has seen, to see it all.” We thus see paradise and hell, the past and the future, and even those promised worlds that humanity will never live in.
Towards the end of the show, contemporary artist Álvaro Perdices and filmmaker Andrés Sanz have their audio-visual installation, “Infinite Garden,” where the wondrous and terrifying details of Bosch’s “Garden” are projected and amplified on the walls and on each face of a giant cube.
“Delight” is a notion that could well summarize this small and fascinating exhibition. If the Flemish painter’s canvases seem surprisingly modern, at the same time they evoke a long-gone universe of medieval fantasy, described for our pleasure in minute and grotesque detail. The dreamy and playful character of the works leaves the visitor with the desire to return to the paintings: Perhaps Bosch’s worlds were never real, but once and again we want to come back to live in them for a while, through the eyes of our imagination.
Bosch: The 5th Centenary Exhibition continues at the Museo del Prado (Paseo del Prado, s/n, 28014 Madrid) through September 25. 
 
 
 

An Impossibly Beautiful Goddess Is the Worst Kind of Goddess

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